c. 2006 Religion News Service
S. African Bishop Calls Condom Use to Prevent AIDS `Ethical Imperative’
VATICAN CITY (RNS) Welcoming news that the Vatican is studying the issue of condom use by those with AIDS, a South African bishop fighting the pandemic said Tuesday (April 25) that the church must look beyond its teaching on sexual conduct to regard condom use as an “ethical imperative.”
Speaking during a conference call from an AIDS prevention meeting in Washington, Bishop Kevin Dowling of Rustenburg, South Africa, expressed hope that the study will ultimately relax the Vatican’s 1968 ban on condoms rather than reinforce it.
“It would in fact be an ethical imperative to use condoms in order to preserve and protect life. That’s what I hope will come out,” Dowling said.
Dowling’s comments came days after a Vatican cardinal announced that his office was preparing a document on condom use and Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, a prominent liberal prelate, asserted that condom use could be acceptable as a “lesser evil” in preventing the spread of AIDS.
In an interview with Vatican Radio on Tuesday, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, who heads the Vatican’s health department, appeared to revise his estimate that a document would be released “soon,” saying the issue was being closely examined by various Vatican departments.
“We are conducting a very profound scientific, technical and moral study,” he said.
Dowling said he hoped the document would support condom use not only as “the lesser of two evils but (as) the greater good for people.”
In recent years, the Vatican has argued that abstinence is the only effective measure for preventing the spread of AIDS. Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, president of the Pontifical Council for Family, has argued that the HIV virus that causes AIDS is small enough to pass through a latex condom.
Dowling dismissed Trujillo’s assertion as “plainly scientifically untrue,” saying that the cardinal’s statement “undermined the credibility of the church.”
Dowling said sexual abstinence was a valid form of AIDS prevention, but added such teaching has “no meaning” to large swaths of South African women who are victims of sexual violence and grinding poverty.
In such conditions, Dowling said, “the only available means of protecting life is condoms and female condoms.”
_ Stacy Meichtry
Rebbe Buried, Leaving 100,000 Followers in Mourning
(RNS) Rabbi Moses Teitelbaum, the supreme leader of the Satmar Chasidic Jewish sect, was buried before dawn Tuesday (April 25) in the cemetery of the Satmar village of Kiryas Joel, N.Y., leaving 100,000 devoted followers around the world and a battle for succession between his two sons.
Teitelbaum, the grand Satmar rebbe since 1980, died Monday at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. He was 91, and had been suffering from spinal cancer and other ailments.
He presided over an insular sect, with its base in Williamsburg, N.Y., and enclaves in Kiryas Joel, Israel, Canada and Britain. Because the grand rebbe is revered as the head of a large and obedient Jewish community, the Satmar rebbe also was courted by political figures in New York.
“Grand Rebbe Moses Teitelbaum was a gentle soul who carried himself with poise and distinction,” said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “From the fires of the Holocaust, the grand rebbe and his uncle performed a miracle here in New York by rebuilding their community to match its glory days in Europe.”
Teitelbaum was born in 1914 in Sighet, Hungary. In 1944, his family was deported to Auschwitz, where his wife and three children were killed. He remarried after the war and immigrated to New York, where he established a Sighet Chasidic community. He succeeded his uncle, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, also a Holocaust survivor, who had settled in Williamsburg and built a flourishing community, named after his prewar home, Satu Mare, a town on the Romanian-Hungarian border.
“In 1980, he assumed leadership of a group of 50,000, and he doubled its size,” said David M. Pollock, associate executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York. “He left behind 100,000 people absolutely committed to an unchanging Orthodox way of life.”
Yiddish remains the household language in the Satmar communities, where half of the population is under the age of 15. There are some 9,500 students in the Satmar religious school in Williamsburg, and another 8,500 in Kiryas Joel, in Orange County, making the Satmar school system one of the largest in New York, Pollock said.
The sect’s holdings, including land, camps, schools and businesses, have a value that has been estimated as high as a half-billion dollars.
The Satmar rebbe installed his older son, Aaron, as the rabbi of Kiryas Joel and appointed his younger son, Zalman, to serve as chief rabbi of the Williamsburg community. Moses Teitelbaum did not publicly name his successor.
There were brawls last year between the sons’ followers in the streets and synagogues. The sons have turned to state courts in New York in the last five years to settle questions of control and authority within the community. Although the courts declined to rule on what they called religious matters, one court intervened after Teitelbaum’s death to ensure the rights of both sons in the funeral and public mourning rituals in Williamsburg.
_ Marilyn Henry
Jews Recall Holocaust With Moving Ceremonies in Israel, Poland
(RNS) Jews around the world continued to commemorate the Holocaust on Tuesday (April 25), recalling the deaths of 6 million European Jews during World War II with services at synagogues, civic centers, college campuses and Holocaust museums and memorial sites.
In Israel, Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day _ known in Hebrew as Yom Hashoah _ was recognized with the wailing of a two-minute siren beginning at 10 a.m. Tuesday (April 25) throughout the country. Drivers stood in the streets beside their cars, pedestrians froze like mannequins, and all businesses and services were halted, creating a somber tableau of national life stopped in its tracks. Entertainment facilities were closed for 24 hours.
Also on Tuesday, in Poland, Shimon Peres, the former Israeli prime minister, led 8,000 Jewish youth from around the world on a silent, two-mile march from Auschwitz to Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz II, which housed the main crematoria during the Holocaust. The annual trek, known as the March of the Living, began with a chilling blast of a shofar, or ram’s horn.
On Monday night in Jerusalem, at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, survivors lit six torches, one for each of the 6 million Jewish lives lost.
Israeli President Moshe Katsav used the language of the Passover liturgy, on the Israelites’ exodus from slavery, to instill the need to remember the Nazi era.
“We must see to it that every generation feels that it was rescued from the fires of the Holocaust,” he said at the Yad Vashem ceremony.
In Jewish communities around the world, events included memorial services, lectures, survivors’ testimonies, and the reading of names of Nazi victims. In North America, some 180,000 yellow memorial candles, symbolizing the yellow stars European Jews were forced to wear, were distributed to Jewish homes by the Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs in New York.
More than 30 countries have established an official Holocaust memorial day, but dates vary. These commemorations usually are held on Jan. 27, the day on which Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz. Israel established its date, which is Nisan 27 on the Hebrew calendar, to coincide with the anniversary of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, in which Jewish resistance fighters held off Nazi troops for a month.
The official American commemoration, established by Congress, uses the Israeli calendar. The weeklong American Days of Remembrance began Sunday (April 23).
_ Marilyn Henry
Methodist Membership Drops for 36th Straight Year
(RNS) Methodist Church membership and attendance are slightly down again in 2004, according to a new report.
The United Methodist Church said that membership dropped .81 percent, to a little more than 8 million, and attendance fell .96 percent. It marked the 36th consecutive decline since the denomination was formed in 1968.
“What I’m hoping that it’s causing us to do is look at ourselves denominationally and see if there are things we need to do differently and how to do those things differently, in order to be attractive to more folks,” said Terry Bradfield, deputy general secretary for the church’s General Council on Finance and Administration, which released the report Friday (April 21).
Church membership and attendance are up in some regions, including Texas, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Georgia. The same goes for Hispanic attendance, which rose 6.18 percent, the eighth consecutive year of growth.
But a large majority of UMC conferences have lost members. The Troy Conference, covering Vermont and northeastern New York, and the Yellowstone Conference, which includes Montana, northern Wyoming and two towns in Idaho, had the steepest drops. Troy’s attendance declined by 17.39 percent, and Yellowstone’s membership dropped 4.33 percent.
Scott Brewer, a senior researcher who worked on the report, said one-fifth of the churches in the Troy region had not responded to questions about attendance figures, which could account for apparent substantial loss. A spokeswoman for Troy declined to comment on the specifics.
The UMC is still the third largest church in the United States, behind the Catholic and Southern Baptist denominations, according to the National Council of Churches’ 2006 Yearbook. And the UMC said its membership is rising dramatically abroad _ 68 percent since 1995 _ in Africa, Asia and Europe.
Bradfield said the increase is consistent with the rising membership in other Christian denominations in those regions.
“The church is experiencing some great growth … overseas, and we’re celebrating that,” Bradfield said.
_ Piet Levy
Quote of the Day: Evangelical Author Tony Campolo
(RNS) “You dare not go against Jim Dobson these days. This is the guru, the new pope. He is infallible. Anybody that contradicts him is obviously out of the will of God.”
_ Evangelical author and social commentator Tony Campolo, offering sarcastic criticism of conservative Christian radio talk show host James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family. Campolo spoke at the Associated Church Press convention in Orlando, Fla.
MO/PH RNS END
