c. 2005 Religion News Service
U.S. and South African Church Leaders Call Focus on Sex the Devil’s Work
WASHINGTON (RNS) The leaders of the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Anglican Church in South Africa said a global schism over homosexuality is the devil’s work and distracts the church from its real mission in the world.
Episcopal Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold and his counterpart from Cape Town, Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, blamed U.S. conservatives for making sexuality the “international focus” of the church.
“I think the endless fixation on sexuality is the devil’s work,” Griswold told Religion News Service in a recent interview. “So much psychic energy goes into this one area that issues of hunger and disease, poverty and civil war get overlooked.”
Ndungane, in Washington to push for action on international poverty relief and development programs, agreed.
“It’s of the devil, actually, that we are sort of detracted from what is the essential in terms of our mission, and it’s about time that we … be energized as Anglicans in faith and action seeking to do God’s mission in the world,” he said.
Ndungane is one of the few African archbishops who has stood beside the U.S. branch of Anglicanism as it faces global condemnation for the consecration of an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire. Ndungane, the successor to famed Archbishop Desmond Tutu, said, “Our God is not a single-issue God.”
Ndungane’s comments stood in stark contrast to those of Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria _ Africa’s largest Anglican province _ who said the election of Bishop V. Gene Robinson in New Hampshire went against the Bible and was a “satanic attack upon God’s church.”
Griswold, who presided at Robinson’s consecration in 2003, said there are greater issues facing the 77 million-member Anglican Communion than an obsession with North American policies towards gays and lesbians.
“It is not very life-giving and it leaves the poor and the diseased exactly where they were before,” he said.
_ Kevin Eckstrom
Canadians Angry About `Snub’ by Archbishop of Canterbury
TORONTO (RNS) The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has rejected an invitation to attend a joint meeting of Canadian and American bishops next month, resulting in uncharacteristically pointed accusations by the Canadian church of a snub over the issue of homosexuality.
“It does send a very, very negative symbol to the Canadian church, no question,” said the primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, Archbishop Andrew Hutchison. “The message it sends to us is that at the moment he does not want to be associated with the Canadians.”
The refusal of Williams, the spiritual head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, widens a global rift among Anglicans. At a closed-door meeting last month in Northern Ireland, primates of the 38 autonomous branches asked Canadian and U.S. churches to “voluntarily withdraw” for three years from the communion’s Consultative Council because of their acceptance of gay marriage and the ordination of gay bishops.
Employing unusually harsh language, Hutchison told Canada’s national Anglican newspaper that Williams’s decision not to meet with North American bishops has left him “very upset because it goes against what I believe is his own personal position (on homosexuality) and he has expressed it pretty publicly in other circumstances.”
More than a year ago, Williams was invited to the joint bishops meeting, set to take place in Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, April 27 to May 1. On Wednesday (March 9), the Globe and Mail newspaper quoted a spokesman as saying Williams could not attend because of a conflicting meeting of the senior council of the Church of England.
“That makes it [the North American meeting] not doable,” the spokesman said, adding, “I can see why Archbishop Hutchison is miffed.”
But Hutchison was unimpressed with the explanation, telling the Anglican Journal, “I’m sure (it’s) not something (Williams had) committed (to) before our invitation.”
Canadian bishop Bruce Howe, in whose diocese the meeting will take place, said Williams “should have made more of an effort to come, to make a pastoral visit to the Canadian and American bishops.”
_ Ron Csillag
Vatican Confirms Hospitalized Pope to Return to Vatican for Holy Week
VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope John Paul II, who has been hospitalized for the last two weeks, will return to the Vatican in time for the start of Holy Week if not sooner, the Vatican confirmed Thursday (March 10).
Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls told reporters that the 84-year-old Roman Catholic pontiff would be “at home for Holy Week,” which opens with Palm Sunday on March 20. “He could also return earlier,” the spokesman added.
Navarro-Valls said that the pope was convalescing and no longer undergoing therapy for the acute breathing problems, caused by influenza, which forced him to be hospitalized twice last month.
Following a nine-day stay in the Agostino Gemelli Polyclinic hospital at the start of February, he was readmitted on Feb. 24 for surgery to insert a breathing tube in his throat to bypass his swollen larynx. Doctors have not yet removed the tube.
“The Holy Father, following the advice of his doctors, will extend his stay in the A. Gemelli Polyclinic by a few more days in order to complete his convalescence, which is progressing regularly,” the spokesman said in a one-paragraph medical bulletin. He scheduled the next bulletin for Monday.
The Vatican said Tuesday that six cardinals would stand in for John Paul during Holy Week celebrations but that he would deliver his traditional Easter Sunday blessing. It left open the possibility that he might preside over a Way of the Cross procession at Rome’s Colosseum on Good Friday.
Navarro-Valls said that the pope is handling Vatican affairs in his 10th-floor hospital suite. Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, and Archbishop Leonardo Sandri, deputy secretary of state, paid him a working visit there Wednesday.
John Paul will give his Sunday blessing from the hospital window while Sandri leads the midday Angelus prayer in St. Peter’s Square for the third week, the spokesman said.
_ Peggy Polk
Cardinal Keeler Says Schiavo Should Remain on Feeding Tube
WASHINGTON (RNS) Cardinal William Keeler has spoken out against removing Terri S. Schiavo’s feeding tube, becoming the highest American Catholic official to weigh in on the plight of a Florida woman whose family is battling over her right to live or die.
Keeler, who is also chairman of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee for Pro-Life Activities, cited the pope’s declaration that every human being has “the right to basic health care,” such as nutrition, hydration, cleanliness and warmth.
“They are not ‘vegetables,’ but fellow human beings in need of our love and care,” Keeler said in a Wednesday (March 9) statement.
Bob and Mary Schindler, the woman’s parents, are fighting a legal battle with her husband, Michael Schiavo, to keep her alive. The courts have sided so far with Michael Schiavo, who said his wife told him she didn’t want her life prolonged in a vegetative state. The feeding tube is scheduled to be removed on March 18.
“There are times when even such basic means may cease to be morally obligatory, because they have become useless or unduly burdensome for the patient,” Keeler said. “Deliberately to remove them in order to hasten a patent’s death, however, would be a form of euthanasia, which is gravely wrong.”
Last month, Italian Cardinal Renato Martino, the head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, also spoke out against removing the feeding tube.
_ Andrea James
Victims Urge Rice to Reject Vatican Meddling in Abuse Lawsuits
(RNS) The nation’s largest support group for victims of clergy sexual abuse asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday (March 9) to “expose and rebuff” attempts by the Vatican to shield itself from abuse-related lawsuits.
The request by the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) follows a report by the National Catholic Reporter that Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican Secretary of State, asked for Rice’s help in a lawsuit filed in Louisville, Ky.
According to the newspaper, Sodano asked Rice on Feb. 8 whether the State Department could intervene in a case that seeks to hold the Vatican financially liable for clergy sexual abuse.
Rice responded that the Vatican would have to claim sovereign immunity itself, the newspaper reported, but an “informed Vatican official” told Catholic News Service that Sodano made no such request.
“(Sodano) knows the separation of powers is sacrosanct,” the official told Catholic News Service.
Either way, SNAP asked Rice whether the Vatican has made other similar requests for help in “squashing victims’ rights in this country,” and urged her to reject such interference in the future.
“When (church) officials attempt to use their influence to intervene in judicial matters, they rub salt into the already-deep wounds of once trusting Catholic children,” SNAP National Director David Clohessy and President Barbara Blaine said in their letter to Rice.
_ Kevin Eckstrom
Quote of the Day: Former Southern Baptist President Jack Graham
(RNS) “It was like eating with one of the apostles. We bowed our heads and Adrian prayed over our paper baskets of fish. I was convinced that when I opened my eyes the fish would be multiplied all over our table. But that didn’t happen.”
_ Former Southern Baptist Convention President Jack Graham speaking about dining at a Long John Silver’s restaurant with another former SBC president, Adrian Rogers, at a March 4 ceremony marking Rogers’ retirement from the pulpit of Bellevue Baptist Church in Cordova, Tenn. He was quoted by The Commercial Appeal.
MO/RB RNS END
