c. 1996 Religion News Service
Spyridon condemns attack on Orthodox headquarters in Turkey
(RNS) Archbishop Spyridon of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America has condemned a grenade attack on the Istanbul, Turkey, compound of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, calling on President Clinton and political and religious leaders in the United States to join in the condemnation.
“This senseless and shameful attack violates both the sanctity and safety of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and is an affront to universally accepted principles of religious freedom and human rights,” Spyridon said in a statement Monday (Sept. 30).
Bartholomew is the pre-eminent spiritual leader of the world’s 300 million Orthodox Christians.
On Monday, the Associated Press reported that the explosion caused minor damage to a garden in the Patriarchate, the headquarters compound of Orthodoxy. A caller to the AP said the attack was the work of the outlawed Islamic Great East Raiders Front, a group that wants to install a strict Islamic government in officially secular Turkey.
Spyridon said it is “particularly disturbing to Orthodox Christians in America that their spiritual center should be continually subject to conditions that prevent it from functioning freely.
“On behalf of the clergy and laity of our church, I call upon the Turkish national government and all other relevant authorities to take immediate and serious measures to ensure the protection of the Patriarchate.”
The Patriarchate was first established during the Byzantine Empire in the 3rd century, when Istanbul was known as Constantinople.
In a separate but related development, Amnesty International on Tuesday (Oct. 1) issued a report saying there has been a steady erosion of human rights in Turkey during the 1990s and Turkish government officials excuse, ignore or cover up human rights abuses in the country.
“Turkey’s persistent record of gross human rights violations results from a complete disregard at the highest level for international human rights standards and Turkey’s own laws protecting human rights,” the report by the London-based human rights group said.
The report kicked off a six-month campaign by the group to focus international attention on abuses in Turkey.
“We want to remind the international community and those countries which have special relations with Turkey of their obligation to ensure that, if Turkey continues to refuse to cooperate with international human rights bodies, then action must be taken to hold Turkey to account,” Pierre Sane, secretary general of Amnesty International said in a statement prepared for an Istanbul news conference.
Bishops, joined by other religious groups, file brief in confession case
(RNS) The U.S. Catholic Conference, the social policy arm of the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops, said Tuesday (Oct. 1) it has filed a friend-of-the-court brief seeking the destruction of a tape and transcript of a sacramental confession.
The brief, filed with the 9th U.S. Circuit of Appeals in San Francisco, urges the court to reverse a U.S. District Court judge’s decision because the judge failed to order the destruction of the tape and transcript of the confession.
The case arose in April when a prisoner in the Eugene, Ore., county jail was participating in the Sacrament of Penance, the formal name for confession. Law enforcement officials secretly taped and later listened to and transcribed the exchange between the priest and prisoner.
According to the brief, the officials later acknowledged that they did so specifically because they knew of the confidential nature of the process.
“It is difficult to imagine any more blatant and bald-faced affront to the basic tenets of a religion, short of intentionally committing acts of sacrilege as a matter of state policy,” the brief said.
Since the incident became public, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Portland has been seeking to have the tape and the transcript destroyed but the lower courts have refused the archdiocese’s request.
The brief argues that absolute confidentiality is an integral part of the process of religious confession and reconciliation with God and is, consequently, a necessary component of both a priest’s and penitent’s free exercise of religion.
The requirement of secrecy is also integral to the religious beliefs of the Jewish, Mormon and Protestant communities, the brief said.
Joining the Catholic conference in filing the brief were the National Council of Churches, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the American Jewish Congress, the Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism, the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affirs, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Christian Legal Society.
Atlanta pastor named dean of New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine
(RNS) An Atlanta Episcopal leader has been chosen to lead the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the nation’s largest church structure.
The Rev. Harry H. Pritchett Jr., 60, rector of All Saints’ Episcopal Church in downtown Atlanta, was chosen unanimously by a search committee, The New York Times reported. He succeeds the Rev. James Parks Morton, 66, who served as dean for the last 25 years. Pritchett, a native of Tuscaloosa, Ala., is scheduled to begin his new post March 1.
Pritchett said he hoped to build upon St. John the Divine’s reputation as an international and interfaith house of worship with outreach and environmental concerns.
“The issue of our times, as we come to the end of the century, is how in the world we can live together on this planet as very different people and live together in harmony, valuing each other’s differences,” he said.
Since 1981, under Pritchett’s leadership, the Atlanta church has grown from 800 to 3,000 members.
At the New York church, the seat of the Episcopal Bishop of New York and the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, Pritchett will oversee a staff of more than 150 priests and administrators. Worshipers at St. John’s range from about 500 at the main Sunday service to 6,000 on major holy days.
Catholic nun stabbed to death in Bosnia
(RNS) A Roman Catholic nun was stabbed to death in the Muslim-dominated town of Kakanj, 21 miles northeast of Sarajevo, United Nations police monitors announced Tuesday (Oct. 1).
According to wire service reports, the nun, 46-year-old Sister Ane (cq) Jurjevic, was a Croat. Reuters said the nun was a member of the Order of the Daughters of God’s Love and was a native of Vitez, a Croat-controlled pocket of central Bosnia about 12 miles west of Kakanj.
AP reported that police had no suspects or motives for the attack.
Officials of Sarajevo’s Roman Catholic diocese had no immediate comment on the incident, but an official of the Bosnian Croat political party said he hopes it is not an effort to pressure the predominantly Catholic Croats into leaving the area.
“We heard the news with horror,” said Srecko Vucina, the Croat official. “We do not want to believe that this was … pressure for further eviction of Croats from there.”
During the three-year long civil war, tens of thousands of Muslims and Croats were evicted from their homes by both sides and efforts to repatriate the displaced have faltered as hardline ultra-nationalists refuse to put an end to the deep-seated ethnic hostility.
Adventist church reacts to arrest of pastor in Rwanda genocide case
(RNS) The Seventh-day Adventist Church, responding Tuesday (Oct. 1) to reports that a now-retired pastor in the denomination has been accused of participating in the genocide that swept Rwanda in 1994, said it condemns “atrocity in any form.”
On Thursday (Sept. 26), the Rev. Elizaphan Ntakirutimana was arrested in Texas and charged with genocide and crimes against humanity based on allegations of his participation in killings near Kibuye in western Rwanda in 1994.
The U.S. Attorney’s office has indicated that it will seek to extradite the retired pastor, who fled Rwanda during the civil war, to Tanzania to face the United Nation’s war crimes tribunal.
“We support initiatives to bring to justice those who are responsible for the illegal activities in that country’s crisis,” said Rick Kajiura, a spokesman for the Silver Spring, Md.-based denomination.
At the same time, Kajiura noted that Ntakirutimana maintains he is innocent of the charges and that he must be presumed to be innocent until proven guilty.
“Seventh-day Adventists deplore violence,” Kajiura said in a statement. “We would never condone or rationalize away the killings in Rwanda, nor would we ever condone any form of genocide.
“The killings in Rwanda were a terrible atrocity,” he added. “They demonstrate what happens when the love of God does not permeate human relationships.”
Ntakirutimana retired from the church’s ministry after he fled Rwanda. He has been living with his son in Laredo, Texas. Church officials said he has never been a pastor in the United States.
There are approximately 285,000 Adventists in Rwanda, and 806 Adventist churches. A number of the churches were destroyed during the spasm of violence that shook Rwanda from April 1994 to August 1994 when an estimated 1 million people, most of them members of the Tutsi minority, were killed by ethnic Hutus. The church counts both Hutus and Tutsis among its members. Since the fighting stopped, Seventh-day Adventists have been active in rebuilding and reconciliation efforts.
Supreme Court will hear assisted-suicide case
(RNS) The U.S. Supreme Court said Tuesday (Oct. 1) it will decide whether states may ban doctor-assisted suicides, potentially setting the stage for a major turn in the national debate over euthanasia and the right-to-die.
The justices said they will review federal appeals court rulings involving cases in New York state and Washington state that allow doctors to prescribe life-ending drugs for mentally competent patients who are terminally ill and no longer want to live.
A ruling in the case is expected sometime before July.
The cases are being closely watched in the religious community and a number of churches and other religious groups are considered likely to file friend-of-the-court briefs on the issue.
The two cases the court will consider are:
A March decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco striking down a Washington state law barring doctor-assisted suicide, ruling that law violates due process rights. By an 8-3 vote, the court said the ban was unconstitutional “insofar as (it) prohibits physicians from prescribing life-ending medication for use by terminally ill, competent adults who wish to hasten their own deaths.”
An April decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals striking down two New York state laws barring doctor-assisted suicide on the grounds that they failed to treat people equally.
The Supreme Court has acted twice previously on related issues, the AP reported.
In 1990, the justices said that assuming there is a constitutional right to die, a terminally ill person may refuse life-sustaining medical treatment. But last year, the justices rejected a challenge to Michigan’s ban of assisted suicide brought by Dr. Jack Kevorkian.
U.N. agency awards prize to Handicap International for work with refugees
(RNS) The United Nations refugee agency said Tuesday (Oct. 1) it is awarding its annual Nansen Medal to Handicap International, a Franco-Belgian group that makes artificial limbs for land mine victims.
“Without Handicap International, hundreds of handicapped refugees from Cambodia, Mozambique and Bosnia could not have started a new life,” said Sadako Ogata, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
Handicap International, a non-governmental agency, was formed in 1982 in response to the refugee crisis. It provides prostheses to war victims, principally civilian victims of land mines, and generally uses local materials from the countries in which it is working. The group is now active in 35 countries and works closely with the U.N. refugee agency.
The Nansen Award, which includes a $100,000 gift, is named after Norwegian diplomat and explorer Fridtjof Nansen, the first high commissioner for refugees under the League of Nations.
Quote of the day: Ronald E. Wilson, executive director of the Evangelical Press Association:
(RNS) Ronald E. Wilson, executive director of the Evangelical Press Association, wrote in the current issue of the organization’s newsletter, “EPA Liaison,” on the difficulty of using Jesus’ life and preaching to formulate principles of communication:
“To complicate matters, it’s not all that easy to distill principles of communication from the life of Christ. At times Jesus rebuked. Other times he remained silent. Sometimes he answered in confusing parables. At least once he spit. As Virginia Stem Owens once put it, `the one thing we can safely say about Jesus’ own communicating in the Gospels is that it was almost always unpredictable.”’
MJP END RNS
AP-NY-10-01-96 1722EDT
