c. 1998 Religion News Service

Pope to visit St. Louis in January

(RNS) Pope John Paul II will visit St. Louis in January 1999 following a stop in Mexico, the vatican announced Friday (April 24).

John Paul’s visit will be his fifth to the United States since becoming pope. The pontiff is scheduled to spend Jan. 22-25 in Mexico, and then stop in St. Louis on Jan. 26 on his way back to Rome.

St. Louis Archbishop Justin Rigali told the Associated Press he expects the pope to spend at least 24 hours in the Missouri city.”I’m going to see if I can convince him to stay a bit longer,”said Rigali, who got to know the pope while working at the Vatican prior to assuming his post in St. Louis.

John Paul’s visit will be the first by a pope to St. Louis. However prior to becoming pope, John Paul visited St. Louis in 1969 when he was known as Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, archbishop of Krakow, Poland.

The 77-year-old pope was last in the United States in October 1995, visiting New York, New Jersey, Baltimore and the United Nations.

St. Louis Mayor Clarence Harmon, a Roman Catholic, welcomed the upcoming visit.”This is as big as it gets. This is as though we got five presidents at one time.” The pope’s stops in Mexico and St. Louis are follow-ups to last year’s Vatican synod on the Catholic Church and the Americas. John Paul is expected to speak about the synod’s findings.

Rights activist James Lawson to preside at Ray’s funeral

(RNS) The Rev. James Lawson, the minister who invited the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to make the fateful Memphis visit where he was killed, will preside at the funeral of King’s confessed killer, James Earl Ray, Lawson associates said in Boston Friday (April 24).

The funeral is scheduled for next week in Nashville, the city where 70-year-old Ray died Thursday of end-stage liver disease. Details of the funeral are still being decided by Ray’s family.

Lawson, who is in charge of finding a church to hold the service, said the funeral will be either Wednesday or next Saturday.

Currently the pastor of Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles, Lawson was director of nonviolent education for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a leader of the 1968 Memphis sanitation worker strike that brought King to the city.

Lawson, along with other prominent civil rights leaders and members of King’s family, has said he does not believe Ray was the lone assassin as investigations after the killing have concluded and has maintained an effort in the 30 years since the killing to re-open the trial.

King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, also maintains that Ray was part of a larger conspiracy to assassinate her husband. Following Ray’s death, she renewed her appeal to Attorney General Janet Reno to continue to probe of the killing.

Zimbabwe president lashes out at gays, criticizes World Council

(RNS) Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe, has once again lashed out at homosexuals and criticized the World Council of Churches, scheduled to meet in Harare in December, for being soft on gays and lesbians.”Animals in the jungle are better than these people because at least they know how to distinguish between a male and female,”Mugabe said in a eulogy at the home of Charles Chikerema, the late editor of a government newspaper. And he repeated earlier criticism he had made that homosexuality is neither African nor Christian and is completely unacceptable.”Will God not punish us for such practices,”he said, reportedly to much applause from the mourners, according to Ecumenical News International, the Geneva-based religious news agency.”The World Council of Churches is even coming here to debate homosexuality, even though it’s known internationally that Zimbabwe is opposed to it,”he said.

Mugabe’s remarks were apparently prompted by news reports that a gay group, Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe, would be allowed to attend the World Council assembly.

But WCC officials in Geneva said the group will not take part in the assembly but has received accreditation for a display at a special section.

The officials also said homosexuality is not on the official agenda of the assembly, but could come up if delegates decide to take the issue up in some manner.

The gay issue has long been a controversial one for the WCC’s 332 Protestant and Orthodox member churches and three years, when Mugabe first caused an international stir by attacking gays and lesbian as evil, a number of WCC churches in the United States and western Europe expressed concern about holding the assembly in Zimbabwe, fearing gay delegates from their churches might be harassed or ill-treated.

Subsequently, the WCC and Zimbabwe issued a”Memorandum of Understanding”in which the government promised not to interfere in assembly.

But government officials in Harare said Mugabe is likely to refuse to open the assembly if homosexuality is to be discussed.

Cuban picked to head Latin American church group

(RNS) A Cuban Methodist pastor has been appointed general secretary of the Latin American Council of Churches, which represents many of Latin America’s mainstream Protestant and some Pentecostal churches.

The Rev. Israel Batista, 55, will assume his new duties Jan. 1, 1999. Batista is currently the World Council of Churches’ executive secretary for justice, peace and creation in Geneva.

Batista’s appointment was announced this week at a meeting of the council’s directors in Sao Leopoldo, Brazil. He will replace the Rev. Felipe Adolf, according to Ecumenical News International, a religious news service based in Geneva.

Batista was previously national coordinator of the Cuban Ecumenical Council, and has served as a pastor in Cuba in Havana, Cienfuegos and Matanzas.

Swedish translation of Koran to be published

(RNS) Noting that Islam has become Sweden’s second largest religion after Christianity, the Stockholm government has agreed to pay for a new Swedish translation of the Koran.”Islam is the biggest religious minority in Sweden, so it is natural for the Koran to be available in modern Swedish,”the nation’s culture ministry said in a statement.

The government will pay a local publisher about $38,000 to produce the Swedish translation, Reuters reported. Another $19,000 will be put toward the project by Sweden’s National Coordinating Committee for the European Year Against Racism.

Lutheranism is the dominant Christian faith among Sweden’s 8.5-million people.

Catholic University disinivites speaker’s lesbian sister

(RNS) The president of The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., canceled a speech scheduled for Thursday (April 23) by Candace Gingrich, a lesbian activist and the sister of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.

The Rev. Patrick Ellis, CU’s president, wrote in a statement that he had canceled the appearance by Gingrich because he concluded her talk would not be”compatible with the Catholic identity”of the school.

Gingrich, a spokeswoman for the Human Rights Campaign Fund’s National Coming Out Project, was slated to address CU students about how to end discrimination against gays at the university, The Washington Post reported. She had been invited by the school’s Organization for Lesbian and Gay Student Rights.

About a month ago, the gay students’ group had received permission to invite Gingrich by the Rev. Robert Friday, CU’s vice president.”Upon reflection, I have asked Father Robert Friday to withdraw the invitation to Candace Gingrich,”wrote Ellis.”While I am grateful for (his) role as a moderator of the sponsoring group and for his intention to provide as much balance as possible among viewpoints, I have concluded that the presentation could not be compatible with the Catholic identity of the Catholic University of America.” The U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, while maintaining that homosexual activity is a sin, issued a pastoral statement last year encouraging churches to be more tolerant of homosexuals and for families to support their gay members.

The bishops’ letter has sparked great debate within the church.

Gingrich said it was the first time in the three years she has been speaking in public that she had been”disinvited.””I feel deep sadness and disappointment that there are those at Catholic University who felt that it was necessary to muzzle this dialogue,”she said.

TV’s `Ellen’ gets the gate at NBC

(RNS)”Ellen,”the controversial TV sitcom that was the first to have an out-of-the-closet lesbian leading character, has been canceled by ABC after five seasons.

The show, which began with high ratings, became a source of controversy and national debate as the title character slowly moved into revealing her homosexuality.

Both the actress, Ellen DeGeneres, and the character came out of the closet last season with more than 36 million people watching the April 30 episode in which the character’s lesbianism was revealed.

It was one of the most watched moments in television history, the Associated Press reported.

But after that, the show’s rating began to slip and DeGeneres and the network feuded over the show’s content and direction. This year, the show averaged fewer than 11 million viewers an episode, a 22 percent drop over the previous year.

The last show is scheduled for May 13.

Quote of the date: Chinese dissident Wang Dan

(RNS)”Any movement that results in the death of people, even if it’s just one person, raises the question of the moral role of the participants. When so many people died, I have the feeling of moral guilt in this matter and imagine I will have it all my life.” _ Wang Dan, a leader of the pro-democracy student protests at the time of the 1989 Tiamanman Square demonstrations in which hundreds were killed by the Chinese army, in a speech Thursday (April 23) at the City University of New York.

DEA END RNS