c. 1999 Religion News Service
Pope, in Lent message, urges more just distribution of world’s goods
(RNS) Pope John Paul II called Tuesday (Jan. 19) for individuals, governments and international institutions to join in a search for”courageous new routes”for a more just distribution of the world’s wealth.
The Roman Catholic pontiff made the appeal in his message for Lent, the 40-day liturgical season in which Christians are called upon to fast, pray and give alms in preparation for Easter. This year, Lent will begin on Feb. 17, Ash Wednesday.
John Paul, who has designated 1999 as the Year of Charity, based his Lenten message on the words of the prophet Isaiah,”The Lord will prepare a banquet for all the peoples.”He likened the needy to the diseased beggar Lazarus in the Biblical parable of the rich man and the beggar.”The new poverty and the great questions that grieve many hearts await concrete and pertinent answers,”the pope said, adding he was especially concerned about”those excluded from the banquet of daily consumerism.”There are many Lazaruses, who knock on the doors of society: they are all those who do not participate in the material advantages brought by progress.” The pope said”situations of misery”that persist in the world cannot help but jolt the consciences of Christians and remind them of their duty to act with urgency both personally and as a community.”Not only individual persons are offered occasions to demonstrate their willingness to invite the poor to participate in their rightful well-being but also international institutions, the governors of peoples and the centers that direct the world economy must make it their business to design courageous routes for a more just division of the goods of the earth, both within individual countries and in relations among peoples,”he said.
At a Vatican news conference, Archbishop Paul Josef Cordes, president of the Pontifical Council”Cor Unum,”which coordinates Catholic aid and development services, reported on the new project”Panis Caritatis.” Cordes said that more than $300,000 collected in Italy and $150,000 in the United States in the project’s first three months will be used to set up bakeries serving refugees and other destitute people in the Great Lakes region of Africa, Uganda and Sudan.
The project receives donations with each purchase of bread at affiliated shops.
The Rev. Frank Dewane, an American official of”Cor Unum,”reported that the pope’s personal charity, known as the Holy Father’s 100 Projects, has received $20,451,015 so far and will finance 223 development projects throughout the developing world. He said all of the projects will be completed this year.
The pontiff will honor Catholics who do volunteer charity work by inviting them to a papal mass May 16 in St. Peter’s Square, Cordes announced.
Update: Falwell clarifies Antichrist statement, draws criticism
(RNS) Evangelist Jerry Falwell has clarified his recent statement that the Antichrist might be alive today and if so, is probably a Jewish male.”When I delivered my sermon on the second coming of Jesus Christ last week to a pastors’ conference in Kingsport, Tenn., I conveyed biblically-based truths that I have believed and preached nationally for more than 40 years,”said Falwell in a statement released Monday (Jan. 18).
Falwell, the pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va., stressed that his beliefs are also those of many evangelical Christians.”Since Jesus came to the earth the first time 2,000 years ago as a Jewish male, most evangelicals believe the Antichrist will, by necessity, be a Jewish male also,”he said.”This belief is 2,000 years old and has no anti-Semitic roots. This is simply historic and prophetic orthodox Christian doctrine that most theologians, Christian and non-Christian have understood for two millennia.” Falwell’s remarks drew the ire Tuesday of Jewish organizations and the Catholic bishop in his area.”The statement by Rev. Jerry Falwell, that the Antichrist, who is evil incarnate, is Jewish, borders on anti-Semitism at best and is anti-Semitic at worst,”said Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League.”In identifying the Antichrist as a living Jewish man, Rev. Falwell draws from an especially vicious tradition of Christian theological anti-Judaism.” Leaders of the American Jewish Congress agreed.”It may be that Rev. Falwell did not overtly intend his comment to provoke a broad anti-Semitism fallout,”the congress said in a statement.”If so, he was wrong. History unambiguously teaches that the unexplained preaching of arcane Christian theological concepts like those advanced by Rev. Falwell has an inevitably incendiary and degrading effect on Christian attitudes toward Jews.” The Catholic bishop based in Richmond also differs with Falwell’s convictions.
In a letter sent to the editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Bishop Walter F. Sullivan, the leader of the Diocese of Richmond, said,”Rev. Falwell’s claims are as reprehensible as they are outrageous. … By defining, as he does, the Antichrist to be a Jewish `counterfeit’ of Christ, he recklessly targets the Jewish people as the fountainhead of evil itself.” Sullivan’s diocese includes central and eastern portions of Virginia, including Lynchburg.
Unlike Falwell, Sullivan said,”the Antichrist is not a person but a biblical symbol for what Pope John Paul II has called `the culture of death.’ It is a whole pattern of attitudes and lifestyles that contradict values held in common by Christians and Jews alike. The Antichrist is everything in our culture that devalues the sanctity of life.”
High court rejects Operation Rescue defamation suit against Kennedy
(RNS) The Supreme Court has rejected a request to revive a 1994 lawsuit filed by Operation Rescue and three of its leaders against Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and the federal government.
The suit alleged that Kennedy defamed Operation Rescue and three leaders of the militant anti-abortion group _ Randall Terry, Philip Lawler and Robert Jewitt _ when he linked them to anti-abortion violence.
Lower courts had turned aside the suit, saying federal law protected the speech of certain governmental employees, including members of Congress, when said within the scope of official duties. The federal government replaced Kennedy as the defendant when the case moved from state to federal court.
Tuesday (Jan. 19), the high court let stand those rulings without comment. Kennedy said at a news conference on Nov. 15, 1993, that”people can have a difference on public policy issues, but when we have a national organization like Operation Rescue that has as a matter of national policy firebombing and even murder, that’s unacceptable.” The suit said Operation Rescue and its three leaders”have never advocated firebombing or murder as part of their opposition to abortion,”and that Kennedy had tarnished their reputations by falsely accusing them of illegal actions.
Kennedy’s comments were in the context of a then-pending bill to extend federal protection to abortion clinics subjected to demonstrations by militant anti-abortion activists intent on preventing their operation. The bill later passed the Congress as the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994.
Cosmetics heir Lauder nominated for Jewish post
(RNS) Ronald Lauder, the billionaire cosmetics heir and former Reagan administration official, has been nominated to become the next president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
Lauder’s nomination, which is tantamount to election, came despite the complaints of liberal Jewish leaders who said Lauder’s conservative views were out of step with the majority of American Jews, who tend toward liberal positions.
The Presidents Conference includes 55 leading American Jewish groups and acts as the Jewish community’s national and international voice on Israel and other Middle East issues. The full body will vote on Lauder’s nomination by a selection committee in February.
Lauder, 54, is currently president of the Jewish National Fund, a position he assumed two years ago. At the time, the post was widely seen as a stepping stone to the presidency of the Presidents Conference.
A close friend of right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Lauder is heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune. He left the cosmetics company in 1983 to serve as assistant secretary of defense under Reagan. He also served as U.S. ambassador to Austria and ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York City on the Conservative Party line.
Report: Vietnam cracking down on `illegal’ evangelism
(RNS) The government of Vietnam is cracking down on what it terms”illegal Protestant evangelism”which has been growing in the country’s northern highlands, according to reports coming out of the country.
According to a report in the official journal Phap Luat (Law), members of the Hmong ethnic minority were switching from traditional animist beliefs to Protestantism, Reuters reported Tuesday (Jan. 19).
It said the evangelism centered on remote Ha Giang and focused on a”disguised”illegal sect it termed”Vang Chu.”It said the group had about 6,000 adherents.”The followers demolished their (ancestors’) shrines, gave up funeral and wedding ceremonies, and threw dead people into canyons instead of burying them,”Phap Luat said.
The journal said a task force has been set up to deal with what it called illegal religious evangelism.
Human rights groups and other sources have estimated there are between 150,000 and 300,00 Hmong Protestants in northern Vietnam and some 30 church leaders have been detained by the government.
English churches are victims of a crime wave
(RNS) English churches are suffering from a crime wave that has been hitting at least a third of all Anglican churches every year and officials say the churches are getting ready to respond with a”Church Watch”program similar to Neighborhood Watch programs in the United States.
Under the program volunteers will watch over vulnerable churches and have a”hotline”telephone link to the police.”There is vastly more church crime than people realize,”Nick Tolson, a Church Watch coordinator for Bath and Wales told Ecumenical News International, the Geneva-based religious news agency.”The figures are bad enough, and yet only a quarter of crime affecting churches gets reported.” At a mid-January conference on the issue, Brian King of Ecclesiastical Insurance said his company spends some $6.6 million a year for crimes involving Church of England churches.
He said of the more than 4,000 claims each year, most are for vandalism and burglary but arson claims are more costly, averaging $50,000 each.
Quote of the day: U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan
(RNS)”If Anne Frank, in her living hell, could summon the power to imagine a better, peaceful world, a future free of suffering and persecution, then surely we can summon the will to make that day come to pass.” _ United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan at a Jan. 14 ceremony in which he placed the first signature on a declaration in the name of Anne Frank that organizers hope will spread a message of peace and intolerance of bigotry.
DEA END RNS