c. 1999 Religion News Service

Interfaith delegation helps gain release of prisoners of war

(RNS) An interfaith delegation led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and National Council of Churches General Secretary Joan Brown Campbell succeeded in efforts to gain the release Sunday (May 2) of three American prisoners of war from Yugoslavia.

The 19-member delegation of U.S. Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders sought to use their religious influence to gain the release of the three soldiers _ Steven Gonzales, 22, of Huntsville, Texas, Andrew Ramirez, 24, of Los Angeles, and Christopher Stone, 25, of Smiths Creek, Mich.”We rejoice greatly … in the release of the three American soldiers held captive in Belgrade,”the delegation said in a statement.”Nevertheless, our joy is framed against the sorrowful reality of the many innocent lives lost in the current NATO bombing campaign. Therefore, we remain firmly committed to the nonviolent resolution of this conflict.” The delegation also expressed its thanks to the Serbian Orthodox Church, led by Patriarch Pavle, for its work in gaining the release of the three U.S. soldiers.

Campbell and Jackson, founder and president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, walked across the border between Yugoslavia and Croatia hand-in-hand with the three men who had spent 32 days in captivity.

At the border, the soldiers told reporters”they had developed friendships with their captors, felt fondly about them and had prayed with them before they left,”said the Rev. Roy Lloyd, NCC’s broadcast news director, who accompanied the delegation.

Jackson praised Campbell for her work in bringing an inclusive religious delegation on the mission. Campbell stressed that it was a religious, not a political, trip and credited all of the delegation members with helping in the release.

In addition to meeting with the Serbian Orthodox patriarch, the delegation viewed damage from the NATO bombings.

When the delegation returned to the United States, Jackson praised the interfaith group _ some members of which had never worked together before.”Faith without works is dead but faith in action has awesome power,”he said Monday at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington.

Jackson returned with a letter from Yugoslavia President Slobodan Milosevic for Clinton.

The Clinton administration had discouraged the mission, but Clinton stated his pleasure with its successful outcome. The president also reaffirmed his commitment to continue the U.S.-led NATO campaign that aims to return”over 1 million Kosovars who are unable to go home because of the policies of the regime in Belgrade.” The delegation included Bishop Dimitrios of Xanthos, ecumenical officer, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, New York; the Rev. Irinej Dobrijevic, Serbian Orthodox priest of Cleveland; Rabbi Steven Bennett Jacobs of Los Angeles; Dr. Nazir Khaja, president of the American Muslim Council; the Rev. Raymond G. Helmick, a Catholic priest at Boston College in Massachusetts; and Bishop Marshall L. Meadors Jr., a United Methodist bishop from Jackson, Miss.

Pope calls Padre Pio’s prayer and charity”authentic road to peace” (RNS) Pope John Paul II said Monday (May 3) the newly beatified Padre Pio set an example for the world by choosing prayer and works of charity as”the authentic road to peace.” The Roman Catholic pontiff addressed some 20,000 pilgrims who remained in Rome for a Mass of thanksgiving the day after he declared the sometimes controversial Capuchin friar blessed, one step below sainthood.

City officials estimated that some 200,000 people attended Sunday’s papal Mass in St. Peter’s Square. Among them were Italian President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema, Mayor Francesco Rutelli, Cabinet members, the governor of the Bank of Italy, Antonio Fazio and Consiglia De Martino, 47, whose miraculous healing of a lymphatic swelling after praying to Padre Pio helped to qualify him for beatification.

The pope also gave communion to Senator-for-Life Giulio Andreotti, a seven-time prime minister and editor of the Catholic news magazine”30 Days”who is awaiting a verdict in his trial for associating with the Mafia.

Immediately after the Mass, John Paul flew by helicopter to the piazza of St. John in Lateran on the other side of the Tiber River for prayers with another 100,000 people who had watched the ceremony on giant television screens.”Divine Providence wanted Padre Pio to be proclaimed blessed on the eve of the great Jubilee of 2,000 as a dramatic century closes,”the pope said at the close of Monday’s Mass.

The more than 700 prayer groups he founded and the high-tech hospital he established at his monastery in San Giovanni Rotondo in the Gargano mountains of southern Italy, John Paul said, are the”two significant gifts that Padre Pio has left us.””The fact that he conceived both his works _ the House for the Relief of Suffering and the prayer groups _ in the year 1940 while the catastrophe of the Second World War was looming in Europe should not pass unobserved,”the Polish-born pontiff said.”He did not remain inert, but, from his out-of-the-way monastery in the Gargano, responded with prayer and works of charity, charity toward God and his fellow man. And today, from Heaven, he repeats to all that this is the authentic road to peace.” Padre Pio, who died in 1968 at the age of 81, carried the stigmata _ Christ-like wounds on his hands, feet and side _ for most of his priesthood. He won a wide following as a mystic, but the Vatican distrusted some of his views, and the Holy Office suspended him from his priestly duties for three years in the 1930s.”By his life given wholly to prayer and to listening to his brothers and sisters, this humble Capuchin friar astonished the world,”the pope said at the beatification. Padre Pio’s trials, he said, were a result”of his incomparable charisma.”

Chinese step up raids of underground Protestant churches

(RNS) Bibles were confiscated and worshippers detained when a Chinese underground Protestant church was raided in late April, according to a Hong Kong-based human rights group.

The Information Center of Human Rights and Democratic Movement said the April 25 raid took place in Henan province’s Sui county and that 25 congregants were taken into custody.

The raid was at least the fifth since October in Henan county, an area of wide-scale underground Protestant church activity, the Associated Press reported.

Religious activity is tightly controlled in China. Those churches _ both Protestant and Catholic _ that operate outside the government’s official framework are referred to as being underground, even when their activities are known to officials. The underground churches generally meet in private homes.

Fifteen of those detained in the latest raid were still in custody as of Monday (May 3), according to the center. At least 225 other Christians have also been detained during the series of raids, with some being fined the equivalent of $240 _ nearly equal to the average yearly income in rural China.

Islamic head scarf prompts uproar in Turkish parliament

(RNS) A member of the Turkish parliament set off a furor by wearing an Islamic head scarf to her swearing in session, prompting hundreds of her fellow lawmakers to bang on desks and yell”get out.” Merve Kavakci, a 30-year-old American-educated member of the Islamic Virtue Party, said the scarf was a legitimate expression of her Muslim faith.”My head is covered because of my faith. I will defend my rights until the end,”she said Monday (May 3).

Turkey is an overwhelming Muslim nation where the staunchly secular establishment is locked in a political struggle with a growing Muslim traditionalist movement.

Secularists consider the head scarves a political statement. Traditionalists say the head coverings are required by Islam’s rules concerning modesty in dress.

While parliament’s rules do not specifically ban head scarves, Turkish civil servants are forbidden to wear them, the Associated Press said.

Following the ruckus, Premier Bulent Ecevit halted the swearing-in session and Kavakci left the parliament session. She said she would take the oath at another time.”Turkey is a secular republic and religion should not be mixed with politics,”Ecevit said.

Turkish President Suleyman Demirel called Kavakci’s action a provocation and prosecutors said they will investigate whether she could be charged with”inciting religious hatred.” Pakistani religious leaders arrested

(RNS) The leaders of Pakistan’s Ahmadiyya movement have been arrested and charged with violating the nation’s anti-blasphemy law, which carries the death sentence.

Mirza Masroor Ahmad and Col Ayaz, the two most senior leaders of the estimated 4 million-member Pakistani Ahmadiyya community, were reportedly arrested Friday (April 30). Reuters said they were arrested for allegedly erasing writing on a signboard announcing the government’s unilateral decision to rename the city of Rabwah, the sect’s spiritual center.

The announcement reportedly contained verses from the Koran, Islam’s holy book, prompting the charges. In recent years, Christians and minority Shiite Muslims have also been charged with blasphemy in overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim Pakistan.

Reuters reported that a spokesman for the Pakistani Ahmadiyya community said the writing was actually erased by opponents of the movement in an effort to frame the arrested leaders.

Imam Shamshad A. Nasir, head of the movement’s Baitur Rahman Mosque in Silver Spring, Md., said the blasphemy charges are”not only false but also grossly ludicrous since the holy Koran is the most revered book of Ahmadi Muslims.” Since 1974, Pakistani law has considered the Ahmadiyya movement to be non-Islamic because the sect considers its founder, religious reformer Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who died in 1908, to be a prophet. Mainstream Islam holds that Muhammad, the faith’s founder, was the final prophet.

Ahmadiyya Muslims have suffered persecution in Pakistan ever since. The movement’s current world leader, Mirza Tahir Ahmad, resides in exile in London. There are about 10 million Ahmadi Muslims worldwide.

Violence at home, abroad concerns British church leaders

(RNS) Roman Catholic Cardinal Basil Hume, speaking in the wake of terrorist bombings in England, the high school shooting in Littleton, Colo., and the ongoing war in the Balkans, has been been prompted to express the fear that the world is sinking back into barbarism.”When I think about what’s been going on in America, when you know of what’s been going on in Kosovo, we seem to be at the end of our millennium sinking back to a kind of barbarism,”he said.”It’s terrifying, and we really need as a society to take a very long look at ourselves as to what values we are giving to our people and how we are bringing up the young.” Hume said he was horrified by the carnage caused by the bombing at a gay nightclub in the Soho district of London on Friday in which three people were killed and 22 others injured. It was the third such bombing over the past few weeks.”The Roman Catholic Church doesn’t agree with many aspects of the way the gay community think and act, but it does condemn utterly, and I condemn utterly, all violence against gays,”he told BBC radio.”These are our brothers and sisters, and as such they have got to have our respect. I will not tolerate any violence against the gay community.” Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey said he was”shocked and horrified”by the Soho bombing.”This attack, like those in Brixton and Brick Lane, is apparently intended to terrorize minority communities and should be condemned for the evil it is,”he said.”Like racism, homophobia should have no place in our society. Even at a time when there is no shortage of barbarous violence around us, these attacks stand out for the hatred and cowardice they manifest.” Anglican Bishop of London Richard Chartres said when visiting the scene of the explosion:”This is an atrocious crime. It is a sin against God and the whole community.” Leaders of Britain’s Jewish community said they were extremely concerned that it, too, could be a target for the bombers, given that the first bomb was aimed at the blacks of Brixton, the second at the Bangladeshis of London’s East End, and the third at the gay community. Police have been meeting representatives of the Jewish community in London, Leeds, Manchester, and other towns with large Jewish populations to discuss ways of safeguarding predominantly Jewish areas.

On Monday a 22-year-old man was charged with planting the three nail bombs in Brixton, Brick Lane, and Soho. Police believe he was acting alone, even though a number of far-right groups have claimed responsibility for the bombings.

One of the ironies of the Soho bombings was that the three dead were a recently married woman who was four months pregnant, the best man at her wedding, and a family friend. Together with her husband, who is in a critical condition in hospital, and another friend who was a victim of the blast, they were on their way to a West End musical.

Nicaraguan cardinal called”hurricane of peace”by U.S. Catholics

(RNS) Nicaraguan Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo finished a weekend visit to Los Angeles on Sunday (May 2), telling Nicaraguan immigrants,”we should go into the third millenium following God.” As archbishop of Managua and a leading Central American cleric, Obando y Bravo played a central and controversial role in the 1980s during the civil war between Nicaragua’s Sandinista government and anti-communist Contra rebel leaders. Many Nicaraguans suspected him of secretly aiding the Reagan-administration-financed Contras.

While celebrating Mass for 3,500 people on a football field in the poor Los Angeles suburb of Lynwood, the cardinal thanked Nicaraguans for helping Central Americans hurt last fall by Hurricane Mitch. Speaking in Spanish, Obando y Bravo said the aid was,”distributed to those truly left with nothing.” The cardinal arrived in Los Angeles April 30 and at a Saturday night dinner was honored by the Nicaraguan consulate. Angela Vanegas, founder of the local Nicaraguan prayer group La Purisma, described Obando y Bravo as”the hurricane of peace.” In his Sunday sermon, the cardinal discussed his homeland’s history of civil strife, saying,”There are a lot of countries with a lot of greed, with a lot of envy, and that’s against peace. People should work together to construct peace among all of us.”He added that people should work to give peace”a human face.” Quote of the day: Albanian Kosovar relief worker Zeke Cecu

(RNS)”They are like sheep, herded this way and that. They move here and there to avoid the Serbian forces, in groups large or small. If they see an opening, they make a run for it.” _ Zeke Cecu, an Albanian Kosovar relief worker, on the plight of ethnic Albanian refugees inside Kosovo, as quoted by Lutheran World Relief, April 29.

DEA END RNS