c. 2000 Religion News Service
Georgia Baptists Affirm New Southern Baptist Faith Statement
(RNS) Disagreeing with a famous fellow Baptist, delegates to the Georgia Baptist Convention affirmed the new faith statement of the Southern Baptist Convention at their annual meeting Tuesday (Nov. 14).
Former President Jimmy Carter, who attends a church in Plains, Ga., announced in October that he could no longer be associated with the nation’s largest Protestant denomination after the revamped Baptist Faith and Message was adopted in June. Carter, who remains a Baptist deacon and Sunday School teacher, called it “an increasingly rigid creed” and hoped to influence the state convention’s vote on the statement.
But apparently a majority of the delegates did not agree with Carter.
“The convention body voted approximately 2-to-1 to affirm that Baptist Faith and Message,” Georgia Baptist Convention President William Ricketts told Religion News Service.
Ricketts said there was about 20 minutes of discussion before a motion was made to vote on the resolution that expressed “official approval and appreciation” of the Baptist Faith and Message.
He said most of the discussion centered on how the new document addresses the interpretation of Scripture.
The resolution notes that the statement, “while not being an official creed, and while possessing only such authority as voluntary acceptance imposes, constitutes a general consensus of what Southern Baptists believe.”
More than 3,400 delegates were registered at the annual meeting of the Georgia Baptists, whose gathering in Savannah ended Tuesday.
Hackers Distribute Virus Through Vatican’s Holy Year E-Mail List
(RNS) Hackers invaded the Vatican’s Holy Year Web site Monday (Nov. 13) and distributed a computer virus to every address on the site’s e-mail list, including news organizations and the Vatican Secretariat of State, it was reported Tuesday (Nov. 14).
Italian news agencies said all subscribers to the daily bulletin of the Central Committee for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000 received a file attachment titled navidad1.exe. When opened, it duplicated itself seven times and disabled software.
Vatican officials said the virus apparently did no permanent damage, however. Once the file was deleted, the infected computer functioned normally.
The hackers apparently put the file into the system through the e-mail address of someone working on the Vatican committee. The server automatically sent it on to the mailing list for the daily bulletin of Holy Year events.
The committee’s switchboard was flooded with calls of complaint, and officials sent out an emergency message advising subscribers to delete the navidad attachment without opening it.
Navidad is Spanish for Christmas.
Update: Vietnam Rejects Religious Freedom Report
(RNS) Vietnamese authorities Tuesday (Nov. 14) denounced as slanderous a report from a U.S.-based human rights group that charged the country with suppressing Christianity.
“This information that says Vietnam suppresses religion is distorted and slanderous,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Phan Thuy Thanh said in a statement, according to Reuters news agency.
On Friday (Nov. 10), the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Religious Freedom, an arm of the human rights group Freedom House, revealed eight documents the center claimed provided “irrefutable evidence” of a government campaign “to arrest and reverse the country’s growing Christian movements.”
The report comes as President Clinton prepares for a three-day visit to Vietnam, the first by a U.S. president in 31 years. Organizations such as Human Rights Watch have asked the president to address Vietnam’s human rights record while he is in the country.
Dating from early 1998 to June 2000, the documents recommend that officials take steps to curb religion, such as prohibiting religious study groups. One document questioned whether Christian churches helped bring about the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe. Others encouraged government leaders to “work hard to control religious leaders, officials and missionaries” and ensure that “religious law yields to the `secular law.”’
“Several of the documents refer to the Protestant movement among the Hmong and other tribal peoples as being `hostile,’ `dangerous’ and a `problem,”’ the center noted.
Nina Shea, the center’s director, said the documents were a “smoking gun” that contradicted Vietnam’s public declarations of religious tolerance.
Vatican Delegation Visits North Korea for Talks and Religious Rites
(RNS) Vatican diplomats, visiting Pyongyang for the fifth time in recent years, have met with officials of the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the official church, held a prayer service and celebrated Mass, the Vatican said Tuesday (Nov. 14).
Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said Monsignors Celestino Migliore, undersecretary of state for international relations, and Marino Montenayor, an aide to Migliore, wound up their official visit Tuesday.
Relations between the Vatican and North Korea’s Communist government have improved since Roman Catholic charities began offering aid to the country, hard hit by the loss of economic ties with the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s and by famine in the late 1990s.
“The delegation of the Holy See, in its fifth consecutive visit to Pyongyang, wanted to reaffirm the pope’s constant and real solidarity with the population of North Korea and to continue the previous relations established with the governing authorities, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in particular,” Navarro-Valls said in a statement.
The spokesman said the high points of the visit were a prayer meeting with the Catholic community of Pyongyang and a Mass celebrated in the Church of Chan Chung, the country’s only Catholic church. After the Mass, the prelates met with a leader of the government-sanctioned Catholic Association of North Korea, he said.
Reports from South Korea earlier this year said the North Korean regime wanted to invite Pope John Paul II to visit the country, but Navarro-Valls said there has been no formal invitation to date.
Study: Most Dying Patients Shun Euthanasia, Physician-Assisted Suicide
(RNS) The majority of dying patients would not choose physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia to end their lives, a new study has found.
About one of 10 patients who were terminally ill said they seriously considered using euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide. Fewer than 6 percent said they had seriously discussed either measure for themselves or hoarded drugs with the intent of committing suicide.
One patient in the study made an unsuccessful suicide attempt and another died as a result of euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide.
The study, published in the Nov. 15 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, is considered to be the first major assessment of attitudes of terminally ill patients regarding the hotly contested issues.
The study found that those who consider euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are affected by depression, feel unappreciated and have substantial need for assistance with basic functions such as eating, dressing, transportation and homemaking.
Researchers also learned that shortness of breath, rather than pain, was the physical symptom most closely tied to first thoughts of physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia.
“Improving end-of-life care has often been framed as a question of permitting either physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia,” said Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, the lead investigator for the study and chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health.
“But these issues are largely irrelevant and distract us from attending to the real issues of the dying: depression and meeting patients’ needs for all kinds of help in their everyday lives.”
The authors of the study caution that doctors who receive requests for physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia should not consider patients to be settled on such requests.
Half of those who initially considered either way of ending their lives changed their minds at a follow-up interview. An almost equal number of patients who did not consider those measures in the first interview changed their minds in a follow-up interview.
The study was based on interviews of 988 terminally ill adults and their primary caregivers in March 1996 and March 1997. No margin of error was calculated for the study, Emanuel said.
Physician-assisted suicide was defined as a case where a patient ends his or her own life with the help of a doctor. Euthanasia was defined as a case where another person ends a patient’s life at the request of the patient.
The study was funded by the Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based organization that works to help Americans live productive and healthy lives, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation, a New York-based organization that supports humane, patient-centered care at the beginning and end of life.
Orthodox Patriarch Awarded Environmental Award
(RNS) The leader of the world’s 200 million Orthodox Christians was commended for his commitment to the environment Monday (Nov. 13) with an award by a New York conservation group during a visit to Manhattan.
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, widely called “the Green Patriarch” for his support of the environment, was presented the International Visionary Award for Environmental Achievement by Scenic Hudson, an environmental group based in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
Bartholomew is widely known for his efforts to clean up environmental damage in the Danube River and the Black Sea near his base in Istanbul, Turkey. New York Gov. George Pataki heralded Bartholomew’s linking of faith and God’s creation.
“With the presence of His Holiness, we have clear proof that God is on our side,” Pataki said during a luncheon at the Metropolitan Club of Manhattan, according to the New York Times.
Bartholomew said there is little doubt that mankind and the environment are divinely tied together.
“Human beings and the environment compose a seamless garment of existence, a multicolored cloth which we believe to be woven by God,” he said during a speech.
Environmentalists said the patriarch has given unprecedented attention to the need to protect the natural creation.
“One has the feeling that this is a true St. Francis of Assisi type,” said Alex Zagoreos, a trustee with Scenic Hudson.
Cyprus Church Embroiled in Gay Allegations
(RNS) Allegations of a homosexual affair involving a senior bishop brought leaders of the Greek Orthodox Church in Cyprus together for an emergency meeting Tuesday (Nov. 14) to consider the charges.
Armed police escorted the religious leaders into the capital city’s archbishopric where clerics prepared to discuss the accusations against Athanassios, bishop of Limassol, Cyprus.
Athanassios maintains he is not homosexual and that the charges leveled against him by a 33-year-old barber living in Greece are false, Agence France Presse reported. The barber claimed that when he was a teen-ager and a novice monk he was seduced by Athanassios at the Mount Athos monastic community in Greece.
Supporters of Athanassios, a former monk at Mount Athos, say he is the target of religious leaders who want to block him from becoming the Archbishop of Cyprus.
“This pits the old guard of bishops associated more with business against bishops like Athanassios, who is bringing the church closer to the people,” said the bishop’s lawyer, Christos Clerides.
The meeting Tuesday marked the first major gathering of Orthodox Bishops (or Major Holy Synod) in Cyprus since 1973, and only the second such synod in almost 2,000 years. Despite the church’s disapproval, homosexuality has been legal in Cyprus for the past three years.
Quote of the Day: `Web Pastor’ Eric Elder
(RNS) “I love church. Church is great. But in a church, my message only goes about a hundred feet. On the Net, it goes to a hundred countries.”
Eric Elder, self-described “Web pastor” whose spiritual retreat center, TheRanch.org, exists solely in cyberspace. Elder, of Streator, Ill., was quoted in the Monday (Nov. 13) edition of USA Today.
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