c. 1998 Religion News Service
Crowd of 100,000 gather for woman’s message from Virgin Mary
(RNS) A crowd of 100,000 people gathered in Conyers, Ga., Tuesday to hear a message from the Virgin Mary given by a woman who claims to have had visits from Mary since 1990.”If you are worried about the future, put not your attention to these matters,”homemaker Nancy Fowler read from handwritten notes to a rapt audience.”The future holds no concern to those who truly seek God and love him and remain in his favor.” The woman claimed that Mary visited her earlier that day inside her small farmhouse about 30 miles east of Atlanta, the Associated Press reported.
Fowler delivered messages from Mary on the 13th of each month from October 1990 to May 1994. After that date, she announced that there would be a public message from the Virgin Mary just once a year _ on Oct. 13.
Each year, the crowd gathering in the town of 60,000 has grown steadily. Fowler announced last year that Tuesday’s public message would be the last.”My crowning words are to be holy, to be witnesses, and to walk in my faith,”Fowler told the crowd, which included a majority of women.”I love you all, my dear children.” Local Catholic officials have not endorsed Fowler’s visions. She did not say why the messages were concluding.”She being the loving mother she is, reassured me that she would always remain with me,”Fowler said.”Just as she reassured me she would always remain with all of you.” Some in the crowd, which was attentive and quiet during the 30-minute reading, gasped, clapped and fell to their knees when Fowler said a multitude of souls accompanied Mary in her vision. She said the souls were being released into heaven from purgatory in Mary’s honor.
Baptist group votes to oust church that ordained women deacons
(RNS) A local association of Southern Baptist churches in Missouri has voted to withdraw fellowship from a church that ordained six women deacons earlier this year.
Delegates to the annual meeting of the Cape Girardeau (Mo.) Baptist Association voted 98 to 41 to oust First Baptist Church of Cape Girardeau from the association.
Association Moderator Glen Golden called the decision”a course correction that needed to be made for the association,”reported Baptist Press, the official news service of the Southern Baptist Convention.
The vote came after delegates rejected a report from a credentials committee that found that women deacons should not be a test for membership.
Some who opposed ousting First Baptist Church of Cape Girardeau cited the Baptist concept of local church autonomy.”There have to be limits to local autonomy,”responded Golden, pastor of First Baptist church of Delta.”If you’re coming together under the Scriptures of our Lord Jesus Christ, as far as Cape Girardeau Association is concerned, ordination of women is one of those non-negotiables.” John Owen, pastor of the ousted church, said his congregation reacted to the decision with sorrow.”There is some grief,”he said.”There is some anger … There is the residual feeling of having been dealt with unjustly, unfairly.” But Owen added that because there was also a vote during the Sept. 29 meeting to appoint a constitutional revision committee, his church’s membership might be secure during the year a revision is being considered.
South Africa’s major white church debates merger with black denomination
(RNS) The Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, which once preached that apartheid was biblically ordained, now says the country’s former system of racial separation was a”sin.” Its pro-apartheid stance had caused the denomination to be shunned in world religious circles.
But the Dutch Reformed body, the major church among South Africa’s white Afrikaners, still isn’t sure it is ready to merge with its black and mixed- race counterparts.
On Tuesday (Oct. 13), the 400 delegates to the church’s national meeting _ held once every four years _ voted to adopt a resolution calling apartheid”sinful.”By adopting the resolution, the church reactivated its membership in the 75 million-member World Alliance of Reformed Churches, made up of reformed and Presbyterian denominations around the world.
On Wednesday, however, debate on whether to merge with the separate branches of blacks and mixed-race Christians it established during the apartheid era and which have joined as the Uniting Reformed Church, bogged down over a statement drafted by the Uniting Church during the apartheid era.
Uniting Church leaders have said they will only accept the merger if their white counterparts approve a statement on racial equality and social justice known as the Confession of Belhar.
Delegates to the white church’s meeting, however, said they felt they were being asked to sanction a theologically unacceptable document rooted in outdated, anti-apartheid history, the Associated Press reported.
A vote on the proposed merger was put off until late Wednesday.
Bulgarian Orthodox said to end six-year schism
(RNS) An agreement brokered by some of Orthodox Christianity’s top leaders has apparently brought to an end a bitter six-year-old schism in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.
But some commentators are warning that the agreement reached between the leaders of the two bitterly feuding factions has not yet reached the church’s lower levels and will require further changes, reported Ecumenical News International, the Geneva-based religious news agency.
The agreement came after an”extraordinary and enlarged synod”of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church presided over by Ecumenical Partriarch Bartholomew, the first among equals of Orthodox prelates. Six other patriarchs, including Alexii II of the Russian Orthodox Church, took part in the synod meeting and the hammering out of the agreement aimed at ending the schism.
The Bulgarian Orthodox Church, which claims the loyalty of 87 percent of Bulgaria’s 9 million people, has been divided since 1992, when opponents of the church’s leader, 86-year-old Patriarch Maxim, questioned the canonical validity of his 1971 election and accused him of collaborating with the former communist regime.
The division became a full-blown schism in July 1996 when backers of Metropolitan Pimen, leader of the breakaway dissidents, proclaimed him a patriarch and named their own bishops.
The agreement, announced Oct. 2 after the three-day synod, confirmed the leadership of Patriarch Maxim but also lifted the”anathema”placed on the 92-year-old Pimen. The agreement also recognized the 12 rebel bishops who supported Pimen and restored to full communion all the clergy and laity of the dissident group.
Bulgarian state television showed members of both groups holding hands in a gesture of reconciliation after an act of penance by supporters of Pimen.”Bulgarians were ashamed of their church’s division, so this promised reunification will please everyone,”Maria Dimitrova, a religion specialist at St. Kliment Ohriddski University told ENI. “But the inner conflict continues,”said.”Most of the church’s leaders are old and have held office for too long. It’s clear that changes must be made.”
Bulgarian Baptist chosen to head European Baptist Federation
(RNS) Bulgarian Baptist leader Theodor Angelov has been named the next general secretary of the European Baptist Federation.
Angelov was elected at a federation council meeting in Kiev, Ukraine, in late September. He will replace current leader Karl Heinz Walter, who retires next fall, and will become the federation’s eighth general secretary.
Angelov, the president of the Baptist Union of Bulgaria, is the first leader from Eastern Europe chosen to serve in the post, reported Associated Baptist Press, an independent news service.
Vatican pharmacy: no Viagra
(RNS) The Vatican pharmacy may be one of the best-stocked drug stores in the world, but don’t go there looking for Viagra.
The anti-impotence drug went on sale Wednesday (Oct. 14) in Italy, arriving on the heels of a media fanfare rivaling that accorded 35 years ago to another a symbol of potency _ the Beetles.”We don’t have Viagra and we don’t plan to sell it,”a pharmacy employee told Reuters.
The pharmacy, run by priests of a religious order dedicated to health care, is considered one of the best in Rome because of its efficiency and because it stocks some medicines not available in other parts of Italy.
Quote of the day: Italian TV personality Bruno Vespa
(RNS)”Even journalists have a soul.” _ Bruno Vespa, moderator of an Italian television call-in show after choking up when Pope John Paul II called in to say thank you during a special on the pontiff’s 20th anniversary as pope.
DEA END RNS
