c. 2003 Religion News Service
South African Archbishop Says Church Is Obsessed With Sex
(RNS) The Anglican archbishop of South Africa said the Anglican Communion has become so obsessed with sexuality that it has ignored the more pressing issues of poverty, AIDS and spreading the gospel.
Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane said it is irresponsible for conservative church leaders _ including other African bishops _ to criticize Anglicans in Vancouver for allowing same-sex unions, or Episcopalians in the United States for electing an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire.
Ndungane said in a June 26 statement that he agreed with the leader of the Anglican Communion, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, “that we dare not become preoccupied with the sexuality issue. We must focus on mission. We are faced with matters of life and death.”
Several Third World bishops, led by Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, recently severed ties with the Vancouver diocese and threatened to do the same with New Hampshire. Ndungane said he will not break communion unless “a province or diocese is not in communion with the See of Canterbury on issues of faith and doctrine.”
The Anglican Communion is made of 38 autonomous churches. The archbishop of Canterbury is the spiritual head of the global body but holds no authority over individual churches.
Ndungane downplayed threats of schism from conservatives who are upset with the Western church’s more liberal stands on homosexuality. “The doomsday prophets also predicted a schism over the ordination of women and were proven wrong,” he said.
“The church is God’s and he wills what is good for it,” said Ndungane, the successor to apartheid-era Archbishop Desmond Tutu. “So it is premature to even consider talking about schism; the best thing is not to even use the word.”
_ Kevin Eckstrom
NCC Signs Agreement With Biotech Industry
WASHINGTON (RNS) The National Council of Churches has signed an agreement with the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) to work together to address the ethical and moral issues surrounding biotech.
The NCC represents 36 mainline Protestant and Orthodox churches, and the biotech group represents about 1,000 research, development and manufacturing companies in the $200 billion biotechnology sector.
The two groups signed a “memorandum of understanding” at BIO’s recent convention in Washington. The agreement promises to cultivate “an active and informed debate” on biotechnology and a shared “belief in the importance and urgency of the appropriate and ethical use” of new knowledge in the field.
Both groups pledged “unequivocal opposition to human reproductive cloning” but remained silent on cloning for research purposes, an area of rapid growth for the biotech field. The NCC has not staked out a position on therapeutic, or research, cloning.
The statement said biotechnology is “an arena of human enterprise which holds immense consequences for human life.”
“Biotechnologies promise magnificent contributions to human well-being,” said NCC General Secretary Bob Edgar. “At the same time, there is a need for vigilance about the ways in which those technologies are applied, so that human dignity and equality of opportunity are assured.”
Carl Feldbaum, president of the biotech group, said preliminary talks between the two groups had been “frank, confidential, productive and respectful.” Feldbaum’s organization first approached religious groups two years ago, and the NCC agreement is the first formal relationship to emerge from those talks.
Last year the NCC convened an exploratory commission to examine how churches have addressed the host of concerns surrounding biotech issues. The panel is expected to make its report in November at the NCC’s General Assembly meeting in Jackson, Miss.
_ Kevin Eckstrom
Pope Warns Against `Loss’ of Europe’s Christian Heritage
VATICAN CITY (RNS) Appealing anew to the European Union to give formal recognition to the continent’s Christian roots, Pope John Paul II has warned that the “loss of Europe’s Christian memory and heritage” has serious consequences for society.
The Polish-born Roman Catholic pontiff said that growing secularism in Europe is causing a “kind of fear of the future,” which he blamed for a falling birth rate, a decline in religious vocations and rejection of marriage.
The pope’s appeal was contained in a 130-page statement responding to concerns expressed by Europe’s bishops at a meeting known as a synod, which was held in the Vatican Oct. 1-23, 1999.
John Paul signed the document Saturday (June 28) during Vespers in St. Peter’s Basilica marking the eve of the Solemnity of the Apostles Sts. Peter and Paul, a major feast day on the Catholic liturgical calendar.
Cardinal Jan Schotte, secretary general of the Synod of Bishops, acknowledged at a news conference earlier Saturday the release of the document also was timed to coincide with discussion of a new European Union constitution.
The Vatican was dismayed when a first draft of the preamble issued late last month said that Europe was nourished by `Hellenic and Roman civilizations” and “the philosophical currents of the Enlightenment” but not specifically by Christianity. A revised draft issued June 13 referred only to Europe’s “cultural, religious and humanist inheritance.”
“I would like to mention in a particular way the loss of Europe’s Christian memory and heritage, accompanied by a kind of practical agnosticism and religious indifference whereby many Europeans give the impression of living without spiritual roots and somewhat like heirs who have squandered a patrimony entrusted to them by history,” the pope wrote.
“It is no real surprise, then, that there are efforts to create a vision of Europe which ignores its religious heritage, and in particular, its profound Christian soul, asserting the rights of the peoples who make up Europe without grafting those rights onto the trunk which is enlivened by the sap of Christianity,” he said.
During the Sunday Mass, John Paul conferred the pallium on new metropolitan archbishops. Among the 40 prelates who received the white woolen sash symbolizing their authority and their bond with the pope were Archbishops Timothy Dolan of Milwaukee and Marc Ouellet of Quebec.
In keeping with tradition, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople sent a delegation to the Mass in return for the visit of Vatican prelates to Istanbul for the Orthodox Feast of St. Andrew.
Archbishop Demetrios of America, who led the Orthodox delegation, congratulated John Paul on “the completion of 25 years of dynamic ministry” as pope and said he prayed for “healing and reconciliation” between Catholics and Orthodox.
“I renew today, in the evocative frame of this feast, my full readiness to put my person at the service of communion among all the disciples of Christ,” John Paul said.
_ Peggy Polk
Cremation Supporters Increase Efforts in Greece Over Church Opposition
(RNS) Cremation advocates in Greece have redoubled their efforts to overturn a ban on the practice, citing overcrowded cemeteries and growing religious diversity as reasons behind their fight to introduce crematories.
For more than five years, members of the Committee for the Foundation of a Cremation Center in Greece have lobbied government officials and lawmakers to allow crematories to be built. While no current law bans cremation, regulations prohibiting the building of crematories effectively eliminates the option.
Greek Orthodox Church leaders say they do not oppose cremation for Greeks who are not Orthodox Christians, but fear the introduction of crematories would make the practice available to church members, the New York Times reported Monday (June 30).
“Christ himself was buried, not burned,” Bishop Theoklitos Koumarianos, a church spokesman, told the Times.
Proponents of cremation have said the lack of crematories violates articles securing religious freedom in the European Convention for Human Rights, which was approved by the Greek parliament. Greece is the only country among the European Union’s 15 nations where cremation is not practiced.
While the majority of Greece’s 11 million people belong to the Greek Orthodox Church, growing numbers of immigrants adhere to faiths that permit cremation. But currently, people who die in Greece and wish to be cremated must have their bodies shipped to other countries at great expense to their families and friends.
“I think it’s barbaric to have to be a refugee in death,” Antony Alakiotis, who is seeking to fulfill his deceased friend’s wish to be cremated, told the Times.
Appeals Court: 83-Year-Old Ten Commandments Plaque Can Stay
(RNS) An appellate court has ruled that a Ten Commandments plaque that has long hung on the facade of a Pennsylvania courthouse can remain there for the sake of historical preservation and does not constitute an official endorsement of religion.
The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday (June 26) that a reasonable person acquainted with the plaque’s history would consider a ruling to leave it there as religiously neutral, not evangelical. The 50-inch-high plaque has been attached to the Chester County Courthouse in West Chester, Pa., since 1920, the Associated Press reported.
“We cannot ignore the inherently religious message of the Ten Commandments,” wrote Judge Edward R. Becker. “However, we do not believe … that there can never be a secular purpose for posting the Ten Commandments, or that the Ten Commandments are so overwhelmingly religious in nature that they will always be seen only as an endorsement of religion.”
The decision by the Philadelphia-based appeals court overturned a lower court ruling that the plaque must be removed because it is inherently a religious statement.
Margaret Downey, a member of the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia, an atheist group that considers the plaque to be a violation of church-state separation, said she may appeal the case to the Supreme Court.
“When the government displays a religious icon, it gives credence to the persecution of atheists,” she said.
Chester County Commissioner Andrew Dinniman, who is Jewish, disagreed, saying the commandments may be inspired by religion but have a place in the history of secular law, too.
“The story of the Ten Commandments is the story of people coming out of the wilderness and finding civilization and law,” he said.
In a separate but related matter, a Frederick, Md., man sued his city on Tuesday (June 24), seeking the removal of a Ten Commandments monument in a city park. In December, the American Civil Liberties Union dropped a similar suit after the city sold the small piece of land where the marker stood to a fraternal organization.
Film’s `God’ Has Phone in England, Too
LONDON (RNS) The plague of people ringing the number God gives as his telephone number to TV reporter Bruce Nolan in the film “Bruce Almighty” has spread across the Atlantic.
The film is set in Buffalo, N.Y., where this particular phone number apparently does not exist. But it does exist in a number of other areas of the United States, including Colorado, where it belongs to a radio station which has had to set up a special answering service to deal with callers.
And it is the phone number of a caterer who lives in the Manchester suburb of Irlam.
Twenty-eight-year-old Andy Green is getting up to 70 phone calls a day and, according to the Daily Mirror, is being rung up by “every religious nutter in Manchester.”
“I have to tell them I’m not the Messiah,” the paper quotes him as saying. “I’m just a caterer from Irlam. When the phone rang the first time and someone said, `Is that God?’ I just laughed. Since then it’s gone mad.
“At weekends I’m getting up to 70 calls a day. Most people ring off when they hear my voice. They don’t expect God to have a Manchester accent.”
_ Robert Nowell
Quote of the Day: Anglican Archbishop Peter Carnley
(RNS) “Anybody brave enough to claim to know the inner mind of God on the basis of a personal claim to be privy to the only conceivable interpretation of some biblical texts is guilty of self-delusion.”
_ Anglican Archbishop Peter Carnley of Perth, Australia, on the debate over homosexuality within the Anglican Communion. Carnley said it is “not our question to decide” whether gays should be allowed to marry in Vancouver, or serve as bishops in the United States.
DEA END RNS
