c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Following is a collection of international religion stories compiled by RNS staff, wire and denominational reports.)

Pope John Paul II returns to a transformed Central America

(RNS)-Pope John Paul II, who last visited Central America in 1983, returned this week for a seven-day visit and found a politically transformed region that is no longer torn by Cold War tensions.

The visit, which began Feb. 5, took the pontiff to Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador in Central America. It was scheduled to conclude with a two-day visit to a sole South American nation, Venezuela, beginning Friday (Feb. 9).

But the theme of John Paul’s visit to the four nations-“Together for Peace”-underscored the fact that violence and the threat of violence still mar the region despite the subsiding of guerrilla wars in Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador.

In Nicaragua, the pope found the most dramatic change, which he commented on during the celebration of a Mass in Managua.

Departing from his prepared text, John Paul noted that during his last visit, Nicaragua was”a shooting gallery for the superpowers,”a reference to the war in which U.S.-backed”Contra”guerrillas sought to oust the Soviet-backed Sandinista government from power.”There was noise … it was a great dark night,”John Paul said, in a reference to the earlier visit.”Today we celebrated the Eucharist under the sun.” During the previous Nicaragua visit, tensions between the church and government ran high. At his arrival in 1983, John Paul rebuked several Catholic priests for taking roles in the Sandinista government, and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega delivered a long, accusatory speech about the war being waged against his government.

By contrast, the Wednesday (Feb. 7) visit was marked by a warm airport welcome from President Violetta Chamorro, who kissed the pope on the cheek and walked hand-in-hand with him down a red receiving carpet. An estimated 150,000 Nicaraguans jammed a downtown square for the Mass.

Still, while hailing what he called the”new and positive changes”in Nicaragua, the pontiff reminded the nation’s rulers that the people still suffer from poverty. That poverty, he said, shows itself”in the high number of people without a job, in the homes in which they are in a situation of desperate need, and in children and young people who are not getting an adequate education.” While in Guatemala, the first stop on his four-nation visit, John Paul commented on the current pause in a 35-year-old civil war.”I sincerely hope that Guatemala can conclude in the very near future a definitive peace accord,”he said.

In El Salvador, John Paul said he was pleased to see that”the weapons of war have been silenced”and that the once-warring factions are”interested in implementing the peace accords.”

Southern Baptists commit $500,000 to North Korea famine relief

(RNS)-Cooperative Services International, the Southern Baptist Convention’s overseas relief and development agency, says it will give $500,000 to famine relief efforts in North Korea.

Relief agency officials said the funds will be used to feed up to 10,000 North Korean school children for six months and purchase low-cost rice to be shipped to North Korea.

Flooding in parts of North Korea last summer not only destroyed thousands of homes but also devastated much of the country’s grain harvest, according to relief officials from the United Nations and several religious agencies that have visited the nation.

On Jan. 30, the United Nations’ World Food Program said that several million of North Korea’s 25 million population, including 2.5 million women and children, face possible starvation.

Last week, the U.S. government, which does not have diplomatic relations with North Korea, announced that it would contribute $2.2 million to the World Food Program for famine relief. The government also said it has granted licenses to a number of U.S. religious agencies, including Church World Service, the relief arm of the National Council of Churches, and World Vision, the evangelical aid agency, to ship humanitarian aid to North Korea.

Earlier this month, Church World Service sent $50,000 worth of rice to the Korean Christian Federation in North Korea for distribution. It had already sent antibiotics and oral rehydration tablets to halt the spread of cholera, which threatened the nation after the flooding.

Effort being made in Germany to `clear’ Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s name

(RNS)-To many Christians and Jews, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer became a martyr when the Nazis executed him in 1944 for taking part in a plot to assassinate Hitler.

But German law still considers him a traitor.

On Sunday (Feb. 4), the 90th anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s birth, a group of German politicians, Lutheran clerics and human rights activists launched a campaign to seek posthumous rehabilitation for Bonhoeffer. They are also asking that the German Parliament declare all convictions by the Nazi SS court-the court that found Bonhoeffer guilty-illegal and void, The New York Times reported.”Germany has not succeeded in cleansing its justice system of the influence of Nazi judges,”the newspaper quoted Stephan Hilsberg, a member of parliament, in launching the campaign.

Bonhoeffer, who studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York City in the late 1930s, was considered an up-and-coming young theologian when he returned to Germany. There, he helped organized the”Confessing Church,”a movement of Christians opposed to the official church that aligned itself with Hitler. Bonhoeffer also helped train pastors and theologians for the anti-Hitler movement.

He was arrested in 1943 for his activities and in 1944, when it was discovered he was a co-conspirator in a plot to assassinate Hitler, he was sentenced to death. He was hanged at Flossenburg on April 9, 1945.

Although he was not well-known outside Germany during World War II, Bonhoeffer became a world-famous theologian when his letters and papers from prison and several books on discipleship, community and ethics became available in English in the 1960s.

Baptists, Orthodox hold `pre-conversations’ looking to official dialogue

(RNS)-Leaders of the Baptist World Alliance and the European Baptist Federation met with representatives of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Eastern Orthodoxy on Jan. 30 and agreed to hold a round of talks that could lead to official theological dialogues between the two faith groups.

In an official communique adopted at the end of the meeting, the two groups said the first meeting of the”pre-conversations”will be held in Istanbul, Turkey, May 10-14.

At the meeting, representatives of each side will exchange information on such issues as the authority of the Bible, evangelism in the life of the church from the Baptist point of view, and tradition and its place in the teaching of the Orthodox faith.

An evaluation of those views will help determine if official theological dialogues aimed at achieving some measure of consensus on the topics should be convened, the communique said.

Anne Frank’s custodians spar over trademark issues

(RNS)-The group that owns the rights to Anne Frank’s diary has sued the foundation that owns the Amsterdam, Netherlands home-turned-museum where she hid, seeking the trademark rights to the famed Nazi victim’s name.

The Associated Press reported (Feb. 8) from Amsterdam that the Anne Frank Funds, a Basel, Switzerland-based group that owns the rights to”The Diary of Anne Frank,”wants to have the trademark rights to Anne Frank’s name to prevent commercial exploitation of Frank.

The Anne Frank Foundation, owner of the home where Frank and her family hid before they were betrayed to the Nazis, registered the name as a trademark in the 1980s.

Vincent Frank Steiner, president of Anne Frank Funds, says he fears the foundation might want to sell Anne Frank souvenirs such as T-shirts and pens. He said his group wants to stop other potential commercial exploitation as well.

Steiner said his group’s pursuit of the trademark rights began when it tried to stop a Singapore company from using Anne Frank’s name. It discovered that because it did not own the trademark, it had only limited legal power. “The Anne Frank story is told through her diary, and not through her name on a pen,”he said.

Ita Amahorseija, a spokeswoman for the foundation, denied the museum has any plans for commercial use of Frank’s name. She said the trademark allows the foundation to publish educational materials on Anne’s life.”That (marketing souvenirs) would be completely counterproductive to the work we are doing,”she said.”We don’t see Anne as an icon, but we use her story for educational projects, not for commercial use.” The Jewish Frank family fled Nazi Germany before the war and hid in an Amsterdam house from July 1942 until they were discovered in the fall of 1944. Anne kept a diary that chronicled their life in hiding. Discovered and published after her death, the diary became an international best-seller, translated into more than 50 languages. It is required reading in classrooms around the world.

LJB END ANDERSON