c. 2003 Religion News Service
Hip-hop Diva Lauryn Hill Blasts Vatican During Concert
VATICAN CITY (RNS) Hip-hop diva Lauryn Hill attacked the Catholic Church and organized religion in general on Saturday (Dec. 13) at a Christmas concert in the Vatican hall where Pope John Paul II holds his weekly audiences.
“I don’t believe in any representative of God on Earth. I am here to tell you to repent, repent, repent,” she said as she took her turn at the microphone in the Paul VI Audience Hall.
“I did not come here to celebrate the birth of Christ with you, but to ask you why you are not in mourning for his death inside this place,” she said. “God has been a witness to the corruption of his leadership, of the exploitation and abuses … by the clergy.”
She apparently referred to scandals about pedophile priests in the United States and elsewhere.
Because she spoke in English, many in the audience, which included high-ranking Vatican prelates and Italian elite closely associated with the church, did not understand what she was saying.
But those who did were shocked.
“There is something unworthy in this behavior. It is clear that the intention was to offend and create embarrassment,” said Italian Cardinal Ersilio Tonini, 89. “It is an act of unlimited rudeness. There is something inhuman about it.”
Four other cardinals sat with Tonini in the front row, including Edmund Szoka, an American who is governor of Vatican City, and Camillo Ruini, president of the Italian Bishops Conference.
Hill, an American, was one of 12 stars invited to perform in the concert, which was taped for airing on Italian television and radio on Christmas Eve. The others included Algerian singer Khaled, a Muslim who said at an earlier news conference that he was “happy and grateful for the opportunity to carry a message of peace and brotherhood among peoples.”
The concert, now in its 11th edition, has become a Christmas tradition in Italy. Funds it raises go to build churches in Rome’s new suburbs.
Officials of Prime Time Productions, the organizers, said Hill’s statement, which she read from a sheet of paper, probably would be cut for the Christmas Eve airing.
The 28-year-old former star of the Fugees traveled to Rome with her spiritual adviser, Anthony Wayne McGugan Sr.; her 5-month-old son, John Nesta Marley, whose father is Rohan Anthony Marley, son of Bob Marley; a sound engineer; baby sitter; hairdresser; and drummer Rudolph Anthony Bird.
Each singer was asked to perform one piece from his or her repertory and one for Christmas. Hill chose “Oh Happy Day” and “Killing Me Softly” but at the last minute switched to “Damnable Heresies” and “Social Drugs,” which are unknown in Italy.
_ Peggy Polk
Judge Rules School Simulation of Muslim Activities Constitutional
(RNS) A federal judge has ruled that a California school district did not violate the U.S. Constitution when its teachers asked students to simulate Muslim worship and attire in class.
The parents of two former seventh-graders at Excelsior Middle School sued the Byron Union School District in Byron, Calif., last year after a world history class mandated their son simulate Muslim activities, the Contra Costa Times reported.
Among the activities were reciting a Muslim prayer, dressing in Arabic clothes for a presentation, selecting a Muslim name, and playing a trivia board game in which students race to reach Mecca.
“Objectively, the students at Excelsior cannot be considered to have performed any actual religious activities in their seventh-grade world history class,” wrote U.S. District Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton in San Francisco in an opinion issued in early December.
Richard Thompson, chief counsel and president of the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Mich., represented Jonas and Tiffany Eklund in the suit.
The judge’s opinion demonstrated a double standard for Christians and other religions because schools are not permitted to post the Ten Commandments but students were permitted to recite “In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful,” he said.
“There is no question that if you are going to educate students, you should educate about different faiths,” he said. “It’s about how you do it and how far you go.”
Nancie Castro, principal of the middle school in East Contra Costa County, said the school was not attempting to indoctrinate students.
“I think they were common educational practices used for a variety of subject matter,” she said. “We would never want to influence any child in their religious belief.”
Moyers to Profile Riverside’s James Forbes `Speaking to Power’
NEW YORK (RNS) One of America’s most prominent preachers is poised to receive some attention from one of America’s most prominent television journalists.
The Rev. James Forbes Jr., the senior minister of the Riverside Church in New York City, is the subject of an hourlong Bill Moyers documentary, “Speaking to Power,” that will air Dec. 26 on PBS. The profile is part of the PBS series “NOW With Bill Moyers.”
Forbes has long been considered one of the nation’s greatest preachers, and the documentary provides ample evidence of his spellbinding preaching style, rooted in the black Pentecostal tradition of his youth.
But the documentary, previewed for journalists last week by Moyers and his staff, also examines how Forbes rose to prominence to stand in the pulpit of perhaps the nation’s best-known liberal congregation, which was founded by the philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr.
Moyers said he had wanted to profile Forbes after he and his wife, Judith Davidson Moyers, attended a post-Sept. 11 interfaith service at the Riverside Church led by Forbes. Moyers was struck by how Forbes’ message of healing contrasted with the statements of some conservative Christian leaders who, Moyers said, “were calling for a virtual holy war with the whole of Islam.”
“There were Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and God knows who else gathered in a Christian sanctuary, wrestling with how to respond to an evil act without doing evil ourselves,” Moyers said. “I realized what many already understood, that James Forbes has a message for America.”
In the documentary, Forbes often takes note of his experiences as a black man growing up in the 1950s in the segregated South and how that has informed his theological outlook and ministry.
“There are members of the Islamic faith who are committed to achieving their ends by any means necessary. And that includes violence. And I abhor that violence,” Forbes said. But there are also self-styled Christians, such as the Klu Klux Klan, who have been bent “on destroying other people.” Violence and terror, Forbes said, “are equal opportunity visitors,” and they “visit all our (religious) traditions.”
Later in the documentary, Forbes said he does not approve of many of President Bush’s policies, in part because their “swagger and tone” evoke memories of his youth _ of seeing “people walk around like they had the power to decide who should live and who should die. Everything in my spirit is in revulsion against the domination empire building.”
“The shock and awe in Baghdad looked like it was not coming from God’s assignment,” Forbes said. “It felt like it was a prideful way of saying, `You mess with us, we’re going to show you who we are.”’
_ Chris Herlinger
Florida’s Governor Announces Plans for Faith-Based Prison
(RNS) Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has announced the creation of what he calls the nation’s first entirely faith-based prison at a facility in his state.
Bush made the announcement Dec. 5 in Tampa at one of a series of conferences sponsored by his brother’s White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives.
“For those individuals who are motivated to change their lives, programs like this can make a tremendous difference and create a pathway out of the criminal justice system,” Bush said.
He applauded the work done by the office instituted by President Bush as well as the efforts by Attorney General John Ashcroft to recognize faith-based organizations.
“It is imperative for government to work in close and careful coordination with community and faith-based organizations because government alone will never solve the problems tearing the fabric of our society,” he said.
The governor’s plan for the faith-based prison is for more than 790 inmates to live in eight dormitories at the Lawtey Correctional Institution in Raiford, Fla. Participation by inmates is voluntary and entry into the program will not depend on the inmate’s faith preference or lack of faith. Those who choose to be part of the program will be involved in faith-based activities seven days a week. Programs will focus on such issues as family life, personal growth and life skills.
The Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, criticized the governor’s plan.
“This is a clearly unconstitutional scheme,” he said in a statement. “A state can no more create a faith-based prison than it could set up faith-based public schools or faith-based police departments.”
_ Adelle M. Banks
Muslim `Intifada’ Football Teams Come Under Fire
LOS ANGELES (RNS) Jewish and Muslim opinions differ over a Jan. 4 all-Muslim flag football tournament in Irvine, Calif., which has teams named “Intifada” and “Mujihadeen” and, before it was removed last week, “Soldiers of Allah.”
The team names were first reported Dec. 7 in the Los Angeles Times. The amateur league’s Web site _ http://muslimfootball.com _ listed the names plus team logos including masked men looking similar to the Palestinian culture’s black masked Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists.
“The players are being labeled because of these names,” Tarek Shawky, the “Intifada” team quarterback, said in an interview. “This is just about football.”
Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Southern California chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations, said CAIR was “very unhappy with the titles. … We didn’t think they (the players) had any evil intention against people. I told them, `Pick neutral names.’ Still pick macho names, the Bull or whatever, the Tigers, the Lions, but do not pick names that might be misconstrued.”
The Web site has 10 teams listed. “Intifada” and “Mujihadeen” still are listed, but Shawky said the “Soldiers of Allah” team agreed to remove its name and pick a new one as part of the 10-team “Muslim Football Allstars” roster.
Sarah Eltantawi, communications director at the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said she did not think team names should be changed. “It’s a free country,” she said. “I think people need to accept it. Just because the Jewish community or some other community doesn’t like it, I’m sorry.”
When asked about Hamas/Hezbollah-style masked men logos on the league’s Web site, Eltantawi said: “I just can’t comment on that. It’s a different culture; that is the way (Palestinian) people dress.”
The teams consist mostly of young men in their 20s and teens. “I’m not sure that in the first go around that these names were picked for political reasons,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. “`Mujihadeen’? We have to go to them to explain why `Mujihadeen’ is inappropriate with hundreds of thousands of American soldiers in Afghanistan in harm’s way? This doesn’t need an emergency meeting between Jews and Muslims. This needs adult leadership from their own (Muslim) community.”
The league’s Web site has a statement which said calling a team “intifada” partly reflects the Palestinian struggle against Israel; “This is the `intifada’ that participants glorify enough to choose as their team name.”
“`Intifada’ really indicates standing up against injustice,” said CAIR’s Ayloush. “Literally, if you want to describe the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw ghetto against the Nazis, in Arabic you would call it the intifada.”
Cooper disagreed. “`Intifada’ in 2003 invokes one image; homicide bombing.”
_ David Finnigan
Quote of the Day: Cosmopolitan’s British Editor Lorraine Candy
(RNS) “We get hundreds of letters every month from successful young women looking for something outside their material success to make them happy. … Young women today are spirituality seekers, whether that be adhering to a formal religion or something a bit less dictatorial.”
_ Lorraine Candy, editor in chief of Cosmopolitan magazine’s British edition, speaking about the edition’s decision to appoint its first spirituality editor. She was quoted by the Sunday Telegraph in London.
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