c. 1999 Religion News Service

Ashcroft out as religious conservatives’ top choice for GOP nod

(RNS) Religious conservatives have lost one potential Republican presidential candidate while gaining another.

Sen. John Ashcroft, R-Mo., announced Tuesday (Jan. 5) he would not seek the GOP nomination in 2000, while Gary Bauer said he was taking a leave of absence from his job as president of the Family Research Council to explore a presidential run.

Bauer, 52, a one-time White House domestic-policy adviser to ex-President Ronald Reagan, said on CNN he would decide whether he will run by the end of January. If he does, Bauer said he would present himself as a Reagan conservative on economic and social issues.

Bauer has also headed the Campaign for Working Families, which calls itself the nation’s sixth largest political action committee. It raised some $7 million for conservative candidates during 1998.

Bauer has consistently spoken uncompromisingly about abortion and other issues important to religious conservatives. He has also faulted conservative GOP leaders for being too quick to compromise in order to attract moderate voters to Republican ranks.

However, Bauer has never run for political office and some Washington political insiders have expressed concern that Bauer is too conservative and too unknown to win a presidential race.

Ashcroft’s decision to pull out of the race for the Republican nomination came as a surprise. He was considered the early favorite of religious conservatives, and had spent a year laying the groundwork for a campaign.

Ashcroft said he would now concentrate on winning re-election to the Senate. “The social conservative movement had gravitated toward Ashcroft and there was not an easy second choice,”Michael Farris, president of the Home School Legal Defense Association in Purcellville, Va., told the Associated Press.

Other announced and unofficial candidates for the GOP nomination _ including publisher Steve Forbes, ex-Vice President Dan Quayle, Gov. George Bush Jr. of Texas, Elizabeth Dole and Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Bob Smith of New Hampshire _ are, to varying degrees, viewed less favorably by staunch religious conservatives.

Three more Concerned Christians members to be deported from Israel

(RNS) Israel issued deportation orders Wednesday (Jan. 6) for three members of an alleged”doomsday”sect, Concerned Christians, raising to 14 the number of sect members ordered out of the country on suspicion of plotting millennium-related violence.

All 14 of the alleged sect members were arrested in raids by Israeli security forces on suspicion the Denver-based group was plotting an act of violence to hasten the return of Jesus.

The three ordered deported Wednesday had been detained by police for questioning on the suspicion they had information about other members in Israel and elsewhere, Reuters reported.

Between 60 and 80 members of the tiny sect had abandoned their jobs and homes in Colorado last year and have been missing for several months.

The group’s leader, Monte Kim Miller, who has prophesied that he will die on the streets of Jerusalem during 1999, was not in Israel, police said. The Associated Press, meanwhile, quoted a lawyer for the three detained men as saying they had told him Miller was in London.

The lawyer, Eran Avital, said his clients wanted to go to Greece because other group members are already there and they believed the United States would be destroyed soon.

The 11 _ including six children _ not being held by police are under police guard at a Jerusalem hotel.

The AP quoted a”senior police source”as saying the sect members were planning violent acts in Jerusalem’s walled Old City and one possible location was the Temple Mount, site of Jewish-Muslim tensions in the past.

Some Christians interpret the New Testament Book of Revelation as saying that Jesus will return to Earth to make everlasting peace after a millennial cataclysmic war between the armies of Gog and Magog at Armageddon in the Holy Land.

Pope consecrates nine new bishops

(RNS) Pope John Paul II formally consecrated nine new bishops Wednesday (Jan. 6), including new prelates for war-scarred Sudan and religiously sensitive Vietnam.

In naming Italian Cesare Mazzolari bishop of Rumbek in Sudan, John Paul called the African nation a”country whose people, subjected for years to suffering, expect a just peace that respects the human rights of all, starting with the weakest.” The pontiff told Pierre Tran Dinh Tu, named bishop of the diocese of Phu Cuong in Vietnam, that he must”bring a message of hope to a diocese … whose brothers and sisters of the faith endure significant difficulties.” Other new bishops were assigned posts in Pakistan, Rwanda, Ecuador, India and Italy.

Russia’s first interfaith council organized

(RNS) Representatives of Russia’s major faiths have organized a new interfaith council that they hope will foster cooperation between the groups.

Meeting in December, Russian Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist leaders created the Permanent Interfaith Council _ reportedly the first such organization in Russian history.

Vsevolod Chaplin, a spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, said the council’s goal is to”ensure contacts and avoid conflicts between believers of various denominations,”the Jewish Telegraphic Agency news service reported Tuesday (Jan. 5).

Zinovy Kogan, the council’s Jewish representative, said the organization will endeavor to present a unified voice in opposition to anti-Semitism, signs of which have increased in recent months as Russia’s deep economic and political troubles have worsened.

The council is expected to add Roman Catholic and Lutheran representatives in the near future.

A St. Louis prayer request: Good weather for the papal visit

(RNS) As St. Louis struggled to recover from a storm that dumped eight inches of snow and sleet on the city over the New Year’s weekend, the Roman Catholic official coordinating the upcoming papal visit to the city asked local nuns to pray for good weather.

Monsignor Richard Stika said he has asked some 150 contemplative nuns, who spend much of the day praying, to pray for Pope John Paul II’s health and clear and warmer weather for his Jan. 26-27 visit to St. Louis.

Last year, St. Louis enjoyed 60-degree weather in late January, according to the Associated Press.

John Paul, who will come to St. Louis from Mexico, is scheduled for three motorcades while in the city. Tens of thousands are expected to line the motorcade routes _ if the weather is good. Inclement weather could make it difficult for the pope to travel around the city _ or even fly in or out.

Quote of the day: Daniel Taylor, Bethel College professor

(RNS)”Too much of what passes as tolerance in America is not the result of principled judgment but is simple moral indifference.” _ Daniel Taylor, literature professor at Bethel College, St. Paul, Minn., in the Jan. 11 issue of Christianity Today.

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