c. 2000 Religion News Service
Church Arsons Decrease for Third Straight Year
(RNS) Church arsons have decreased for the third straight year after a jump in the arson rate in 1996, a task force studying the problem has reported.
About 100 churches were burned or were the targets of attempted bombings in 1999, compared with nearly 300 in 1996, said the National Church Arson Task Force.
The surge in attacks in 1996, especially against black Southern churches, was the catalyst for the task force, which includes federal and state law enforcement agencies.
“While these types of cases are oftentimes difficult to investigate and prosecute, our cooperative efforts have brought tremendous success,” said Bill Lann Lee, acting assistant attorney general and the group’s co-chairman.
During its three years of investigation, the committee has looked into more than 800 arsons, bombings or attempted bombings that occurred between January 1995 and October 1999, the Associated Press reported.
Federal, state and local authorities made 364 arrests and obtained 267 convictions, said the group’s third report to President Clinton.
Arrests have included that of Jay Scott Ballinger, who has been charged in several federal courts for allegedly burning 33 churches in eight states since 1994. His indictments represent the largest number of fires tied to a single person during the investigation, the report said.
Ballinger is scheduled to face trial on June 19 in Indiana. In federal custody since his February 1999 arrest, he faces a minimum of 90 years in prison if convicted on all charges.
The vast majority of arrests during the investigation have been white men and most were younger than 25. Thirty men were convicted on federal charges of bias-related hate crimes.
Southern Baptist Newsman Herb Hollinger to Retire
(RNS) Herb Hollinger, the vice president for convention news for the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee, has announced his retirement.
Hollinger, who has overseen Baptist Press, the denomination’s official news service, since 1991, will retire effective July 1.
During his tenure the news service has moved from delivery by mail to availability via the Internet.
Following his retirement, when he will be 60, Hollinger will move to the West Coast and pursue work with local churches, Baptist Press reported.
“I felt the call of the Lord to go out and help grow churches and plant churches out West,” he said.
Hollinger, who grew up in the Mormon Church, became a Baptist in 1962 and and was licensed to preach in 1970 by an Idaho church. He served as a pastor in California and Washington state before taking several denominational positions in the news, communications and public relations fields.
Pew Launches Study of Catholicism in Public Life
(RNS) The Pew Charitable Trusts has announced it will help launch a three-year study of the role of Roman Catholicism in American public life.
“A strong public expression of religious faith and an open, pluralistic public square don’t have to be mutually exclusive,” said Rebecca W. Rimel, president of The Pew Charitable Trusts, a Philadelphia-based organization that supports nonprofit activities in the areas of culture, education, the environment, health and human services, public policy and religion.
The $1.5 million project, “American Catholics in the Public Sphere,” will examine issues such as how American Catholics approach civic life and the effect of American culture on Catholic political and social thought.
The study, co-sponsored by the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., and the Commonweal Foundation in New York City, will also examine the voting habits of Catholic voters through focus groups and a national poll.
The study on Catholicism is part of a larger research project _ Religious Communities and the American Public Square _ led by Pew Charitable Trusts which examines the civic contributions of mainline Protestant, Catholic, evangelical Christian, Muslim, Latino, African-American and Jewish religious groups in the United States. Grants of more than $1 million have been awarded to researchers in the study.
American Falun Gong Supporter Being Held by Chinese
(RNS) A New York City woman has been held by Chinese authorities for nearly a week after she took a picture of police breaking up a protest by members of the outlawed Falun Gong religious group, according to the Associated Press.
Tracy Zhao, 30, arrested by police on Feb. 4, after taking a picture of police breaking up the protest at Tiananmen Square, was one of about 50 Falun Gong supporters who were detained at the protest, according to Zhao’s American boyfriend, Lin chong-Li, who is also from New York.
Zhao was not a participant in the protest, said Lin, but was there in a show of support.
He said he has not heard from Zhao since Saturday morning, when she used a borrowed mobile phone to contact him twice to report she was being taken to a detention center north of Beijing.
Zhao, who was born in Beijing and emigrated to the United States about seven years ago, has been a member of the Falun Gong _ banned in China last July _ for about a year, according to her mother Yan Zuo, who lives in Queens, N.Y.
“She is a practitioner but in Tiananmen did not participate, she just took a picture,” said Yan, who said she too had not heard from Zhao since Saturday.
Zhao had visited Beijing on Feb. 3 to see relatives and welcome the new year, said Yan, and she also wanted to find out how Chinese authorities treated Falun Gong members.
Meanwhile, Chinese authorities continue to crackdown on other Falun Gong members. Chinese courts sentenced Gao Qiuju, chief of the Falun Gong’s Dalian branch, to nine years in jail on Friday (Feb. 11), according to the Information Center of Human Rights and Democratic Movement. The same group reported that a judge in southern China, Huang Jinchun, remains in a psychiatric hospital after being admitted there about three months ago for refusing to renounce the Falun Gong.
The U.S. State Department and some members of Congress spoke out against what they see as China’s abuse of human rights, introducing resolutions on Thursday (Feb. 10) calling for China to release a businesswoman linked with nationalists in western China. Rebiya Kadeer, part of the People’s Political Consultative Conference in Xinjiang from 1993 to 1998, was arrested in August on suspicion of “harming national security,” according to Reuters.
“We’ve seen nothing to suggest there is any basis to Chinese charges that she has provided state secrets and intelligence to foreign organizations,” said State Department spokesman James Rubin.
Rep. George Nethercutt, R-Wash., introduced the nonbinding congressional resolution, which also calls for the release of Kadeer’s son, sentenced last December to two years in a labor camp, and secretary, and asks that China permit the three to come to the United States should they make that request.
Pope Tells the Sick Pain and Sickness are Part of Divine Plan
(RNS) Pope John Paul II, celebrating a special Holy Year Mass for the sick, said Friday (Feb. 11) they must accept the heavy cross of pain and sickness as “part of the mystery of man on earth.”
The 79-year-old Roman Catholic pontiff, who himself suffers from a debilitating neurological disease, said he felt an “intimate participation” in the Jubilee of the Sick and Health Care Workers.
“You are in the heart of the successor of Peter, who shares your every worry and anxiety,” the pope told 35,000 pilgrims, some 3,000 of them in wheelchairs, who gathered in St. Peter’s Square for an outdoor Mass on a cool but sunny morning.
During the Mass, John Paul anointed 10 of the seriously ill, including Kirk Kilgour, 52. A native of Los Angeles, he was champion volley-ball player in the United States and Italy until a riding accident in Rome 24 years ago left him totally paralyzed.
Kilgour brought with him a prayer he wrote for a gathering of the pilgrims with the pope Saturday (Feb. 12) night in the Paul VI Audience Hall. “I asked of God to be strong to carry out grandiose projects, and he made me weak to conserve my humility. I demanded of God that he give me health to realize great tasks: He gave me pain to understand it better,” it read in part.
“Dearest brothers and sisters,” the pope said, “some of you have been nailed to a bed of pain for years.”
John Paul said he prayed that “this touching celebration” would not only bring “extraordinary physical and spiritual comfort” but also “offer to all, healthy and sick, the opportunity of meditating on the salvational value of suffering.
“Pain and sickness are part of the mystery of man on earth,” he said. “Certainly, it is just to struggle against sickness because health is a gift of God. But it is also important to know how to read the design of God when suffering knocks on your door.”
Comparing sickness to the cross on which Jesus was crucified, the pope said, “For he who knows how to welcome it in his tested life, illuminated by faith, it becomes a source of hope and of salvation.”
The jubilee celebration fell on the day the church recalls the apparition of the Madonna at Lourdes and traditionally dedicates to the sick, and the square took on the look of the French shrine to which large numbers of the sick flock in hope of a cure.
Red Cross nurses wearing white coifs and navy blue capes pushed wheelchairs and accompanied pilgrims on foot. Holy Year volunteers and members of the Order of the Knights of Malta distributed hot milk and blankets donated by the Red Cross and Italian Ministry of Defense, and a portable hot water system heated 3,000 square meters of the square.
Four giant screens showed similar celebrations under way at Lourdes, Czestochowa in Poland and other shrines dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Special radio and television hookups carried the papal Mass to the shrines.
Scotland Poised to Repeal Law on Promoting Homosexuality
(RNS) Repeal of a law barring local authorities from promoting homosexuality seems likely to go ahead in Scotland following a debate in the Scottish Parliament on Thursday.
At the same time, in an 88-18 vote, with three abstentions, members of Scotland’s limited autonomy parliament, supported a motion committing it to creating appropriate safeguards before any repeal.
The proposal, which has been widely debated throughout Great Britain, has the support of the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair but has provoked sharp criticism from much of England’s religious community.
Currently, local officials _ especially school administrators and teachers _ are barred from any activities that might seem to promote homosexuality. Critics of the law contend that it is anti-gay while its supporters argue it protects traditional understandings of marriage. Repeal, they argue, could undermine children’s understanding of marriage.
Thursday’s debate and vote was seen as a harbinger of the final vote on the issue sometime later this year.
Earlier this week, the House of Lords, defeated the British government’s effort to repeal the law for the whole of the Britain but under current British law granting some measure of autonomy to Scotland, the Scottish parliament can still repeal the provision in Scotland.
A spokesman for Roman Catholic Cardinal Thomas Winning, Archbishop of Glasgow, who has been among the most vociferous opponents of repeal, welcomed the fact parliament approved the resolution calling for safeguards in any repeal plan.
Emphasizing such reassurance was required, Winning’s spokesman said, “It should come in the shape of a clause which should be inserted into the (new law) … which will offer the same degree of protection to our children” as in the current law.
Meanwhile a Gallup poll found a bare majority of voters in Great Britain _ 51 percent _ thought Section 28, as the current law is known, should stay, while 43 percent wanting it repealed and 6 percent said they did not know or had no opinion. Seventy-two percent regarded homosexual behavior as neither right nor wrong but simply a fact of life.
In a separate development, the British House of Commons voted once again to reduce the age of consent for male homosexuals from 18 to 16. Previous efforts to reduce the age of consent have been blocked by the House of Lords, but it is understood this time the government will invoke other provisions of British law to force the change through.
Israel Won’t Act Unilaterally on Safety Issue at Jerusalem Church
(RNS) Israeli officials said Friday (Feb. 11) they won’t take unilateral action in order to open a safety exit in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which tradition holds is the burial site of Jesus.
Meanwhile, it appeared increasingly unlikely the Catholic, Greek and Armenian church bodies with rights to the famous holy site are likely to come to an agreement on their own about where and how a door would be opened prior to next month’s upcoming visit by Pope John Paul II.
The pope is expected to be accompanied by thousands of pilgrims _ most of whom are expected to want to visit the church. Similar crowds are expected during millennial Easter celebrations.
Without an emergency exit, the number of visitors who can safely be permitted into the labyrinthian church structure at any one time is significantly more limited.
“There is no question a second door is needed,” said a spokesperson in the office of Israel’s Minister of Public Security, Shlomo Ben Ami, who has tried repeatedly to mediate a solution to the problem of an emergency exit, to no avail. “But out of respect for the sanctity of the site, the Israeli government will not take unilateral action to open an emergency exit. We will only do so with the agreement and co-ordination of the heads of the churches.”
New Episcopal Bishop for Chaplains Named
(RNS) A new bishop for the Episcopal Church’s ministry to the armed forces, health care institutions and prisons will be consecrated on Saturday (Feb. 12) in Washington.
The Rev. George E. Packard, who will work with chaplains and their constituencies, will be consecrated at Washington National Cathedral. His predecessor, Bishop Charles Keyser, has retired, the church announced.
Packard, a Vietnam veteran, served in parishes in Virginia and New York from 1989 to 1995. He also served as a full-time Army chaplain during Operation Desert Storm.
Quote of the Day: Gospel Singer Yolanda Adams
(RNS) “Gospel has moved with the times, just like any other music. Technology, with its loops and synthesizers, changes the music around you, but it doesn’t change how you sing. The music is different but the message is the same.”
Gospel singer Yolanda Adams, speaking in an interview with The Washington Post about the evolution of gospel music. She was quoted in the newspaper’s Friday (Feb. 11) edition.
DEA END RNS
