c. 2004 Religion News Service
ADL Says Beatifying `Passion’ Nun Would Fuel Anti-Semitism
(RNS) The Anti-Defamation League has told the Vatican that plans to beatify the 19th century nun whose writings influenced Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” would further incite anti-Semitism.
Bishop Reinhard Lettmann of Muenster, Germany, said the Vatican would beatify Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich on Oct. 3, according to the Reuters news agency, putting the mystic nun one step away from sainthood.
Emmerich, a German nun who lived from 1774 to 1824, wrote “The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” a blood-stained account of Jesus’ crucifixion that Gibson drew on for his blockbuster film.
The bedridden nun called the Jews in the Gospel accounts “cruel” and “wicked” and merciless tormentors of Jesus. Several scenes from Gibson’s film, such as the devil tempting Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, were taken from Emmerich’s writings.
Abraham Foxman, national director of the ADL, told Cardinal Walter Kasper _ head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations With the Jews _ and Baltimore Cardinal William Keeler that making Emmerich a saint would “cause harm to Christian-Jewish relations.”
“The disturbing conclusion that could be drawn from this beatification is that her anti-Semitic views, even if only attributed to her, are being discounted,” said Foxman, one of Gibson’s most outspoken critics.
Foxman said Emmerich’s grisly view of Jesus’ suffering caused Jewish persecution to be “fomented in her name,” and that “this consideration should outweigh the benefits of beatification at this time.”
Still, he acknowledged that the making of saints is “entirely within the realm of the church.”
Gibson told one interviewer that Emmerich’s writings “supplied me with stuff I never would have thought of,” but he told ABC’s Diane Sawyer in April that “in my film, (I) didn’t do a book on Anne Catherine Emmerich’s passion, I did a book according to the Gospels.”
According to Reuters, the Vatican suspended Emmerich’s beatification cause in 1928 out of concern that some writings had been embellished. It was reopened in 1973 and approved last July. Vatican officials said Emmerich would be beatified for her virtuous life, not her best-selling books.
_ Kevin Eckstrom
British Bishop: Rich-Poor Gap Creates Refugee Crisis
LONDON (RNS) No solution to the world refugee problem is possible without a reordering of the economic and political relations between the well-off developed nations of the North and the developing countries of the South, according to Bishop Patrick O’Donoghue, chairman of the office for refugee policy of the Roman Catholic bishops’ conference of England and Wales.
O’Donoghue made his comments in a statement for Refugee Week 2004, which will be observed June 14-20.
“The history of the past 50 years, and the 1990s in particular, has been one of forced migration of people from their countries: hundreds of thousands fleeing wars, ethnic cleansing, human rights abuses, and state- and non-state-sponsored terrorism,” O’Donoghue said.
Noting that currently there are more than 100 conflicts around the world and that most of the victims of these conflicts are women and children, the bishop said: “The tragic events in Sudan (Darfur), which has already affected more than 130,000 people, is a case in point. The U.N. has described the situation in Darfur as one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.”
Meanwhile, aid worker Nils Cartensen, who has just returned from a recent assessment mission to Darfur on behalf of CAFOD _ the aid agency of the bishops’ conference _ and its partners, warned: “All the signs are pointing in the wrong direction right now. You can’t help getting the sense that it is going to get worse before it can get better.”
Many displaced people are trapped in centers that are like concentration camps, where if they venture more than a few hundred meters away they risk being snatched by the paramilitary Janjaweed Arab militia. “Every day women are being raped as they go out to collect firewood, and the men claim that they cannot protect the women because then they will be abducted and killed,” said Cartensen.
_ Robert Nowell
Treasury Department Appoints Islamic Finance Scholar
(RNS) The Treasury Department has announced the appointment of the first scholar-in-residence who will oversee an effort by the government to understand the religious laws that govern Islamic banking.
Mahmoud el-Gamal, a professor of Islamic economics, finance and management at Rice University in Houston, will provide instruction and conduct workshops for U.S. government agencies seeking to understand the complex system.
Under Muslim law, or sharia, the payment of interest in financial transactions is prohibited. As such, Islamic banks, which mainly exist overseas but are increasingly appearing in the United States and Europe, are difficult to regulate.
In addition to the banks, individual brokers can operate “hawalas,” which are mainly based on the honor system and do not yield clear records, Reuters reported.
El-Gamal will “promote broader awareness of Islamic finance practices internationally and domestically for U.S. government policymakers, regulators and the public at large,” said a Treasury Department statement announcing the appointment.
“With the recent growth of the Islamic finance industry, deeper understanding of Islamic finance is a priority for this administration,” said John Taylor, who is the under secretary for international affairs, in the statement.
Whereas some Muslim groups have accused the government of targeting Muslim institutions for investigation unjustly following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, others welcome the appointment as a positive development in including Muslims in public policy positions.
“We welcome the appointment,” Salam al-Marayati, head of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, told Reuters. “This is a positive response to our call for the Bush administration to appoint American Muslims to policy-making positions in government.”
_ Holly Lebowitz Rossi
Pentecostal Leader Jack Hayford to Lead Foursquare Church
(RNS) Pentecostal minister Jack Hayford has been elected the next president of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel.
Hayford, the founding pastor of The Church on the Way in Van Nuys, Calif., will begin the position on Oct. 1, the denomination announced.
Hayford, who is the chancellor of the King’s College and Seminary in Van Nuys, was nominated for the position along with his brother, Pastor Jim Hayford, a Bothell, Wash., pastor and the Rev. Glenn Burris, general supervisor of the denomination. Jack Hayford won with 63 percent of the 2,334 votes cast at the denomination’s convention in San Francisco.
His election follows the resignation in March of former denominational president Paul Risser and corporate treasurer Brent Morgan, who lost about $14 million to two investment firms that have been alleged to be fraudulent.
Jack Hayford is the composer of hundreds of hymns, including the worship song “Majesty,” and the author of dozens of books.
The Los Angeles-based denomination was founded in 1923 and has about 5 million members worldwide. It has about 350,000 to 400,000 members in 1,900 churches across the United States, said Ron Williams, church spokesman.
_ Adelle M. Banks
Jewish Human Rights, Yiddish Language Advocate Theodore Bikel Honored
LOS ANGELES (RNS) Actor, singer, human rights activist and Yiddish language advocate Theodore Bikel’s 80th birthday was marked with a Sunday (June 6) concert where folk legend Peter Yarrow called his longtime friend “a statesman without portfolio. Thank you, Theo, for turning 80, and keeping your hair.”
The bearded Bikel’s thick head of white hair was remarked on occasionally during the 90-minute show, “Theo! The First 80 Years” at the Wadsworth Theater near UCLA. Virtually all of its 1,378 seats sold for the $50-$250 per-ticket tribute to Bikel, which raised funds for a project at the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem in Bikel’s honor.
Celebrities paying homage in word or song included famed Chicago cantor Alberto Mizrahi and Jewish actors Leonard Nimoy, Rachel Leah Cohen, Mare Winningham and Larry Miller.
“We had four albums in my house when we were growing up; one was (by) Theodore Bikel,” said Miller.
The evening resembled Christopher Guest’s folk music “mockumentary” film of last year, “A Mighty Wind,” and with good reason; performing in Bikel’s honor was not only Yarrow but the Limelighters, upon which Guest’s film partly was based. Yarrow, the first name in the 1960s folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, said Bikel was there for him “when I began to conceptualize my Jewishness.”
The evening included a kaleidoscope of film clips from Bikel’s long career in stage, cinema and TV such as “Colombo,” “My Fair Lady,” “The African Queen,” his Academy Award-nominated turn as a Southern sheriff in “The Defiant Ones” and his 1,600 stage performances as Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.” Decades-old video clips also showed Bikel doing human rights work for interracial harmony, labor rights and especially for oppressed Soviet Jews.
Toward the show’s end Bikel came onstage to thunderous applause, to both sing and speak. He talked of how as he and other Jewish protesters sang while getting arrested in front of the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., the policeman told him, “`I’m leaving you for last, you got the best voice.”’
As for what he would like on his gravestone, Bikel said, “I’m not there yet. I’m 80 years and four weeks old. I don’t aim to be there for a long time. If there is anything to be written there, I would like it to be at least partly in Yiddish, because Yiddish is the language of my people.”
_ David Finnigan
Quote of the Day: 2000 Republican Presidential Contender Gary Bauer
(RNS) “When John F. Kennedy made his famous speech that the Vatican would not tell him what to do, evangelicals and Southern Baptists breathed a sigh of relief. But today evangelicals and Southern Baptists are hoping that the Vatican will tell Catholic politicians what to do.”
_ Gary Bauer, president of the conservative group American Values and a Republican presidential contender in 2000, in an interview with USA Today.
DEA/PH END RNS
