c. 2008 Religion News Service
Poll: Pope unknown to most Americans
WASHINGTON (RNS) Most Americans hold a favorable opinion of Pope Benedict XVI, but the vast majority confess they don’t know much about the pontiff, according to a new poll.
Just weeks before Benedict’s first trip to the U.S. as leader of the Roman Catholic Church, 58 percent of Americans say they have a favorable or “very favorable” opinion of him.
But when asked how much they know about the 80-year-old German, 52 percent said “not very much,” and nearly 30 percent said “nothing at all.”
Benedict and Americans will have a chance to get to know one another better April 15-20, when the pope celebrates Masses, greets interfaith leaders, and visits heads of state in New York and Washington, D.C.
Forty-two percent of Americans said they’d like to attend one of Benedict’s public appearances, according to the survey, which was conducted by the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion and financed by the Knights of Columbus. Sixty-six percent of Catholics said the same.
More than 70 percent of Americans look forward to hearing Benedict talk about spiritual matters such as God’s presence in daily life, spiritual fulfillment and how to positively affect the world.
The survey polled 1,015 adults 18 years of age or older, 613 of whom were Catholic. The margin of error for all Americans is plus or minus 3 percent; for the Catholic sample alone it is plus or minus 4 percent.
_ Daniel Burke
Report: Saudis deny request to build church
VATICAN CITY (RNS) Saudi Arabia will deny a request by the Vatican to build that Muslim country’s first Christian church, according to a report broadcast Tuesday (March 25) by a television channel owned by the Saudi royal family.
The report came the same day that Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah announced plans to host a conference of monotheistic religions, including Islam, Christianity and Judaism, a project that he said he had discussed with Pope Benedict XVI on a visit to the Vatican last November.
The conference would be the first such interreligious event in Saudi Arabia, which forbids public observance of any faith but Islam.
The two events epitomize the ambivalent and volatile nature of recent relations between the Holy See and the Islamic world.
Earlier this month, a delegation of Muslim scholars and clerics met with Vatican officials in Rome to plan a Christian-Muslim summit in November. Also this month, Catholics were permitted to open the first Christian church in the Persian Gulf country of Qatar.
In the same period, the murder of a Chaldean Catholic archbishop in Iraq highlighted the plight of that country’s Christian minority, leading the pope to use his Palm Sunday homily to demand an end to the “slaughters,” “violence” and “hatred” in Iraq.
Benedict’s decision to baptize Magdi Allam in St. Peter’s Basilica on the day before Easter also raised tensions in the church’s relations with Islam. Allam, who until his conversion was one of Italy’s most prominent Muslims, has been an outspoken critic of Muslim intolerance of other faiths.
Among those denouncing the baptism was Jordanian scholar Aref Ali Nayed, part of the group behind the upcoming Muslim-Christian summit at the Vatican. But Nayed insisted that he and his colleagues would “not let this unfortunate episode distract us.”
In an effort to soothe feelings, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano ran a front-page article in its Wednesday (March 26) edition declaring that Allam’s baptism did not represent “any hostile intention with regard to so great a religion as Islam.”
_ Francis X. Rocca
Girl questions God’s purpose after mistaken identity in crash
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (RNS) There were hints early on that Laura Van Ryn’s family missed.
While tending to the bandaged young woman in the hospital bed, the family did not recognize the clothes that staff in a Fort Wayne, Ind., hospital told them belonged to Laura.
Her brother noticed her teeth seemed different, and later her sister was surprised to see her navel was pierced.
Their doubts grew when a therapist in Grand Rapids asked the college student believed to be Van Ryn to write her name, and she printed in big letters: W-H-I-T-N-E-Y.
Whitney Cerak still marvels at being alive _ and wonders why.
“I’m the only person I know who’s listened to her own funeral,” the 20-year-old says in the epilogue of a new book written by the families whose lives were intertwined in an ordeal of joy, sorrow and faith. “That was pretty weird.”
Why did she survive the wreck on April 26, 2006, when four fellow students and a staff member from Taylor University in Upland, Ind., did not?
“I still don’t get that,” Cerak writes in “Mistaken Identity: Two Families, One Survivor, Unwavering Hope,” released Tuesday (March 25). “Maybe I’m not supposed to. Even if I can’t figure it out, I know that God has a purpose for it, even if I never completely understand what it may be.”
Cerak, who grew up in Gaylord, Mich., spent five weeks in a coma while the parents of Laura Van Ryn stood vigil by her side, believing she was their daughter.
Authorities in Indiana had confused the two young women during the chaotic aftermath of the collision between a semi truck and a school van. Their blond hair and even some facial features were similar.
Cerak’s parents, Newell and Colleen Cerak, declined to view the body they believed was their daughter’s, preferring to remember Whitney as she had appeared in life.
Meanwhile, Don and Susie Van Ryn believed their daughter’s appearance had been altered by facial injuries. Only when Whitney began mentioning strange names while slowly regaining consciousness did they suspect something was amiss, the 275-page book explains.
The Van Ryns wrote of how they spent five weeks at the bedside of a woman they believed to be their 22-year-old daughter. Their story is mingled with that of Cerak’s parents, who thought they buried their 18-year-old daughter, only to discover she survived the crash.
Both families share how their faith provided the strength to accept what happened, and they wrote the book with Mark Tabb, a former Indiana pastor. It was published by Howard Books, a division of Simon & Schuster.
In the epilogue, Whitney Cerak tells of the difficulty of recovering from her brain injury and returning to campus.
“One of the things I struggled with was the fact that I was the only student to survive the accident instead of one of the others,” she wrote.
“They all loved God so much, and all of them would have done wonderful things for Him. Why did God keep me here and not them? It didn’t make any sense to me.”
_ Dave Murray
Quote of the Day: Sen. Hillary Clinton
(RNS) “While we don’t have a choice when it comes to our relatives, we do have a choice when it comes to our pastors or our church.”
_ Sen. Hillary Clinton, saying Sen. Barack Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, “would not have been my pastor” because of his controversial remarks on race. She was quoted by The New York Times.
KRE/PH END RNS
