c. 2007 Religion News Service
Update: Woman Who Sought Sanctuary in Church Deported
(RNS) U.S. officials deported illegal Mexican immigrant and activist Elvira Arellano Sunday (Aug. 19) in Los Angeles, days after she left her refuge at a Chicago church to launch a national immigration-reform campaign.
Arellano, 32, was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs officers “without incident” and transported to San Ysidro, Calif., where she was turned over to Mexican immigration officials late Sunday, ICE announced Monday.
Arellano’s 8-year-old son, Saul, who is a U.S. citizen, was with her at the time of her arrest, federal officials said, and was left in the custody of her traveling companions. Among those companions was the Rev. Walter Coleman, of Adalberto United Methodist Church in Chicago, where Arellano had eluded federal capture for more than a year.
After illegally entering the U.S. twice, Arellano was arrested in 2002 and convicted of using another person’s Social Security number to illegally obtain employment, ICE said.
On Aug. 15, Arellano announced that she would begin a multi-city campaign to push for immigration reform, which would end Sept. 12 with a vigil in Washington. Los Angeles was to be the first stop on that campaign.
_ Daniel Burke
Graham `Fair and Improving’ in Hospital
(RNS) Evangelist Billy Graham is in “fair and improving” condition at a North Carolina hospital after he was admitted Saturday (Aug. 18) for intestinal bleeding, a spokesperson said Monday.
Graham, 88, is alert, walking around and visiting with family, said Graham spokesperson Melany Ethridge.
The evangelist remains near his home, at Mission Health & Hospitals in Asheville, N.C., for “evaluation and rest,” Ethridge said.
Graham’s physicians have said the illness does not appear to be life-threatening.
Medical tests showed no areas of bleeding in the gastrointestinal tract, according to the hospital. The bleeding may have come from small pouches that form in the lower intestines, Graham’s doctors said.
The evangelist, whose wife of 64 years, Ruth Graham, died in June, suffers from Parkinson’s disease and has been largely home-bound in recent years.
_ Daniel Burke
Study Finds Criminal Futures for Many Aboriginal Victims
VANCOUVER, British Columbia (RNS) A startling psychological study suggests more than half the aboriginal students abused at Canada’s church-run residential schools went on to criminal activity.
The new research also counters widespread preconceptions that clergy were most responsible for abusing the former students.
The study, published in the August edition of the B.C. Medical Journal, shows that almost two-thirds of 127 aboriginals who say they were abused while attending Canada’s residential schools ended up involved in crime; three former students became murderers.
The former students who turned to crime, all of whom are now adults, have been convicted of physical assaults, robbery, major driving charges and numerous sex crimes.
The two criminologists who coauthored the report _ Ray Corrado of Simon Fraser University and Irwin Cohen of University College of the Fraser Valley _ link a century-long history of abuse at Canada’s more than 100 residential schools with the chronically high incarceration rate that continues among Canada’s aboriginals.
Another revealing discovery made by the study’s five researchers, led by psychologist Ingrid Sochting of suburban Vancouver’s Richmond General Hospital, is that the largest group of perpetrators at the now-defunct residential schools were non-clergy staff.
Canada’s aboriginal residential schools were operated for about a century by churches while being funded by the federal government, until the last ones were shut down, mainly in the 1960s and 1970s.
While many Canadians blame the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada denominations for what that went wrong inside residential schools, this study, for the first time, provides hard data suggesting priests were the abusers in only 3.7 percent of cases studied; nuns in 2.9 percent.
A minority of the aboriginals who agreed to be interviewed for the study _ 70 percent of whom were male _ admitted they had also been abused in their villages, usually before they were forced to attend residential schools. Their most common sexual abuser was an aunt.
When it came to physical abuse in the aboriginal villages, mothers were the victimizers in 37 percent of the cases, followed by fathers at 31 percent.
_ Douglas Todd
Quote of the Day: Author and Pastor Greg Boyd of St. Paul, Minn.
(RNS) “It amazes me that Jesus could call a Matthew and a Simon both to be his disciples. Matthew was a tax collector, a conservative of the conservatives. Simon was a zealot, the liberal of the liberals. … They were farther apart than Ted Kennedy and Rush Limbaugh could ever dream of being. … What’s amazing is that you don’t find Jesus whispering a word about which one he thought was better. … Jesus is the lord of a transpolitical kingdom.”
_ Greg Boyd, senior pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minn., and author of “The Myth of a Christian Nation,” speaking at a recent forum on ministers and politics in Washington sponsored by Christian Ethics Today, a bimonthly journal.
KRE/LF END RNS
