c. 2003 Religion News Service
Bishop T.D. Jakes to Expand Outreach to Women With New Conferences
WASHINGTON (RNS) Bishop T.D. Jakes, who gained fame for reaching hurting women through his “Woman, Thou Art Loosed!” conferences, is expanding his ministry to a new venture aimed at helping African-American women deal with financial, health and relationship issues.
Jakes, a Dallas megachurch pastor, announced his “God’s Leading Ladies” conferences at a luncheon Friday (Jan. 3) for female organizational leaders, saying they will bridge the divide between the secular and spiritual worlds.
“What is the good of being liberated if you’re not going anywhere?” he said, calling the new conferences the “next step” in his continuing efforts to address women’s needs.
“We want to tell you as God’s leading ladies what to do with the blessings that you have.”
The first conferences, considered a test for possible future ones, will be held Feb. 21-22 in Jacksonville, Fla., March 21-22 in Philadelphia, and April 4-5 in Charlotte, N.C.
The venture will be jointly sponsored by T.D. Jakes Enterprises and Thomas Nelson Publishers, a Nashville, Tenn.-based company developing an accompanying workbook.
Jakes, who authored a 2002 book titled “God’s Leading Lady: Out of the Shadows and into the Light,” will present the conferences with a team of experts, including Marian Heard, president and CEO of the United Way of Massachusetts Bay. In a brief interview Friday, Heard said the mixing of faith with leadership training is appropriate.
“CEOs and supervisors cannot complain down and so who do you talk to?” said Heard, a member of an African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Boston. “You talk to God and God will give you direction. Your subordinates will give you options but God will give you direction.”
Jakes plans to continue to hold “Woman, Thou Art Loosed!” and Manpower conferences this year, but hopes to eventually offer a male conference addressing the concepts in the God’s Leading Ladies conferences.
“I don’t think it will be complete if it ends with women,” he told Religion News Service.
_ Adelle M. Banks
Pope Celebrates Epiphany by Consecrating 12 New Bishops
VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope John Paul II celebrated the Solemnity of the Epiphany on Monday (Jan. 6) by consecrating 12 bishops, including a new United Nations observer, secretaries of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Council for Promoting Christian Unity and an auxiliary for Baghdad.
“Your names and your faces speak of the universal church,” the pope told the prelates. “You come, in fact, from various nations and continents and to different countries you are now newly destined.”
Epiphany is the feast on which the Catholic Church commemorates the manifestation of Jesus to the world as represented by the three Magi, who arrived from the East bringing gifts to the newborn Jesus.
“You have not given gold, incense and myrrh to the Lord but your very lives,” the 82-year-old pontiff told the new bishops. “Now Christ asks you to renew this oblation to assume the episcopal ministry in the church.”
The newly promoted prelates included Italian Archbishops Celestino Migliore, 50, permanent observer at the United Nations, and Angelo Amato, 64, a Salesian theologian who will be the No. 2 official in the congregation responsible for safeguarding Catholic doctrine and morals; Irish Bishop Brian Farrell, 58, of the Legionaries of Christ, No. 2 on the council that promotes ecumenical dialogue, and Iraqi Bishop Andraos Abouna, 59, who will be auxiliary in the Patriarchate of Babylon of the Chaldeans.
The other new bishops will serve as envoys to Bangladesh and Benin and Togo, head dioceses in Italy, Spain, Benin, Slovakia and Ukraine and act as apostolic vicar of Aleppo in Syria.
At midday, thousands of Italians from the countryside near Rome marched into St. Peter’s Square in traditional costumes, led by bands and figures dressed as the Magi and the Befana, a friendly witch on a broomstick who brings children presents on Epiphany. The pope greeted them after leading the Angelus prayer from his study window overlooking the square.
_ Peggy Polk
Tutu Calls British Support of American War Aims `Mind-Boggling’
LONDON (RNS) Britain’s support for the United States in threatening Iraq with war is “mind-boggling,” retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu told British television viewers on Sunday (Jan. 5).
The Nobel Peace Prize winner and former archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, said, “I just hope one day people will realize that peace is a far better path to follow.
“Many, many of us are deeply saddened to see a great country such as the United States aided and abetted _ extraordinarily _ by Britain.” This, he said, is “mind-boggling, mind-boggling.”
“I’ve had a great deal of time (with) your prime minister, but I’m shocked,” he said.
Tutu said he longed to ask the United States and Britain, “When does compassion, when does morality, when does caring come in?”
Emphasizing that peace is possible and “your enemy is a friend waiting to be made” is “not starry-eyed” but possible. “It happened here” in South Africa, he said.
Tutu also said he thought that “devastating things” like the Sept. 11 attacks made people begin to realize they could not go it alone.
“The truth of the matter is we realize that we will not win the war against terrorism as long as there are conditions in other parts of the world that make people sufficiently desperate to say: `We have nothing to lose,”’ Tutu said.
On the Middle East issue, Tutu asked why, if United Nations resolutions are to be applied strictly, this did not happen in Palestine. He said he understood the fears and anxieties of Israelis but added that they were “subverting their own moral traditions.”
Tutu’s argument about spending on aid a fraction of what is spent on arms was echoed by Bishop Peter Price, the Anglican bishop of Bath and Wells.
Writing in The Independent on Sunday (Jan. 5), Price said: “There is little doubt that the investment of the billions of dollars that it will take to support one day’s fighting could, if re-directed, solve many of the causes of discontent and eradicate the breeding grounds of terror, without resort to war.”
_ Robert Nowell
Disney World Scales Back Weekly Christian Worship Services
(RNS) Walt Disney World has decided to scale back its weekly offering of Catholic and Protestant worship services.
The theme park offered its Christmas Day service at the Contemporary Resort as usual, but does not intend to have an organized service at the resort until Easter, the Associated Press reported. Disney officials cited space problems and said it wasn’t appropriate any longer to hold worship services for just two religions when many churches and synagogues in the area could fulfill the needs of worshippers.
Since 1975, two Catholic Masses and one nondenominational Protestant service had been held at the Polynesian Luau resort. Easter and Christmas services will continue.
“As our guest population has grown, so has the diversity of cultures that visit our theme parks,” said Rena Callahan, a Disney spokeswoman. “Places of worship that have grown up around our property are best suited to meet the wide array of spiritual needs of our guests.”
Southern Baptist Convention executive Richard Land said Disney’s decision was more a reflection of indifference than hostility to religion.
“This is just one further step away from what once was a core constituency of religiously motivated `family values’ clientele,” said Land, president and CEO of the denomination’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and a longtime Disney critic.
Vatican Condemns Claim of Human Clone
VATICAN CITY (RNS) Stating doubt about the claims by a religious sect that it has cloned a human baby, the Vatican says that, true or not, the announcement in itself was an “expression of a brutal mentality, lacking any ethical and human consideration.”
Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls issued the two-sentence statement Dec. 28 in response to the announcement in Hollywood, Fla., that a 31-year-old American woman has given birth to a cloned daughter named Eve.
On Saturday (Jan. 4), the group, claimed a second cloned baby had been born, this time to a Dutch lesbian.
“The announcement, without any element of proof, has already raised the skepticism and the moral condemnation of a great part of the international scientific community,” the Vatican spokesman said in the statement.
“But, indeed, the announcement itself is an expression of a brutal mentality lacking any ethical or human consideration,” he said.
Brigitte Boisselier, chief executive of Clonaid, the firm related to the the Raelians sect, said Sunday (Jan. 5) she would not force the parents of the allegedly cloned babies to have DNA testing of the children in order to prove the cloning claims.
The Raelians, followers of the French-born former racing car driver Rael, believe that space travelers created the human race by cloning themselves. The sect says it has 55,000 members.
Earlier this year an Italian expert in fertility and an embryology laboratory business in Kentucky also announced they were working on projects to clone humans.
Bishop Elio Sgreccia, vice president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, called human cloning “an act of scientific piracy,” a “delirium of omnipotence” and “an aggression against human life,” which should be punished by law.
“It is an immoral action, denounced for some time by the church and by international authorities, from the United Nations to the European Parliament,” he said.
_ Peggy Polk
Quote of the Day: Editorial Cartoonist Doug Marlette
(RNS) “My only regret is that the thousands who e-mailed me complaining felt that my drawing was an assault upon their religion or its founder. It was not. It was an assault on the distortion of their religion by murderous fanatics and zealots.”
_ Editorial cartoonist Doug Marlette, writing in a commentary in the Tallahassee Democrat to defend his controversial drawing of a man in Middle Eastern garments driving an explosives-laden rental truck with the caption, “What Would Mohammed Drive?”
DEA END RNS
