c. 1998 Religion News Service

Study finds decline in gun-toting, drug-using students

(RNS) Even though a staggering 1 million American students carried guns to school during the last academic year, the number represents a decline from previous years, according to a survey released Thursday (June 18). The study also shows a decline in drug use among students.

The survey’s authors said the gun statistic is actually good news because the number of students who took guns to school dropped from 6 percent in 1993-94 to 3.8 percent during the school year now ending.

The study also found that 28.7 percent of U.S. students in grades six through 12 used illegal drugs at least once during the last academic year, a decrease from 30.1 percent in the previous year.

The study, by the private organization PRIDE, included cigarettes, tobacco as well as cocaine and heroin in is definition of illegal drugs, reported Reuters.”Despite remarkable progress, drug use is still at the third-highest level in 11 years,”said Doug Hall, a spokesman for PRIDE, an Atlanta-based nonprofit drug-prevention organization.”It only takes one student, not a million, to create a national nightmare.” The survey was based on questionnaires that sought information from 154,350 students between 10 and 18.

The study found there was a connection between participation in after-school programs and school activities and a reduction in drug abuse and violent behavior.

Students who did not take guns to school were 53 percent more likely to be active in community-based after-school programs. They also were 34 percent more likely to take part in activities such as team sports and band.

The survey was issued at the end of an academic year in which the nation has been rocked by deadly shootings at schools from Springfield, Ore., to Jonesboro, Ark.

Fear of abortion rise prompts welfare `family cap’ legislation

(RNS) Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., a lead congressional opponent of legal abortion, has introduced legislation that would scrap the much-touted”family cap”in the 1995 landmark welfare reform bill.

Smith’s legislation was prompted by fears the so-called family cap _ the denial of benefits to women who have additional children while on welfare _ could lead to an increase in abortion.

A new study by Rutgers University researchers suggested that abortions had increased in New Jersey since it imposed a family cap in 1992.”I was saddened and angered over the results of the Rutgers study,”Smith said.”But frankly, I was not surprised.” He said the family cap idea, a cornerstone of welfare reform legislation but strongly opposed by both abortion foes and liberal anti-poverty organizations, had”surface appeal”because”people were fed up with abuse of the welfare system.” In 1995, the anti-abortion, anti-poverty coalition succeeded in blocking a federally mandated family cap but the bill gave states the option of imposing their own. Some 23 states now have them.

Smith’s proposed legislation would bar states from imposing the cap under the welfare program and would bar them from receiving funds from the”temporary assistance to needy families”federal block grant if they implement family cap restrictions.

Pope, in Austria, calls for united Europe

(RNS) Pope John Paul II arrived in Austria for a three-day visit Friday (June 19) and urged a united Europe that would embrace the entire continent.

The three-day trip, which includes stops in Salzburg, St. Poelten and Vienna, is John Paul’s third to Austria, where the church is riven by division and still reeling from a sex scandal that forced the resignation of the country’s top prelate.

John Paul said the”basis of a modern Europe”was the Christian idea of humanity as created in the image of God and”in which the numerous building blocks of different cultures, peoples and religions are held together to establish the new building.”My visit broadens our gaze beyond the borders of this country to the whole of Europe, to all the people of this continent with their history, from the Atlantic to the Urals, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean,”he said in his arrival speech at Salzburg.

Because Austria has been a model of how people of different ethnic origins can live together, John Paul said the nation”thus becomes a mirror and a model for a united Europe which does not exclude and has room for all.”

Sex abuse charges dropped against Catholic bishop in Canada

(RNS) Canadian government charges of sexual abuse against retired Roman Catholic Bishop Hubert O’Connor are being dropped in part because O’Connor has apologized to his accuser in two Native Indian”healing circle”ceremonies, officials said Wednesday (June 17).

The abuse incidents involving O’Connor, who retired in 1991 as bishop of the diocese of Prince George in British Columbia, occurred during the 1960s at a residential school the church operated for Indian children. “O’Connor has admitted that he harmed me. He has to live with the knowledge that what he did was wrong,”his accuser, Marilyn Belleau, said at a news conference.”I no longer know the cloak of pain. I have let it go.” Also at the healing circles, two current Canadian Catholic conference officials offered formal apologies to all native people who attended church schools in Canada, Reuters reported.

O’Connor, 71, was originally charged in 1991 with raping several girls who were students at the Williams Lake residential school in British Columbia. Convicted in 1996, an appeals court overturned the verdict earlier this year and prosecutors had been trying to get a new trial.

But deputy attorney general Ernie Quantz said”unique circumstances”_ including O’Connor’s participation in the healing circle ceremonies _ prompted dropping the charges.

Belleau is a member of the Alkali Lake Band of the Esketemc people, who live about 200 miles north of Vancouver, a group that has pioneered the use of traditional healing circles in treating contemporary problems.

Reclusive popularizer of shamanism reported dead

(RNS) Reclusive author and anthropologist Carlos Castaneda, who introduced Indian shamanism to the American middle-class with a series of popular books during the 1960s, died April 27, according to reports published Friday (June 19). He was thought to be at least 72.

The cause of death, the Los Angeles Times reported, apparently was liver cancer. Deborah Drooz, Castaneda’s lawyer, said the reclusive author was cremated and his ashes taken to Mexico.

Castaneda’s most popular books _”The Teachings of Don Juan”(1968),”A Separate Reality”(1971) and”Journey to Ixtlan”(1972) _ detailed his experiences, some of them drug-induced, as an apprentice to Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian sorceror from Sonora, Mexico. Castaneda said he met the shaman in a bus terminal in an Arizona border town.

Castaneda’s experiences, written first as a master’s thesis which later became an international best seller when published by the University of California Press as”The Teachings of Don Juan,”described a path to higher consciousness mingling ecstasy and panic, and made him a cultural icon at the peak of the psychedelic spirituality of the ’60s.

Critics, however, questioned the reality of Don Juan and speculation grew that Castaneda was the author of an elaborate hoax.

While those questions have taken him out of favor in academic circles, Castaneda continues to have legions of readers and his 10 books, translated into 17 languages, still sell well.

His penchant for mystery and secrecy was only compounded by his death, according to the Times. “Much of the Castaneda mystique is based on the fact that even his closest friends aren’t sure who he is,”Margaret Runyan Castaneda, who was married to him from from 1960-1973, wrote in a 1997 memoir.

Castaneda is believed to have been born in Peru on Dec. 25, 1925 _ or six years later in Brazil, depending on which version of his autobiographical accounts are believed _ and immigrated to the United States in 1951.

Cardinal John Carberry, led St. Louis archdiocese, dead at 93

(RNS) Cardinal John Carberry, a scholarly expert on church law who headed the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis, died Wednesday in Kirkwood, Mo. He was 93.

Carberry, installed as archbishop of the St. Louis archdiocese in 1968, made civil rights a central issue of his tenure.

He was also a leading national figure in the church’s ecumenical relations with Protestants and served as a chairman of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.

Carberry, more theologically conservative than his predecessor, was considered someone likely able to maintain discipline among the priests and laity on matters of church teaching.

In St. Louis, he established the Archdiocesan Pro-Life Commission, an agency that became a model for opponents of legal abortion in church jurisdictions around the country.

Carberry participated in two papal election conclaves and took part in all four sessions of the Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965.

A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., he was ordained to the priesthood in 1929 and retired in 1979 at the mandatory retirement age of 75.

Update: Self-styled guru’s death labeled suicide

(RNS) Authorities in Old Field, N.Y., have ruled the death of self-styled New Age guru Frederick P. Lenz III a suicide. Lenz _ who at various times used the names Atmananda and Zen Master Rama _ was found dead at a bottom of a bay adjacent to his home in April.

Authorities said Thursday (June 18) that Lenz _ a controversial figure who was accused of being a con man and said having sex with followers was”perfectly acceptable”_ fell into the bay after ingesting a large amount of Valium. Under the law, the drug overdose amounted to suicide, according to a statement from the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s office.

Lenz was 48. He was born in San Diego but grew up in Connecticut, where his father was mayor of Stamford. He first became well known in New Age circles in Southern California.

Quote of the day: graduating high school student Kate Logan

(RNS)”Without expectations, feeling the limitless directions to open myself completely, to express myself fully as a confident individual _ for it is only then, when I am open and free, that truth and wisdom will reveal themselves.” _ Kate Logan, a graduating senior of the Long Trail School in Dorset, Vt., who said she was expressing the spirituality of graduation when she took of her robe during her graduation address and finished the speech naked.

DEA END RNS