c. 2003 Religion News Service
Update: Paige Interview Contained Errors, Baptist News Service States
(RNS) The Southern Baptist Convention’s news service has acknowledged “factual and contextual errors” in an interview it published that included controversial remarks by U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige.
Baptist Press reported April 7 that Paige said: “All things equal, I would prefer to have a child in a school that has a strong appreciation for the values of the Christian community, where a child is taught to have a strong faith.”
But an Education Department transcript of the interview, released by Baptist Press, recorded Paige as saying: “All things equal, I would prefer to have a child in a school where there’s a strong appreciation for values, the kind of values that I think are associated with the Christian communities, and so that this child can be brought up in an environment that teaches them to have strong faith and to understand that there is a force greater than them personally.”
Paige’s comment was in response to a question about universities.
The education secretary held a press conference Wednesday (April 9) to clarify his comments and said he respects church-state separation.
Baptist Press released the interview transcript Friday in an attempt to address confusion about his comments.
“The report accurately portrayed the substance of Dr. Paige’s faith in God but contained factual and contextual errors in other respects,” the news service stated. “We regret the misrepresentations by the writer. Todd Starnes has been a trusted correspondent but no longer will be employed to write for Baptist Press.”
Starnes, a former assistant editor at Baptist Press, has recently become the director of university communications at Union University in Jackson, Tenn. He conducted the interview for the university’s magazine.
The Anti-Defamation League, whose national director wrote Paige saying he was “deeply troubled” by the reported comments, welcomed Paige’s clarification.
But the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the transcript left him with a worse impression of Paige’s views.
“I’m glad in theory he believes in separation of church and state, but neither his words nor his conduct demonstrate an understanding of it,” Lynn told Religion News Service.
Lynn, who has opposed the Education Department’s new “guidance” for public schools regarding religion, said the transcript included Paige saying he is puzzled by animosity toward religion in schools.
Lynn said he thinks the transcript confirms the “essential correctness” of the original report and “disturbing comments” by Paige.
_ Adelle M. Banks
Vatican Confirms 100th Papal Trip: A Five-Day Visit to Croatia
VATICAN CITY (RNS) The Vatican confirmed Friday (April 11) that Pope John Paul II will make his 100th papal trip outside Italy in June _ a five-day visit to Croatia.
Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said that the Roman Catholic pontiff will make his third visit to Croatia June 5-9, stopping in Rijeka in the northwest, Dubrovnik on the central coast, Osjek in the south and Djakovo in the east where he will beatify a candidate for sainthood. The trip will come only weeks after John Paul’s 83rd birthday May 18.
The Croatia trip is one of at least four, and possibly six, that the pope is expected to make this year. He will visit Spain May 3-4, Bosnia June 22 and Slovakia Sept. 11-14 and has been invited to travel to Mongolia in late August and to France to speak at the European Parliament in Strasbourg in the fall.
The Vatican on Friday also issued the program for John Paul’s overnight visit to Madrid, the fifth trip he has made to Spain in his 241/2 years as pope.
In addition to proclaiming five new Spanish saints at an outdoor Mass in Plaza de Colon in the center of the Spanish capital, John Paul will meet with President Jose Maria Aznar, King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia and address a gathering of young people at the Cuatro Vientos Air Base.
The candidates for sainthood, two men and three women, are founders or members of religious orders.
In the first 24 years of his papacy, John Paul visited 130 countries, many of them more than once. He traveled a total of 742,550 miles, the equivalent of almost 31 times around the world or more than three times to the moon.
_ Peggy Polk
Founders of National Catholic Reporter, Ramparts Dead
(RNS) Two giants of the Catholic publishing world _ the founder of National Catholic Reporter and the founder of Ramparts _ died recently.
Robert Hoyt, who founded the independent National Catholic Reporter in 1964 and helped set the standards for coverage of the Roman Catholic Church, died of a heart attack April 10 in New York. He was 81.
Edward Keating, a Catholic convert whose Ramparts magazine became the pre-eminent voice of the anti-war left, died in Palo Alto, Calif., on April 2. He was 77.
Hoyt started the Kansas City-based weekly paper as an alternative to church-owned newspapers. “If the mayor of a city owned its only newspaper, its citizens will not learn what they need and deserve to know about its affairs,” he once said, according to The New York Times.
Hoyt and his first wife, Bernadette Lyon, unsuccessfully tried to start a national Catholic daily newspaper in 1950. He eventually became the editor of the Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., diocesan paper and started the independent NCR in 1964.
He left the paper in 1970 and worked on the presidential bids of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. In 1971, he was the spokesman for the “Harrisburg Seven,” including the Revs. Daniel and Philip Berrigan who were accused of plotting to kidnap Henry Kissinger and ransack government buildings.
From 1977 to 1985 he was an editor at Christianity & Crisis, and from 1989 to 2002 he was a senior writer at Commonweal. He is survived by his second wife, Mig Boyle, and seven children.
Keating converted to Catholicism in his late 20s and eventually left the church and became an agnostic. Ramparts, which he launched as a literary quarterly for intellectual Catholics, was published from 1962 to 1975.
Intended to expose hypocrisy in the church, Ramparts soon lost its Catholic base and quickly became the leading voice of the American left, particularly those opposed to the Vietnam War. Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University, said the magazine helped shape “the New Left.”
“While it only had a short history, it had a major impact in terms of shaping opinions about civil rights and anti-war issues,” Carson told the Los Angeles Times.
Keating later became part of a legal defense team for Black Panthers leader Huey Newton and lost a 1967 congressional race. He is survived by six children and six grandchildren.
Lutheran Financial Network Gives $760,000 to Habitat for Humanity
WASHINGTON (RNS) A $20,000 grant might seem like a small step toward raising $230,000 for a new home, but Jim Gleason of Habitat for Humanity of Orange County was pleased to get the money, a grant from Thrivent Financial for Lutherans Foundation.
“This is a great example of how faith organizations can work with Habitat and put that faith in action,” said Gleason, director of development for Habitat.
Orange County, Calif., was one of 40 Habitat for Humanity International affiliates across the country to share $760,000 in grants pledged by the foundation of Thrivent Financial, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit financial services organization that primarily serves members of Lutheran churches. Habitat is a nonprofit Christian housing organization that builds homes for low-income families.
Habitat for Humanity of the Lehigh Valley, Pa., will use its $20,000 grant to renovate a home in Hellertown, Pa., for a single mother and her teenage daughter. The renovation is expected to cost between $25,000 and $28,000 so the grant money will cover at least 75 percent of the necessary funding, according to Lory Anderson, Habitat’s local director.
“There was an interested group of Hellertown Lutherans who want to help on the project,” Anderson said. “They are thrilled about us having the opportunity to do something in their back yard.”
Support from the local Lutheran congregation was one criterion used by Thrivent in the selection process, along with the viability of existing local fund-raising and the number of organizations involved in the effort.
Since 1991, the foundation of Thrivent Financial has contributed $8.5 million in grants while volunteer chapters of the organization have raised $3.7 million for Habitat.
_ Susie Oh
French Muslims Vote to Establish National Council
PARIS (RNS) After almost two decades of false starts and bitter sparring, French Muslim leaders finally elected their first, formal body this week representing the country’s second-largest religion.
More than 85 percent of religious representatives flocked to the polls in two-part voting that ended late Sunday (April 13). The organization groups a myriad of religious and ethnic strains, and represents some 5 million Muslims living in France.
French Jews, Protestants and Roman Catholics all have representative bodies, used to lobby the government for a host of religious demands. But long-standing differences among different Islamic currents here have scuttled a series of government efforts to organize French Muslims in a similar manner.
Still, election results announced Monday offered a disappointing setback for the powerful, government-favored Mosque of Paris. The French Interior Ministry had separately appointed the mosque’s rector, Dalil Boubakeur, as the council’s head for the next two years. But in voting, the Mosque placed behind two rival groups in many parts of France.
Nonetheless, Boubakeur and other Muslims leaders moved quickly to paper over their differences.
“Despite our excellent results, we’re going to remain loyal to the engagements we took on,” Fouad Alaoui, head of the Union of Islamic Organizations in France, said in an interview Monday. “We’re going to work within a framework of unity and consensus with all the elements of French Islam.”
The Union placed ahead of the Paris Mosque in the voting, but occupies a secondary place in the council’s political hierarchy.
For the French government, the vote represents a political coup in its push to organize a politically palatable, “mainstream” Islam. Indeed, elections are particularly timely, as the government confronts a new wave of attacks on Jews, coinciding with the war on Iraq. Many have been blamed on disenfranchised Muslim youths.
“So long as Muslims weren’t organized, who were we supposed to dialogue with?” French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin asked during a television interview this month. “And when Islam is being expressed in cellars, hidden in neighborhoods, then obviously we don’t sense secularity as a Republican value.”
Still, the council remains deeply controversial among France’s Islamic community, and skeptics wonder if it will help integrate the country’s large ethnic-Arab community.
“The council doesn’t interest me because I don’t feel at all represented by these types of people,” Mimi Otsmane, a practicing Muslim of North African extraction, said in a recent interview. “Many Muslims will say the same thing. We’re capable of saying what we think by ourselves, and voting for the political leaders we want.”
Female representation offers another potential source of controversy. The single woman appointed to the body, Betoule Fekkar-Lambiotte, stepped down in February. It was not immediately clear how many women _ if any _ were voted in as council representatives.
_ Elizabeth Bryant
Williams Says World Peace Depends on the `Peace of Jerusalem’
LONDON (RNS) Rowan Williams, the new archbishop of Canterbury, said in his first official visit to the Holy Land that peace in the rest of the world depends on peace for the people of the Middle East.
Williams, who celebrated Palm Sunday Mass at the Anglican Cathedral of St. George the Martyr, said in a pastoral letter that the peace of the world depends “so directly on the peace of Jerusalem.”
“But for the last few months, with all the suffering and fear they have brought, it has been so painfully clear that without peace and justice for all the peoples of the Holy Land there is small hope of lasting reconciliation in the wider world,” he said.
Williams said peace never comes without cost. The deepest enemy of peace is always the spirit of grasping and clinging to what makes us feel safe, he said. Meanwhile, those who love violence continue to keep the wounds open.
“Disproportionate, indiscriminate force, applied not only by weaponry but by constant harassment; the insane butchery of terrorism, dressed up as heroism _ these things serve only to keep the door firmly closed to any hope of taking away fear,” Williams said.
“This Easter, we pray for the sake of the whole region and the whole world, that those who hold power may know how to take the risk of giving it away for the sake of greater peace; and that those who have no power may take the risk of stepping out of helpless resentment into something new,” the archbishop said.
_ Robert Nowell
Quote of the Day: Shiite Muslim Cleric Ali Shawki
(RNS) “We order people to obey us. When we say stand up, they stand up. When we say sit down, they sit down. With the collapse of Saddam, the people have turned to the clergy.”
_ Ali Shawki, the imam of the Prophet Muhammad Mosque in Baghdad, speaking to The Washington Post about power claims in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.
KRE END RNS
