c. 2003 Religion News Service
Pope Begins Lent With Worldwide Day of Fasting and Prayers for Peace
VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope John Paul II, opening the penitential season of Lent under the threat of war in Iraq, on Wednesday (March 5) led a worldwide day of fasting and prayer imploring for peace in the world.
Addressing some 6,500 pilgrims at his weekly general audience, the 82-year-old Roman Catholic pontiff renewed his appeal to world leaders not to abandon efforts to avert conflict.
The pope spoke shortly before Cardinal Pio Laghi, acting as his special envoy, was to deliver a personal message to President Bush at the White House. John Paul also sent an envoy to Baghdad last month and has met U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and a half-dozen other leaders in a concerted peace offensive.
Italy’s center-left political parties and labor unions organized torchlight peace marches Wednesday night in Rome, Florence and other cities. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi supports U.S. threats to use military force to disarm Iraq and remove Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power.
“As we begin our Lenten journey this year, we cannot ignore the tense international situation,” John Paul told the pilgrims at his audience. He said the world faced “threatening tensions of war.”
“A conscious assumption of responsibility and a common effort to save humanity from another dramatic conflict is needed from everyone. For this reason, I have called Ash Wednesday a day of prayer and fasting to implore peace in the world,” the pope said.
Asking prayer for “the conversion of heart, in which every form of evil and every impulse toward sin will be eradicated,” the pontiff said, “We must pray and fast for the peaceful coexistence among peoples and nations.”
John Paul called for “concrete gestures of reconciliation.” He urged everyone from family members in their homes to world leaders in the international arena to join in “the construction of peace.”
As he does each year, the pope drove across the Tiber River to Rome’s ancient Aventine in late afternoon for an Ash Wednesday Mass and the imposition of ashes in the sixth century Basilica of Santa Sabina. Because of his increasing frailty, he no longer leads a procession of cardinals, archbishops, bishops, Benedictine monks and Dominican fathers from the Benedictine Church of St. Anselmo to Santa Sabina at the start of the rite, and he presided over the Mass rather than celebrating it.
Ash Wednesday opens a 40-day liturgical season of fasting, prayer and the giving of charity in preparation for Easter when Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus.
_ Peggy Polk
Black Religious Leaders Urge Bush to Increase AIDS Funding
(RNS) More than two dozen black religious leaders have sent a letter to President Bush asking him to quickly increase funding to address the AIDS crisis in Africa and the United States.
“We call on you to take immediate steps to eliminate the global scourge of AIDS,” says the Feb. 28 letter organized by Africa Action, a Washington-based advocacy group. “This battle must begin at the heart of the pandemic in Africa where 75 percent of the world’s HIV/AIDS cases are concentrated, and in the United States where African-Americans account for more than 50 percent of new HIV infections.”
Signatories include the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. of Rainbow/PUSH Coalition in Washington, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery of the Georgia Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda in Atlanta, and the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker of Canaan Baptist Church in New York.
They urged the president to increase funding for programs that will advance treatment and permit affordable access to medications. Among their proposals, they suggest that the U.S. government contribute $3.5 billion to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
Bush has proposed spending $15 billion to address AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean over the next five years, but Africa Action officials said the proposal would not significantly increase funding until 2005.
In addition to addressing AIDS, the leaders asked Bush to support full cancellation of debts owed by countries in Africa to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
“You have the opportunity to use the wealth, power and position of privilege of the U.S. to enhance human development in Africa, the world’s most impoverished region, by leading the call for the cancellation of Africa’s debts,” they wrote.
In a separate but related matter, religious groups were among the more than 130 nongovernmental organizations that sent Bush a Feb. 26 letter expressing their disagreement with an administration proposal to tie U.S. funding addressing AIDS to the so-called Mexico City policy that restricts money from going to organizations involved with abortions overseas.
“Governments and leading donor institutions throughout the world strongly support integrated family planning and HIV prevention programs as the best approach to improving public health,” the organizations wrote. “For women, access to integrated programs and services can make the difference between life and death.”
Signatories include Catholics for a Free Choice, Council of Religious AIDS Networks, Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, Presbyterian AIDS Network, National Episcopal AIDS Coalition and American Jewish World Service.
_ Adelle M. Banks
Overseas Gains Keep Methodist Membership Stable
(RNS) The United Methodist Church lost some 43,000 members in the United States in 2001, but membership gains in fast-growing overseas churches and the American South kept the denomination’s rolls stable at 9.8 million.
Membership in the nation’s second-largest Protestant church was reported at 8.3 million U.S. members and 1.5 million in Europe, Africa and the Philippines, according to United Methodist News Service.
Membership in the United Methodist Church in the United States, as in most other mainline Protestant churches, has been falling steadily since a peak of 11.5 million in 1965. The declines had slowed in 1999 and 2000, but are now back up to levels seen through most of the 1990s.
Growth was reported only in the church’s most conservative areas _ the southern United States and in Africa. The two U.S. jurisdictions that stretch from New Mexico to Nebraska and on to Virginia gained 3,600 members. Africa, with 1.4 million members, added 77,000 members. The African church has grown by almost 1 million members in the past decade.
The Philippines has 184,000 members. European churches lost about 6,600 members, for a total of 74,361. In the United States, the church’s North Central Jurisdiction, covering most of the Midwest, lost 21,566 members.
_ Kevin Eckstrom
American Muslim Council Director Resigns After Controversy
(RNS) Eric Erfan Vickers, who was the executive director of the American Muslim Council, resigned Feb. 28 after a stormy few weeks resulting from comments he made about the space shuttle Columbia disaster.
After the shuttle, which carried the first Israeli astronaut and six other crew members, broke up on Feb. 1, Vickers circulated an article titled “Seeing the Signs.”
In the article, which referred to the Book of Revelation, Vickers wondered if there is a “sign in the calamitous destruction of the 113th space shuttle mission taking place over a city named Palestine, while on board was the first Israeli astronaut, who also happened to have been the pilot that bombed several years ago an Iraqi nuclear facility.”
The comments stirred immediate reaction from several fronts, including the American Jewish Committee’s Detroit chapter and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who wrote Vickers a letter expressing his dismay.
“To presume that a divine purpose reflects one’s own hateful feelings toward the Jewish people is insulting to all people of faith and goodwill,” wrote Nadler, who called on Vickers to repudiate his remarks.
Soon after, Vickers said, “I unhesitatingly apologize” in a letter to the American Jewish Committee. “All of humanity suffered from the Columbia spaceship tragedy,” he said.
The AMC’s board chairman, Yahya Mossa Basha, responded directly to Nadler, pointing out the AMC was among the first organizations to issue condolences on the morning of the Columbia tragedy. Basha also apologized for Vickers’ statement, saying that it “was an expression of his personal views.”
Despite these actions, Basha accepted Vickers’ resignation, wishing him “good luck in his future endeavors.”
_ Holly Lebowitz Rossi
Muslim Group Condemns Prayer Walkout by Washington Lawmakers
(RNS) A leading Muslim group said two Washington state lawmakers who left during a prayer by a Muslim cleric threaten to damage the country’s image with Muslims around the world.
Republican State Reps. Lois McMahan and Cary Condotta left the floor of the Washington House on Monday (March 3) when an Olympia imam delivered the day’s opening prayer. McMahan said it was a matter of patriotism.
“Even though the mainstream Islamic religion doesn’t profess to hate America, nonetheless it spawns groups that hate America,” McMahan told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, adding, “My God is not Muhammad.”
Condotta said he left the chamber to talk to another legislator and called the timing accidental. “Let’s just say I wasn’t particularly interested,” he told the Seattle paper.
Imam Mohammad Joban of the Islamic Center of Olympia asked “Allah, or God, to bless the state of Washington so it may continue to prosper and become a symbol of peace and tranquillity for all people of all ethnic and religious backgrounds” and prayed that “America may succeed in the war against terrorism.”
Joban told the Associated Press he was not offended by the walk-out. “As a Muslim we have to respect what people believe and … we have to forgive something because of ignorance.”
Nihad Awad, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, called on Republican leaders to condemn McMahan’s and Condotta’s actions.
“Such divisive actions by elected leaders can only serve to increase discrimination against ordinary American Muslims and harm our nation’s image and interests worldwide,” Awad said in a statement.
_ Kevin Eckstrom
Quote of the Day: New York Times Columnist Nicholas D. Kristof
(RNS) “Liberals sometimes show more intellectual curiosity about the religion of Afghanistan than that of Alabama, and more interest in reading the Upanishads than in reading the Book of Revelation.”
_ New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, writing in the newspaper’s March 4 edition about how liberals are out of touch with the nation’s evangelicals.
DEA END RNS
