c. 2000 Religion News Service

Anglican Leaders Urge Unity on Homosexuality, Church Authority

(RNS) Leaders from the world’s Anglican churches urged warring factions within the church to ease the rhetoric over homosexuality and cautioned against a resistance movement that undermined church authority by ordaining its own bishops as the church’s 38 primates wrapped up a meeting in Portugal.

The primates, or leaders, of the worldwide Anglican Communion ended their biennial meeting in Oporto on Tuesday (March 28). In a statement issued at the end of the meeting, the primates said Anglican churches _ particularly American ones _ which ignore the church’s statements on homosexuality threaten the unity of the church “in a profound way.”

Church leaders last met in 1998 at the Lambeth Conference and issued resolutions that forbade gay marriages and the ordination of non-celibate homosexuals. The dispute has pitted the more liberal Episcopal Church in the United States against conservatives in other parts of the world who say the church’s teaching on homosexuality is final. Several U.S. dioceses flatly rejected the Lambeth resolutions.

The issue came to a head in January with the consecration in Singapore of two American bishops, Charles Murphy and John Rodgers, by bishops from Singapore and Rwanda to minister to U.S. Episcopalians at odds with their own church. The Rev. George Carey, the archbishop of Canterbury and head of the worldwide Communion, has refused to recognize those ordinations.

The primates said they did not believe that the clear disagreement over the Lambeth resolutions amounted to a complete and definitive rupture of communion, but said they were concerned that churches had so openly refused to adopt them.

“Such clear and public repudiation of those sections of the Resolution … and the declared intention of some dioceses to proceed with such actions, have come to threaten the unity of the Communion in a profound way,” the statement said.

The primates said that further public rejection of the Lambeth resolutions will add stress on the worldwide church. “We urge all bishops to recognize that further public actions of the kind mentioned above strain the reality of mutual accountability in a global Communion, where what may seem obvious and appropriate in one context may be harmful and unacceptable in another.”

Following Carey’s lead, the primates called for continuing dialogue on the role of homosexuals in church life, noting that “as in any family, the assurance of love allows boldness of speech.”

Pope Plans Pilgrimage to Fatima

(RNS) Pope John Paul II, just back from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, has decided to make an unscheduled visit to Portugal in May to beatify two shepherd children who reported seeing visions of the Virgin Mary at what now is the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima, a Vatican official said Tuesday (March 28).

Bishop Crescenzio Sepe, secretary general of the Vatican’s Central Committee for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, told Vatican Radio that John Paul will visit the shrine May 13 at the urging of Portuguese bishops. He returned Monday (March 27) from a weeklong visit to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Vatican sources said the pope also hopes to travel to his native Poland this year for the eighth time since he became pope in 1978 and possibly to Armenia as well. He canceled a hastily planned trip to Armenia last June when the seriously ill Catholicos Karekin I, leader of the Armenian Apostolic Church, died only days before the pope’s scheduled arrival.

The Fatima pilgrimage was not included in the Vatican’s detailed Holy Year schedule, and the pope had been expected to beatify Giacinta and Franceso Marto at a Mass in St. Peter’s Square on April 9 along with several other candidates for sainthood. Beatification is the penultimate step to sainthood.

Sepe said the original statue of the Madonna of Fatima will come to Rome Oct. 8 when the pope will entrust the third millennium of Christianity to the Virgin Mary at a Mass in St. Peter’s Square.

The 79-year-old Roman Catholic pontiff, who has a special devotion to the Virgin Mary, credited Our Lady of Fatima with saving his life when Turkish terrorist Mehmet Ali Agca shot and wounded him May 13, 1981, in St. Peter’s Square. On the first anniversary of the shooting, he made a pilgrimage to Portugal to pray at the shrine.

The pope gave his approval last June to the finding that prayers to the Marto children were responsible for the miraculous healing of a paralyzed Portuguese woman two years earlier.

They are the youngest candidates of his pontificate to qualify for beatification through a miracle rather than martyrdom. The church requires proof of a second miracle performed after beatification for a candidate to achieve sainthood.

Giacinta Marto was 7 and her brother 9 when, along with Lucia dos Santos, 10, they had the first of six visions of the Virgin Mary in a field near the town of Fatima in 1918. Since then, many millions of pilgrims have visited the shrine erected at the site.

New Mexico Churches to Offer Apology to Navajo Indians

(RNS) Members of about 40 New Mexico churches will embark on a 400-mile pilgrimage Friday (March 31) to the center of the Navajo homeland in Arizona to ask Navajos to forgive wrongs committed against Native Americans during the 1800s.

“We want to dispel our pride and arrogance by embracing some painful truths about ourselves,” said Jim Baker, president of Navajo Missions Inc., a nonprofit organization that assists Native Americans in New Mexico, Utah, Arizona and Colorado. “We have been wrong in using the name of Jesus Christ to impose American values on your way of life, and in trying to destroy the Navajo culture.”

The two-day event commemorates the Long Walk of 1863, when Native Americans were forced to walk more than 300 miles from the Canyon de Chelly, Ariz., to New Mexico. Hundreds died during the journey, and survivors were imprisoned just south of Fort Sumner at the Bosque Redondo.

Members of the 40 churches _ which include nondenominational, Baptist and Assemblies of God organizations _ will be joined in the pilgrimage by Navajos and Mescalero Apaches.

Church members and Native Americans will plant peach trees in the canyon to symbolize reconciliation between the two groups. Navajo leaders will also be presented with artifacts taken from the Navajo people in 1863 by Col. Kit Carson during an 11-day siege.

Uganda Update: Death Toll Rises to 673

(RNS) Less than two weeks after at least 300 members of a religious group burned to death inside their church in Kanungu in southwestern Uganda, the number of church members estimated dead rose to 673 on Wednesday (March 29) as searchers discovered 53 more bodies at the former home of a church leader, the Associated Press reported.

The bodies uncovered Wednesday in Rugazi boost to 81 the total number discovered during a two-day search of the former home of former Roman Catholic priest Dominic Kataribabo _ a leader in the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, a group that believed the world would end in the year 2000. About 335 church members perished inside their church in a fire March 17.

Most of the victims in Rugazi had been dead for “about a month,” according to police official Geoffrey Bangirana.

Searchers discovered 74 more victims buried in Kataribabo’s back yard on Monday (March 27), three days after unearthing 153 bodies in a church compound in the village of Buhunga. Six bodies were found buried in a latrine at the church compound in Kanungu just four days after the church fire.

The rising number of adult and child victims _ many of whom appeared to have been strangled and mutilated _ has prompted officials to investigate the deaths as murder, not mass suicide as was initially believed.

Police officials say they have positively identified the bodies of two church leaders (including Kataribabo) who died in the fire at Kanungu, but they are not certain whether any other church leaders died with their followers.

According to reports from several local witnesses, two leaders _ Cledonia Mwerinde, 40, and former Roman Catholic priest Joseph Kibweteere, 68 _ left the compound the morning of the fire.

The Ugandan government has appointed a task force to investigate the church members’ deaths. Meanwhile police are investigating other branches of the religious group in Uganda.

Vanderbilt’s Divinity School Names New Dean

(RNS) The Rev. James Hudnut-Beumler, an American religious historian, has been named dean of Vanderbilt University’s Divinity School.

Hudnut-Beumler, who has expertise in the areas of ethics and philanthropy, will begin his post Aug. 1, the university announced. He succeeds the Rev. Joseph Hough, who resigned last summer to become president of Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Hudnut-Beumler, a minister of the Presbyterian Church (USA), is currently dean of faculty, professor of religion and culture, and executive vice president at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga.

Vanderbilt Chancellor Joe B. Wyatt welcomed Hudnut-Beumler’s appointment.

“He has the zeal and dedication needed to lead the Divinity School during a time when more questions are being asked about the role that religion is playing and should play in today’s increasingly complex society,” Wyatt said.

Quote of the Day: The Rev. McCallister Hollins, pastor of Ben Hill United Methodist Church in Atlanta

(RNS) “The church is crippled, weak, impotent, ineffective and needs a dose of spiritual Viagra.”

_ The Rev. McCallister Hollins, pastor of Ben Hill United Methodist Church in Atlanta, speaking to the opening ceremony of the Black Methodists for Church Renewal meeting in Winston-Salem, N.C., on March 22.

KRE END RNS