c. 2006 Religion News Service

Archbishop of Canterbury Slams `Flaws’ in Iraq War

LONDON (RNS) Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams on Friday (Dec. 29) attacked the decision by the United States and Britain to go to war in Iraq as having “moral and practical flaws,” and said he wonders whether he could have done more to try to prevent it.

“I am wholly prepared to believe that those who made the decisions made them in good faith,” Williams told British Broadcasting Corp. radio. “But I think those decisions were flawed.”

“I think the moral and practical flaws have emerged as time has gone on _ very painfully,” he said.

The archbishop, who leads both the Church of England and the worldwide Anglican Communion, conceded he had questioned whether he should have been more prominent in the anti-war movement. “I can’t easily balance for myself the pros and cons of thinking about putting yourself at the head of a popular movement and resisting.”

Although he remains convinced he said what he needed to say, “I shall need to think quite a long time about whether I ought to have said more or less on that matter,” Williams told his radio audience.

His latest condemnation of the conflict came barely a week after he slammed the British and U.S. governments for their “short-sighted” and “ignorant” policies in Iraq that were putting the lives of Christians across the Middle East in danger.

“The first Christian believers were Middle Easterners,” Williams said in a commentary published in The Times newspaper in London (Dec. 23). “It’s a very sobering thought that we might live to see the last native Christian believers in the region.”

In Iraq itself, he said during a visit to Bethlehem over the Christmas period, “what we have seen in the last year or so … has been attacks on Christian priests, the murder of some Christian priests and the massive departure of large numbers of Christians” from the war-torn country.

_ Al Webb

`Buddha Boy’ Reappears After Nine Months

CHENNAI, India (RNS) A teenaged Nepalese boy, believed by some to be a reincarnation of Gautama Buddha, has reappeared in eastern Nepal after vanishing for nine months, according to media reports.

Sixteen-year-old Ram Bahadur Bomjan was spotted on Sunday (Dec. 24) by villagers in the remote and dense forests near Piluwa village in Bara district, 95 miles east of the capital city Kathmandu, according to a local journalist, Raju Shrestha, who visited the boy the next day.

Bomjan disappeared in March from the forests in nearby Ratanpuri village, where he had reportedly been meditating under a tree without food or water for almost 10 months. “I’ve been wandering in the forests since then,” Shrestha quoted the boy telling him. “I’m engaged in devotion which will continue for six years.”

Many curious onlookers, including several Buddhists, crowded the site to see the boy sitting in a meditation position. A local TV station showed people pressing their palms together and bowing their heads in reverence.

Shrestha, who met the “Buddha boy” up close, said the youngster had shoulder-length hair and sat cross-legged under a small tree. The boy had a flat-ended scimitar next to him. Bomjan did not say how he came by the sword, simply remarking that he was carrying it for his protection.

Shrestha said the boy “has some sort of extra strength to meditate. He eats herbs.”

Before his disappearance, an estimated 100,000 people from Nepal and neighboring India flocked to see Bomjan in meditation. They were, however, not allowed to get closer than about 165 feet.

Disciples blocked requests by some scientists who wanted to test the boy to see if he had really not taken any food or water.

When Bomjan vanished last March, some villagers said his meditation was disturbed by the din created by people coming to see him. Though security forces and villagers combed the area in the days following the youngster’s disappearance, he could not be traced.

_ Achal Narayanan

Ecumenical Activist Robert Bilheimer Dies at 89

(RNS) The Rev. Robert Bilheimer, a Presbyterian minister who helped organize the first meeting of the World Council of Churches and led opposition to the Vietnam war and apartheid in South Africa, died Dec. 17 at age 89.

Bilheimer died in Canandaigua, N.Y., of complications from a hip fracture suffered after a fall and the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

“Dad had a finely developed social conscience and he found a way to merge it with his Christianity and his vision of solidarity with the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed” his son, documentary filmmaker Robert E. Bilheimer, told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.

Bilheimer was among the organizers of the first meeting in 1948 of the World Council of Churches, the international ecumenical organization that emerged out of World War II. The council, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, currently counts as members 340 Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox church bodies and denominations in more than 100 countries.

He became an associate general secretary of the council in 1960 and was a leader in the effort by the WCC to declare apartheid _ South Africa’s system of racial separation _ a sin that could not be justified by any religious or theological arguments.

In 1963, Bilheimer became senior minister at Central Presbyterian Church in Rochester but returned to the ecumenical movement in 1966 to become international affairs director of the National Council of Churches. In 1971, he helped organize conferences of Christian and Jewish leaders against the war in Vietnam.

In 1974, Bilheimer became executive director of the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research in Collegeville, Minn., and remained there until his retirement in 1984.

Bilheimer was born in Denver and received both his undergraduate degree and his master of divinity from Yale University. He is survived by his wife, Dorothy, three sons and five grandchildren.

_ David Anderson

Quote of the Day: Muslim Congressman-elect Keith Ellison

“I’m a little incredulous about why anyone would care about what I’m going to swear on. In fact, if I swore on a book that wasn’t of my tradition … would you trust me?”

_ Muslim Congressman-elect Keith Ellison, speaking about the controversy surrounding his decision to take the oath of office on a Quran. He was quoted by the Detroit Free Press (Dec. 27).

KRE/CM END RNS