c. 2000 Religion News Service
Methodists Collect Money for Elian’s Father’s Lawyer
(RNS) An agency of the United Methodist Church has set up a fund to collect donations to pay for a lawyer for the father of Elian Gonzalez, prompting confusion in some church circles that tithes and offerings were being used to compensate the lawyer.
According to a church news release, the executive committee of the church’s Board of Church and Society set up the fund last month after Juan Miguel Gonzalez, the 6-year-old boy’s father, asked for legal representation in his bid to have his son returned to Cuba.
Elian Gonzalez has been in Miami since November after the boat carrying him, his mother and several others capsized off the Florida coast. Only Elian survived. The boy’s Miami relatives want to keep him here, but his father and Cuban President Fidel Castro want him returned to Cuba.
The National Council of Churches has been instrumental in the push to return the boy to his father. Former NCC General Secretary Joan Brown Campbell and the Rev. Thom White Wolf Fassett, the head of the church’s public policy arm, have traveled to Cuba several times to meet with the boy’s father and Cuban officials.
Fassett said the fund was started to collect voluntary donations to help pay for the lawyer, former Clinton defense attorney Gregory B. White. Fassett said no church funds were being used.
“The fund is established specifically to receive voluntary contributions from those who wish to support the legal representation of Juan Miguel Gonzalez,” Fassett said. “And people are giving to it. They are giving $10. They’re giving $100. They’re giving $10,000.”
“Rumors” had spread throughout church circles that church tithes and offerings were being used for the lawyer. Fassett said the fund is entirely voluntary, and donations are tax-deductible. Fassett said he and Campbell were concerned that Juan Miguel Gonzalez would not get fair representation in U.S. courts.
Fassett could not be reached to say how much money had been collected.
The ongoing political tug-of-war between Elian’s Miami family and U.S. and Cuban officials is expected to end sometime in the next week. Juan Miguel Gonzalez has been granted a visa to come to the United States to get his son, and details are slowly being worked out over the hand-over of the boy.
Federal Judge Rules in Favor of Evangelist’s Capitol Prayers
(RNS) A District of Columbia federal judge has ruled that a Maryland evangelist had the constitutional right to pray inside the U.S. Capitol and has ordered U.S. Capitol Police to no longer restrict people from bowing in prayer in the national landmark.
In November 1996, the Rev. Pierre Bynum accompanied a group of eight people on a “prayer tour” as associate pastor of Waldorf Christian Assembly in Waldorf, Md.
In an order and judgment released Monday (April 3), U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman ruled that the police agency is “restrained from enforcing … the ban on prayer against Rev. Pierre Bynum when he prays as part of the privately conducted prayer tours of the U.S. Capitol that he leads.”
The judge further ordered that restrictions on “bowing one’s head, closing one’s eyes and clasping one’s hands within the United States Capitol” can no longer be enforced.
Bynum filed suit in 1997, claiming his visit to the Capitol with the “Capitol Hill Prayer Alert” group resulted in an infringement of his First Amendment rights of free speech and free exercise when Capitol Police threatened him with arrest. He had conducted a “Capitol Hill Prayer Tour” organized by Capitol Hill Prayer Alert, a Christian ministry that takes small groups around open areas of the Capitol building.
Capitol Police believed the prayers were a form of demonstration. The U.S. Capitol Police Board has a regulation that describes “demonstration activity” as “expressive conduct that convey(s) a message supporting or opposing a point of view or has the … propensity to attract a crowd of onlookers.”
Friedman ruled that that regulation cannot be enforced because it is “unconstitutionally vague” and too broad.
“While the regulation is justified by the need … to prevent disruptive conduct in the Capitol, it sweeps too broadly by inviting the Capitol Police to restrict behavior that is in no way disruptive,” he wrote.
James M. Henderson, senior counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, the law firm founded by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson, welcomed the decision on behalf of Bynum.
“This is an important decision upholding the First Amendment rights of all citizens _ including our client,” Henderson said in a statement. “We are grateful the court found that prayer is protected speech _ and not a form of demonstration.”
Calls seeking comment from the U.S. Capitol Police were not immediately returned.
Catholic Theologian Urges Rethinking of `Uniate’ Issue
(RNS) A Roman Catholic member of the highest-ranking body linking Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians has urged Greek Catholic (or Uniate) churches to start a “sincere dialogue” with Orthodox Christians.
“Greek Catholics have a right to exist, but they should take both sides into consideration,” professor Waclaw Hryniewicz, a member of the Catholic-Orthodox International Commission, told Ecumenical News International, the Geneva-based religious news service. “If the latest discussions get stuck on this issue again, they could take decades to resume. I hope enough people on both sides understand the seriousness of the situation.”
Uniate and Orthodox churches have long been at odds because Uniates practice liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church while still recognizing the pope’s primacy. Critics in the Orthodox Church contend Uniate churches lead Orthodox Christians to the Roman Catholic Church.
Hryniewicz, a professor at the Catholic University of Lublin in Poland, warned that church delegates to the International Commission’s meeting in Baltimore in June could face a “vicious circle” because divisive issues regarding Uniate churches and the importance of the papacy must be resolved.
“Once you become involved in dialogue, you learn how to listen and respond to others, presenting your own viewpoint without aggression or derogatory language,” Hryniewicz said. He is scheduled to speak at the conference in Baltimore.
“Critics have accused me of betraying my Roman Catholic identity,” the professor said. “But, with time, many have agreed that there is simply no other way out of this situation.”
He called the double-identity of the Uniates an “artificial phenomenon” that has impeded ecumenical reconciliation between the Orthodox and the Catholic churches.
Sears Settlement Avoids Sabbath-Working Suit
(RNS) Under terms of a settlement agreement with the office of the New York state attorney general, retail giant Sears, Roebuck & Co. will allow repair technicians who have religious objections to working on Saturdays to work on Sundays instead.
Sears has also agreed to give $225,000 for employer education programs and provide $120,000 for training scholarships to people who observe the Saturday Sabbath, said New York state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who had threatened to file a lawsuit against the company.
“People should not be forced to choose between their faith and supporting their family,” Spitzer told the Associated Press.
Also under the settlement, filed Tuesday (April 4) in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, Sears will provide $100,000 to pay for the investigation launched by the attorney general’s office, said Spitzer.
Spitzer’s office launched its investigation of the Sears policy requiring repair workers to work on Saturdays last summer after Kalman Katz, an Orthodox Jew, said he was not hired by the company because he would not work on Saturdays. Similar complaints came from at least five other people, including a recent Seventh-day Adventist convert who claimed he lost his job after telling Sears he needed to observe the Sabbath on Saturday.
The policy changes enacted by the settlement will apply only to repair workers in New York, but Spitzer told the New York Times that “any company that sees our agreement with Sears should understand that if we hear of evidence of them acting similarly, they will be getting a call from us.”
Katz said he was informed he needed to work on Saturday because the majority of Sears’ repair work is done on that day. However, an investigation by the attorney general’s office showed Tuesday is the company’s busiest repair day.
Sears did not admit any wrongdoing, and company spokeswoman Peggy Palter said the company “is pleased we were able to reach a satisfactory settlement.”
She said that under terms of the settlement, Sears agreed to open its New York state repair operations on Sundays for an 18-month trial period.
Pastor Files Suit Against Supremacist Church Leader
(RNS) A black pastor in Chicago filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday (April 4) charging white supremacist Matt Hale and his World Church of the Creator should be held responsible for the acts of a follower who went on a shooting rampage last July.
The Rev. Stephen Anderson, injured by Benjamin Smith during a July Fourth weekend shooting spree, is seeking unspecified damages in a lawsuit that claims Hale colluded with Smith to violate Anderson’s civil rights. In addition, the suit alleges Smith’s actions were inspired by a World Church doctrine calling for a “racial holy war.”
Smith took his own life after killing two people and wounding nine others in Indiana and Illinois. Smith’s victims were African-American, Jewish and Asian people.
Anderson, one of the nine wounded, said he has limited use of his right arm and hand. His lawsuit is the second of its kind filed against Hale and the World Church of the Creator. Last summer, the parents of two Orthodox Jews who were walking to a synagogue when Smith shot at them filed a lawsuit claiming Hale “ordered” Smith to shoot people.
But Hale, who has not been charged with any crime in connection with the shootings, dismissed the lawsuits as unworthy of serious attention.
“I learned in law school the first week that anyone can file a lawsuit,” Hale told the Associated Press. “That doesn’t make it valid or legitimate,” said Hale, who earned a law degree from Southern Illinois University School of Law about three years ago but has been denied a license to practice law in Illinois by the state Supreme Court’s Committee on Character and Fitness.
Anderson, who said he has forgiven Smith, said he hopes his lawsuit will help bring an end to hate crimes.
“Perhaps something will click and they’ll wake up and come out from what they’re doing to destroy people’s lives,” he said.
Firebomb Tossed at Black South Carolina Church
(RNS) A firebomb was thrown Monday (April 3) through a window of a predominantly black church in Columbia, S.C., just days after two crosses were set afire outside the county’s oldest black church a few miles away.
“For something like this to happen, it really hurts the black and white folks in Sumter,” the Rev. Richard Baxter, pastor of Goodwill Presbyterian Church, where the two crosses were burned, told the Associated Press. The crosses had been erected in front of the church to observe Lent, the 40-day period of penance that precedes Easter. “It’s probably someone who is really insensitive and didn’t realize one thoughtless action can peel back a wound that’s still festering in South Carolina.”
The firebomb tossed inside St. Paul AME Church failed to ignite, but investigators are not certain why, said sheriff’s Maj. Anthony Dennis. County investigators said no evidence has been found that would link the firebombing and cross burnings, nor is there evidence the two incidents were racially motivated.
The firebomb, along with remnants of the burned crosses, will be sent to the laboratory of the State Law Enforcement Division to be analyzed.
Sheriff Tommy Mims said Sumter County has no history of race-related crimes.
Quote of the day: Randolph Nugent of the United Methodist Church
(RNS) “The airwaves belong to all the people, yet the reality is that there are millions of Americans who have never heard a radio station carrying their ancestral language, have never heard the music of their ethnic culture, or have never been a part of a live debate or discussion about the issues that are paramount to their lives and local communities.”
_ Randolph Nugent, general secretary of the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church in a statement criticizing congressional proposals to block low-power radio stations that would be allowed to broadcast in small geographic units.
DEA END RNS
