c. 1996 Religion News Service
Vatican criticizes anti-Cuba economic embargo law
(RNS) The Vatican has challenged both the legality and morality of a U.S. law aimed at tightening the American economic embargo on Fidel Castro’s regime by penalizing foreign firms that do business with Cuba.”It is a law that involves extra-territorial application in a way which is legally very questionable,”Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, head of the Vatican’s Justice and Peace Commission told Vatican Radio on Friday (Oct. 18).
Etchegaray was referring to the Helms-Burton Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton which went into effect earlier this year. The law bars any foreign company that does business with Cuba from doing business in the United States and bans travel to the United States by executives of the company. It also allows U.S. citizens to sue foreign firms that invest in property confiscated by the Cuban government after the 1959 revolution.
The law has been roundly criticized by Canada, Mexico and the United States’ European and Latin American trading partners as well as Cuba’s Roman Catholic bishops. The U.S. Roman Catholic bishops, as well as agencies of mainline Protestant denominations such as the United Methodist Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, also oppose the law on grounds that innocent people are harmed.
Etchegaray’s comments came as speculation over a possible November meeting between Castro and Pope John Paul II were gaining currency. Castro may attend the United Nations-sponsored food summit in Rome Nov. 13, which John Paul is scheduled to open. There have been suggestions from the Vatican that John Paul would visit Cuba, possibly in 1997.
A Vatican delegation headed by Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran is due to visit Cuba beginning Friday (Oct. 25).
In his comments, Etchegaray linked the Vatican to views expressed by Cardinal Jaime Ortega y Alamino, archbishop of Havana, whom he quoted as saying:”Any economic measure which aims to isolate the country by eliminating the possibility of development and even threatening the survival of the people is unacceptable.” Etchegaray said that the Vatican”is concerned by the appearance of attitudes which run counter to the principle of solidarity, which should be of particular inspiration in any policy regarding food.”
Update: Cleveland okays United Church of Christ hotel plans
(RNS) The Cleveland City Planning Commission has approved plans by the United Church of Christ (UCC) to build a seven-story, 93-room hotel in downtown Cleveland adjacent to the headquarters of the 1.5 million-member church.
The proposal was unanimously approved by the eight Planning Commission members attending the Friday (Oct. 18) meeting.
Church officials said they will now work with city planning staff on details of the project. The anticipated groundbreaking date for the $6.5 million project is March 1, 1997.
The hotel is a project of the denomination’s Board for Homeland Ministries, one of 13 national agencies located in Cleveland. Board officials say the hotel is a way of containing the costs of church-related meetings because church agencies will get below-market room rates at the new hotel. It will also be open to the general public.”We’re hoping to accomplish not just housing but a meeting place and a sense of community for people who visit the national offices of the United Church of Christ,”said the Rev. Robert P. Noble, the project coordinator.
Returns generated by the hotel will be used to support the home missions agency’s programs.
Baptist church in San Francisco to offer medicinal marijuana
(RNS) Dolores Street Baptist Church, an activist congregation that takes liberal positions on a variety of social issues, has announced that it will distribute marijuana to be used as medicine for people suffering from AIDS, cancer and other illnesses.
The church joins another San Francisco congregation, the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco, in deciding to make medicinal marijuana available. According to Associated Baptist Press, a half dozen other Bay Area churches are considering taking similar actions.
The two congregations’ action stems from an Aug. 4 raid by state law enforcement officials on a marijuana club that provided cannabis to people with AIDS.
Marijuana’s use as a medicine has been sharply debated over the past two years within the medical community. A number of doctors and activists contend that marijuana is useful in a number of medical situations, especially in combating weight loss by AIDS patients, combating the side effects _ especially nausea _ of cancer chemotherapy and easing the symptoms of glaucoma. The issue continues to be fought in the courts and federal regulatory agencies.
Over the years, the federal government has given approval to less than a dozen patients to receive marijuana for medicinal reasons from the government’s marijuana plot in Mississippi.”Our church believes that God’s law of healing is more important than state laws banning the use of marijuana of medicine,”the Dolores Street congregation said in an announcement.
The church statement acknowledged that some people abuse marijuana but said that to restrict the drug’s medicinal use because abuse sometimes occurs”is to deny Christ’s call to offer healing to all of God’s people in need.”We believe Jesus calls us to follow the laws of healing, justice and love,”the statement said.”At times, Christ’s call for healing stands in opposition to the laws of the state. When this happens, we humbly, prayerfully and earnestly must respond as Christ would respond.” The church, once funded by the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board, quit the Southern Baptist Convention in 1993 to protest the convention’s expulsion of two churches over gay issues. The congregation had already been kicked out of its local Baptist association and the California Southern Baptist Convention after declaring its openness to gays.
Supreme Court: Albuquerque can’t bar Jesus film
(RNS) The Supreme Court on Monday (Oct. 21) refused to let city officials in Albuquerque, N.M., bar the showing of a film at federally funded senior citizen centers because the film seeks to convert people to Christianity.
The court, without comment, turned down arguments that said showing the film at city-owned centers would violate the Constitution’s church-state separation requirement, the Associated Press reported.
In 1994, Don Kimbro, pastor of the non-denominational Church on the Rock, sought permission to show the film”Jesus”at the city’s senior centers and to hand out large-print New Testaments. The film urges viewers to accept Jesus as”Savior and Lord”and to pray to him every day.
City officials refused to let Kimbro show the film at the centers because, they said, federal law providing money to run the centers barred religious instruction or worship at the centers.
Kimbro sued, and after losing in the lower courts, won his appeal at the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which said the city’s action was an”unconstitutional restriction on expression”under the First Amendment’s free-speech guarantee.
Monday’s action by the Supreme Court was not a ruling on the merits of the case but left intact the 10th circuit’s ruling.
England’s Catholic bishops criticize unbridled free market
(RNS) The Roman Catholic bishops of England and Wales on Monday (Oct. 21) set out their vision of a fair and prosperous society in a statement likely to be read as a sharp criticism of the current Conservative government.
The English and Welsh bishops also criticized the nation’s casual acceptance of abortion, but said Catholics should not make abortion the single issue on which voters cast their ballots.
The statement, entitled”The Common Good,”uses traditional Catholic social teaching to address some of the economic and social issues facing Britain and is intended to improve Catholics’ awareness of church teaching and contribute to the national debate heading into the next general election, which must be held by next May.
In the statement, the bishops explicitly disavow political partisanship and say that while none of the main political parties merit unqualified support from Catholics, none is excluded from that support in principle.”It is not for bishops to tell people how to vote,”the statement said.
The bishops noted they have long maintained that Britain’s socialist-leaning Labour Party does not fall within the scope of the Vatican’s condemnations of socialism.”Nor does the papal condemnation of unlimited free-market, or laissez-faire, capitalism apply indiscriminately to the Conservative Party,”they added.
However, free-market policies came in for strong criticism. If poverty, even relative poverty, excludes people from participation in the life of the community, then that poverty demands attention, the bishops said.”Governments cannot be satisfied with provision for poor people designed only to prevent absolute poverty, such as actual starvation or physical homelessness,”they said.”There must come a point at which the scale of the gap between the very wealthy and those at the bottom of the range of income begins to undermine the common good.”This is the point at which society starts to be run for the benefit of the rich, not for all its members,”they added.
The bishops also lamented the decline in union membership in recent years and said that in some instances, government may have to intervene in labor disputes to protect the right of workers to organize.
Quote of the day: Rabbi Maurice Lamm, president of the National Institute for Jewish Hospice
(RNS) In the debate over euthanasia, society is toying with issues of life and death that could have explosive unintended consequences, says Rabbi Maurice Lamm, president of the National Institute for Jewish Hospice and chair of professional rabbinics at the Orthodox movement’s Yeshiva University. In a column in New York’s Jewish Week, Lamm said that Judaism _ and all the other religions of the Western world _ oppose euthanasia:”The first imperative of life is: live. Judaism not only frowned on suicide; it positively outlawed it. It raged against the idea of taking a guiltless life, which can be reclaimed only by its author, God. A person is a spiritual being, a creation of God. Taking a life through euthanasia is killing, regardless of the spin you put on it. You cannot measure the worth of anyone’s life, including your own. Mathematics and mortality walk hand-in-hand here. If life is infinitely holy, a fraction of life is also infinitely holy.”
MJP END RNS
