c. 2000 Religion News Service
Four More Church Groups Support AME Zion Church in Breakaway Dispute
(RNS) Four more church groups have filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in its lawsuit against a breakaway congregation in Temple Hills, Md.
The Maryland Catholic Conference, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church and the Worldwide Church of God filed the brief, which was approved by the Maryland Court of Appeals on Aug. 9.
In July, lawyers for six other church groups filed friend-of-the court briefs in the case, which involves the Rev. John A. Cherry and the majority of former members of Full Gospel AME Zion Church. They left their parent denomination in July 1999 and formed From the Heart Church Ministries, taking with them more than $40 million in assets, including sanctuaries, schools buildings and a Learjet.
The breakaway congregation sued the AME Zion Church to try to control those assets and the denomination countersued, claiming Cherry was trying to swindle the AME Zion Church. Both parties are scheduled to argue the case Sept. 7 in Annapolis, Md.
In April, the court’s Chief Judge Robert M. Bell ruled that From the Heart Ministries could retain the assets until a final decision was made in the dispute.
“It’s about more than just property rights,” said Gene Schaerr, one of the lawyers representing the churches filing friend-of-the-court briefs. “It’s really about whether someone who joins a church is bound by the rules of the church in court. … Every religious denomination _ whether they care anything about property at all _ has an interest in establishing that if a dispute arises in court over some religious matter, then everybody’s bound by the rules of the denomination.”
He estimated that the court could take “anywhere from a month to a year” to decide the case.
National Council of Churches to Visit Elian in Cuba Next Month
(RNS) A National Council of Churches delegation will visit Cuba in September for the first time since 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez was returned to Cuba earlier this year.
NCC General Secretary Bob Edgar will lead the eight-member delegation to deliver school supplies to Elian’s classmates in the city of Cardenas and meet with the boy’s grandmothers and father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez.
Officials are not sure whether they will be able to see Elian in Cuba, but visits have already been finalized with his father and grandmothers.
The NCC was instrumental in returning the boy to his family in Cuba in cooperation with the Cuban Council of Churches. During the Sept. 2-7 visit, the two councils also will work to continue a $1 million aid program to deliver food, medicine and medical equipment.
The delegation will also meet with Cardinal Jaime Ortega, the Roman Catholic prelate in Cuba. An ecumenical worship service is planned with the Cuban Council of Churches, Catholics and Pentecostals on Sept. 5.
Part of the aim of the visit will be to coordinate outreach between the two councils in the “post-Elian” era. The Cuban Council of Churches, for example, has asked the NCC’s humanitarian arm, Church World Service, to coordinate all aid shipments to the island nation.
The two sides are also hoping that religious institutions can work to foster better relations between Havana and Washington.
Members of the delegation will include Edgar, retired United Methodist bishop Melvin G. Talbert and the Rev. Kermit DeGraffenreidt, director of the mission board of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Britain Moves Closer to Allow Human Cloning for Research
(RNS) The British government has agreed to consider a controversial plan to allow the cloning of human stem cells for medical research, while German officials watch with interest and mull a similar move over the objection of religious leaders.
British officials said Wednesday (Aug. 16) that untold medical breakthroughs may be hiding in the building block cells of human life, and scientists should be allowed to use the cells for research, but not human reproduction.
The measure now needs approval by the British parliament, and a vote is expected later this year.
Stem cells are found in human embryos and grow to become all the thousands of tissues found in the human body. The procedure is controversial because it essentially involves creating life, and then destroying it. Church leaders have said cloning is morally wrong.
Researchers said scientists must be allowed to experiment with stem cells to see if cures for Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s or cancer can be found.
“There is major, major medical potential, but we need to see whether this potential can be realized,” said Liam Donaldson, Britain’s chief medical officer, according to USA Today.
At the same time, researchers in Germany are watching with interest what course Britain chooses to take with cloning research. Many in Germany are hesitant because of the Nazi legacy of genetic experiments to try to create a “master race” of genetically superior humans.
“We have a law protecting embryos based on very strict rules and we have just started a debate on it because it is 10 years old and much has happened since,” said German Health Minister Andrea Fischer in a radio interview.
Church leaders, however, said cloning will never receive the church’s blessing.
“Together with the Catholic Church we believe manipulation of the embryo is a step in the wrong direction, said Thomas Krueger, spokesman for the Evangelical (Protestant) Church, according to the Reuters news agency. “Our barbaric past is yet one more reason to oppose it.”
Ten Commandments Book Covers Allowed in Chicago Public Schools
(RNS) Chicago public school students may soon be sporting the Ten Commandments on their book covers after the school district approved a plan for an independent religious group to distribute them off-campus.
The Total Living Network, a television-based ministry, will give out about 100,000 book covers that feature the Ten Commandments on one side and inspirational quotes from Oprah Winfrey and others on the other side, according to the Associated Press.
Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas gave his approval as long as students are not forced to take the book covers and they are distributed off school grounds.
“I am enthusiastically supportive,” Vallas said Wednesday (Aug. 16). “I view the Ten Commandments as history’s value statements. They’re certainly universally accepted.”
Church-state watchdog groups are giving their blessings, as well, as long as the school district is “rigidly neutral,” said the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.
“(The school district) has no business taking a position on whether the Ten Commandments or any other religious document is good, bad or indifferent,” Lynn said.
City officials said students need positive values reinforcement in a society that is increasingly violent and morally adrift.
“People talk about separating church and state, but separating these two _ it’s not working,” said Jesse Granato, a city alderman from a neighborhood that has seen two people killed this summer.
Peacekeepers, Expanded Sanctions Urged Against Taliban
(RNS) In an appearance Thursday (Aug. 17) in Geneva before the U.N. Subcommission on Human Rights, a representative of an Afghan women’s rights group accused the country’s Taliban rulers of creating the worst human rights crisis in the world, and urged the United Nations to deploy peacekeepers to the country.
“Until we cut off the money and guns, the foreign financial and military support, then we can’t think about real peace or security in Afghanistan,” said Sehar Saba, of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, the Associated Press reported.
Since the Taliban militia seized control of the Afghan capital of Kabul in 1996, women in the country have lived under strict controls and have been barred from activities such as working and attending schools.
On Wednesday (Aug. 16), the Taliban ordered the United Nations to shut down its program that paid widows to manage bakeries that sold bread to other widows.
“The rules of the Islamic Emirate of Aghanistan are clear, and they have been ignoring the rules,” said the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan. “We do not allow women to work.”
The Taliban’s order leaves 350 women jobless, according to Peter Goosent, the country director for the U.N. World Food Program.
Saba told the subcommission that Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis includes not only the suffering of women in the country, but the suffering of the nation as a whole.
“The tragedy is that our people are dying,” she said. “They can’t even find a piece of bread.”
She said sanctions the United Nations imposed against Afghanistan last November for the nation’s refusal to surrender suspected terrorist Osama Bin Laden were ineffective.
“If they really want to help, they should impose sanctions on those countries that are supporting the Taliban,” she said.
Update: Suspect in Indian Church Attacks Arrested
(RNS) Authorities in southern India announced Thursday (Aug. 17) they have arrested a man suspected of participating in several bomb attacks on Christian churches since June.
Syed Hasan Ur Zama, a junior warrant officer in the Indian Air Force, was arrested outside New Delhi by the Corps of Detectives in Karnataka, Reuters news agency reported.
Police believe he may have conspired to bomb four Christian churches across southern India in June and helped plan similar attacks outside two churches in Karnataka the following month.
Zama belongs to the same obscure southern India-based Muslim organization as another suspect in the bombings, police said. The organization’s leader resides in Pakistan but is suspected of coordinating the bomb attacks.
“Information gathered from the accused in the bomb blast cases … has revealed a deep-rooted conspiracy to blast places of worship to create enmity among various religious groups in the country,” the detectives corps said.
The corps also suspects that Zama has given classified information to sources in Pakistan.
“The officer has admitted to collecting and forwarding sensitive information about the location of various vital installations, defense establishments, railway bridges and communicating them to contacts in Pakistan,” read a statement from the detective corps.
Up To 1 Million Young Pilgrims In Rome for Sunday’s World Youth Day
(RNS) Up to 1 million young Roman Catholics have arrived in Rome for World Youth Day celebrations, the Vatican reported Thursday (Aug. 17). Mayor Francesco Rutelli called the church youth jamboree the biggest gathering ever held in the Eternal City.
With temperatures approaching 90 degrees, groups of young pilgrims in shorts and T-shirts marched through the city center and camped in parks and piazzas and on shady stretches of sidewalk to eat box lunches and rest their feet.
Vatican firemen opened a hydrant to spray the swarms of young people waiting in St. Peter’s Square for their turn to walk through the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica at the rate of 20,000 an hour.
The Rev. Claudio Giuliodori of the Vatican’s Holy Year committee said 700,000 young people crowded into the piazzas of St. John in Lateran and St. Peter Sunday (Aug. 15) to hear Pope John Paul II welcome them to six days of celebrations culminating with a Mass Sunday (Aug. 20) on a college campus outside the city.
“We started from more than 700,000 young people, and today we will be at more than 900,000, perhaps even 1 million participants,” Giuliodori said.
The Vatican said earlier it expects 1.2 million to 1.5 million young people to attend the Mass on Sunday.
Some 300,000 of them, including 300 from war-torn countries, were selected to take part Friday (Aug. 18) in a Way of the Cross procession from the Church of Santa Maria in Ara Coeli on the Capitoline Hill to the Colosseum, led by Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the president of the Italian Bishops Conference.
Celebrating Mass for delegates attending an International Forum at Castelgandolfo in the Alban Hills south of Rome, where he has his summer residence, John Paul appealed to young people “to respond to the call” of the church.
“Do not be afraid to assume your responsibilities,” the 80-year-old pontiff said. “The church has need of you, need of your commitment and your generosity. The pope has need of you and, at the start of this new millennium, asks you to carry the Gospels through the world.”
Quote of the Day: Protester Eric DeBode
(RNS) “Our vision is that Jesus came to offer himself as a sign of hope and he did that by caring for the sick, spending time with lepers and suffering people, and standing with victims and offering himself as victim. He did not build churches.”
_ Eric DeBode, of the Catholic Worker outreach ministry, during a recent protest in front of the new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels that is under construction in downtown Los Angeles. He was quoted in the Thursday (Aug. 17) edition of the Los Angeles Times.
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