Adelle M. Banks reports that Southern Baptist trailblazer Adrian Rogers died early today: Former Southern Baptist Convention President Adrian Rogers died Tuesday (Nov. 15) after suffering from colon cancer and double pneumonia. Credited as one of the pre-eminent pulpiteers in his denomination and beyond, Rogers, 74, was known for his role as the first Southern Baptist president in the denomination’s conservative resurgence that began in 1979.
“Few men have left such an impact on a church, a denomination and the larger world,” said R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. “His personal defense of biblical inerrancy and the great truths of the gospel awakened a generation of Southern Baptists to a crisis in our midst-and he put his own ministry and reputation on the line for the sake of denominational recovery and reformation.”
Kevin Eckstrom continues reporting from the meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, and writes that today bishops ramped up the pressure against the death penalty: The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops issued a renewed call to end the death penalty on Tuesday (Nov. 15), saying state-sponsored executions are unfair, unnecessary and unhealthy for America’s moral soul. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, meeting here, affirmed church teaching that allows the death penalty in limited circumstances, but said life imprisonment is a better alternative to capital punishment. “We seek to build a culture of life in which our nation will no longer try to teach that killing is wrong by killing those who kill,” the bishops said in their 18-page statement. In other action, the bishops approved new guidelines for the 30,000 U.S. Catholics who are working as lay ministers and doing many of the jobs once performed by a dwindling number of priests and nuns.
The Vatican’s property rights in Israel remain unsolved, reports correspondent Stacy Meichtry: In the four decades since the Vatican issued Nostra Aetate, officially dropping the age-old insinuation that blamed Jews for the death of Jesus, the Holy See has made reconciliation a top priority in its relations with Israel. Full diplomatic relations were established, a regretful John Paul II visited the Western Wall, and his German successor recently entered a Jewish synagogue in Cologne. But behind the scenes of these high-profile gestures, the Vatican has been chafing over a long-running dispute that neither Nostra Aetate or any subsequent accord has managed to settle: a stalemate over the Vatican’s rights to property and tax exemption in the Holy Land. The property dispute has become a persistent thorn in the side of Vatican-Israel relations and will be an awkward subtext for Thursday’s highly anticipated visit by Israeli President Moshe Katsav.
