c. 1996 Religion News Service

Mexican officials deny permission for Mormon temple

(RNS)-An outcry from local Roman Catholics and concerns about urban development have led city officials in Monterrey, Mexico, to block the construction of what would have been the country’s second Mormon temple.

The decision was reported Wednesday (April 10) in the newspaper La Jornada after thousands of Catholics gathered signatures and purchased advertisements in newspapers protesting the temple construction.

The protesters claimed that children could be”contaminated”by Mormon practice of polygamy, the Associated Press reported.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has not advocated multiple marriages for more than a century.

L. Don LeFevre, spokesman for The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, told Religion News Service that plans to construct the temple began a few months ago in response to the growth of the Mormon community in northern Mexico. Of Mexico’s more than 90 million citizens, 735,000 are Mormon.

The temple in the greater Monterrey area would have served 200,000 Mormons. The area has 49 stakes, or regional groups of congregations.

Ramiro Garza Villarreal, state secretary of urban development, told the Associated Press that the city did not base its decision upon the public’s lobbying efforts, but that the temple construction plans did not comply with the city’s urban development laws.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints completed construction of a temple in Mexico City in 1983. LeFevre said the church would work toward reaching an agreement with Monterrey officials and dispelling misconceptions within the community.

Pope travels to Tunisia to preach tolerance

(RNS)-In his first visit to a North African country since 1985, Pope John Paul II will travel to Tunisia Sunday (April 14) to encourage interfaith dialogue among residents of this largely Muslim country.

The pope’s day trip to Carthage symbolizes the growing need for Christian-Muslim dialogue throughout Africa, where both faiths are gaining large numbers of adherents. During his visit, the pope will celebrate Mass and address bishops, cultural officials and political leaders from North Africa.

In Tunisia, only 15,000 of the country’s 8 million residents are Roman Catholic. Relations between the two groups are good there, Reuters reported.

Discussing the importance of inter-religious dialogue and tolerance in January, the pope told ambassadors to the Vatican that some Muslim countries deny non-Muslims the right to worship.”This is an intolerable and unjustifiable violation not only of all the norms of current international law, but of the most fundamental human freedom, that of practicing one’s faith openly,”he said.

In Saudi Arabia, Christian places of public worship are banned, though, according to the Vatican, 500,000 Christians reside there.

Update: Brando will meet privately with rabbis

(RNS)-Actor Marlon Brando has canceled a planned public appearance at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Beverly Hills, Calif., where he was expected to apologize for recent remarks about Jews in Hollywood.

Instead, Brando plans to have a private meeting Friday (April 12) with two leaders of the center, Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, the center announced.

After the meeting, the leaders are scheduled to discuss their talk with Brando at a news conference, the Associated Press reported.

The 72-year-old actor said that”Hollywood is run by Jews,”during an appearance on CNN’s”Larry King Live.” On Tuesday (April 9), Hier said Brando”expressed his remorse”to him and agreed to make a public apology.

Australian outback a possible destination for terminally ill

(RNS)-A landmark euthanasia law will go into effect July 1 in Australia’s remote Northern Territory, the provincial government announced Thursday (April 11), prompting right-to-life activists to say that the remote outback region could well become a destination point for the terminally ill.”You will see a whole congregation of people arriving there,”said Kath Harrigan, a spokeswoman for Australia’s Right to Life Association, told the Reuter news agency.”It will be wholesale killing of people.” Northern Territory’s new law, which will allow doctors to administer lethal injections to the terminally ill, was approved in February.

About 20 of Northern Territory’s 700 doctors are prepared to administer the injections, said euthanasia advocate Dr. Philip Nitschke of Darwin, a city 1,800 miles northwest of Sydney.

In a 1995 opinion poll, more than 70 percent of Australians backed legal euthanasia. But the Northern Territory’s new law has pitted churches and many doctors against pro-euthanasia forces as lawmakers in other parts of Australia consider similar legislation.

Northern Territory officials have yet to draft the guidelines for access to assisted suicide, a spokeswoman for the territory’s health minister said. Pending plans call for a psychiatrist and two physicians to certify the terminally ill person to be mentally competent.

D’Amato to search for Holocaust victims’ bank accounts

(RNS)-The Senate Banking Committee has scheduled a hearing April 23 to determine what happened to money deposited in Swiss banks by European Jews who perished in the Holocaust.”Huge sums of wealth vanished and some of it may be sitting in Swiss banks today,”New York Sen. Alphonse D’Amato, chairman of the committee, said in a statement released Monday (April 8).

Of the estimated 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, some may have smuggled their wealth out of Nazi-controlled territory and into Swiss banks. What happened to the money has been a source of speculation for decades.

The Swiss Bankers Association has said assets of Jews held before the Holocaust totaled $32 million, but the Associated Press reported that investigators working for D’Amato have found documents that”strongly point to one institution alone having approximately $20 million in deposited assets.” The search by heirs has been complicated by Swiss banking secrecy, since depositors were sometimes unable to give heirs details of accounts before they died. Depositors could also have acted through intermediaries, obscuring the link to the true owner of the funds.

New bishop for Romanian Catholics

(RNS)-Pope John Paul II has appointed the Rev. Archimandrite John Michael Botean as bishop of the Romanian Catholic diocese of Canton, Ohio. The Canton diocese, also known as an eparchy, represents some 5,300 Romanian Catholics throughout the United States, who belong to this Byzantine rite of the Catholic Church.

He succeeds Bishop Louis Puscas, who retired in July 1993.

Botean attended St. Fidelis Seminary in Herman, Pa., and earned a bachelor’s degree at the Catholic University of America, from which he graduated in 1977.

He was ordained in 1983. Botean worked for a time as staff member of the Pax Christi U.S.A. Center on Conscience and War in Cambridge, Mass. After serving as pastor of a Romanian congregation in Aurora, Ill., he was named pastor of St. George Cathedral in Canton. Botean also served as editor of the diocesan newspaper, Unirea (The Union).

Lawmaker took ailing son to Toronto for `blessing’

(RNS)-Rep. Tony Hall (D-Ohio) took his 15-year-old son, critically ill with leukemia, to a controversial Toronto Pentecostal church in December seeking healing, The Washington Times reported Thursday (April 11).

Hall took his son, Matthew, to the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship, which was ejected last year from its denomination, the Association of Vineyard Churches in Anaheim, Calif., for its unusual methods of prayer, prophecy and interpretations of Scripture.

The church has spawned a movement, known as the”Toronto blessing,”in which some worshipers express religious fervor with laughter, animal sounds and claims of faith healing.

The youth, whose cancer was diagnosed three years ago, had a brief remission but has since relapsed, the Times reported.”I can’t say Toronto made the difference, but prayer did make the difference,”the Ohio Democrat said.”It was a little bit wild and a little bit crazy sometimes, but there was no doubt in my mind the power was there.” But the Rev. John Arnott, pastor of the Toronto church, makes no claim for healing powers.”There’s no guarantees, of course,”Arnott told the Times.”Potentially, we ought to be able to do what Jesus did. Those of us who are trying at it have lots and lots of times when it didn’t work or didn’t happen.”

Quote of the Day: Rabbi Moshe Sherer, president of Agudath Israel of America.

(RNS)-Rabbi Moshe Sherer, president of Agudath Israel of America, a New York-based Orthodox Jewish movement, responding to federal appeals court decisions in Washington state and New York state that declare a terminally ill patient’s constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide:”We dare not allow the rhetoric to obscure the reality of what is taking place: A rapid descent into a moral abyss where the millennia-old rejection of suicide is being cast aside in the name of humanitarian progress.”

MJP END RNS