c. 1998 Religion News Service

`Islamic extremist’ kills three nuns in Yemen

(RNS) Three Roman Catholic nuns in Yemen were shot to death Monday (July 27) by a suspected gunman the Yemeni government called an”Islamic extremist.” The nuns _ one from the Philippines and two from India _ were from the Sisters of Charity order founded by Mother Teresa and worked as nurses at a clinic in the Red Sea city of Hodeida, the Associated Press reported.

The nuns, ages 35 to 40, were sprayed with bullets from a automatic weapon as they left the clinic, where about a dozen sisters provide medical services.

The suspect, Abdullah al Nasheri, 22, said he killed the nuns because they were”preaching Christianity,”Reuters reported.

Yemen is a predominately Muslim nation on the southwest tip of the Saudi Arabian peninsula and is one of the most impoverished Arab states. Large parts of Yemen are lawless, inhabited by tribes that kidnap foreigners and widely use firearms, the AP reported. Unofficial estimates say there are some 50 million firearms in Yemen, more than three weapons for each citizen.

The Sisters of Charity have worked in Yemen since 1970, with some 25 nuns working in four facilities located in the main cities. This is the first known attack against the group, Yemeni officials said.

Sister Nirmala, Mother Teresa’s successor of the order, left the group’s Calcutta headquarters on Monday headed for Yemen to meet with the sisters there.

Swindoll, best-selling author, to start new church

(RNS) The Rev. Charles Swindoll, a seminary president and best-selling author, has decided to start an interdenominational church in Frisco, Texas, a community north of Dallas.

Swindoll announced Thursday (July 23) he wants to start the congregation on a 60-acre cornfield, The Dallas Morning News reported.

He expects the Stonebriar Community Church to begin meeting by early fall and hopes a 2,500-seat auditorium will be constructed by spring 1999. The church would meet at a temporary site until the structure was completed.

Swindoll, 63, is known worldwide and is likely to have a large following among people in the fast-growing suburban area, the newspaper reported.”With the kind of growth we’re seeing out in the Frisco area, I can envision a remarkable beginning as folks from all over, searching for this kind of church, can find what they’ve been hungering for,”said Swindoll, who often is called Chuck.

Swindoll served as pastor of churches in Massachusetts and California before arriving at the seminary in 1994.

Catholics erect new crosses at Auschwitz

(RNS) Polish Catholics have erected more than 50 crosses outside the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, setting up the possibility of a new confrontation with Jewish groups who view such actions as attempts to”Christianize”the Holocaust.

The new crosses _ one of them nearly nine-feet tall _ were placed near a 22-foot crucifix that commemorates a 1988 visit to Auschwitz by Pope John Paul II, Reuters reported Saturday (July 25).

The Polish news service PAP said the new crosses were erected by a Roman Catholic workers’ group.”We want the entire escarpment to teem with crosses,”said group member Kazimierz Switon.

The Nazis murdered some 1.5 million people at Auschwitz, which is near the Polish town of Oswiecim. Ninety percent of the victims were Jews.

However, Catholics have insisted they have the right to mourn the members of their faith who also died at Auschwitz. As a result, the site has long been a flashpoint for interreligious conflict. In 1993, a Catholic nuns’ convent was removed from the site following international Jewish protests.

Rabbi Menachem Pinkas Joskowicz, Poland’s chief rabbi, said the presence of Christian crosses at Auschwitz makes it difficult for religious Jews to pray at the site.

Poll: Pushing morality could hurt GOP in House

(RNS) A new poll commissioned by moderate Republicans says the GOP could lose its majority in the House of Representatives this fall if its candidates focus too narrowly on such moral issues as homosexuality and abortion.

The poll released Monday (July 27) by the Republican Leadership Council also showed the GOP is likely to increase its House majority if its candidates focus on the economy, education, crime and other similar broad-based issues.

Despite rumblings from religious broadcaster James C. Dobson and others about deserting the Republican Party if it does not press moral issues more forcefully, the poll showed that conservative voters who put moral issues at the top of their agenda are not likely to leave the party _ even if their issues are not pushed by GOP candidates.

The poll surveyed 800 likely voters in 77 congressional districts where Republicans won or lost in 1996 by 10 percentage points or less.

Asked to list their primary concerns, just 12.1 percent choose moral issues, while 40.5 percent selected economic issues and 32.4 percent named education, health care, the environment and other”social”issues.

More than 82 percent of the moral conservatives said they would or probably would vote Republican.

Nearly 58 percent of those surveyed opposed legislating a moral agenda, the Associated Press reported, and 58.2 percent opposed requiring GOP candidates to oppose certain late-term abortion practices in order to gain party support.

The poll was conducted by Kieran Mahoney and Associates between July 17-20 and has a 3.5 percent margin of error.

United Methodists’ donations to church programs increases

(RNS) United Methodists’ donations to their denomination’s programs have increased by almost 2 percent during the first half of 1998.

The eight funds that receive money through the apportionments system of the United Methodist Church gained a total of $34.65 million by midyear, which was an increase of $600,000 from the amount received by June 30, 1997, said Sandra Kelley Lackore, the treasurer and general secretary of the denomination’s General Council on Finance and Administration. That means giving from the annual (or regional) conferences to fund churchwide ministries and administration increased by 1.8 percent.

World Service, the church’s basic benevolence fund, increased by 2.2 percent or $400,000, compared to 1997. Receipts for that fund were $18 million at midyear 1997, compared to $18.4 million this year.

While church officials saw an increase in giving to apportioned funds, there also was an increase in Special Sunday offerings, which are taken six times a year to focus on such areas as human relations, Native American awareness and peace and justice.”When Special Sunday offering receipts are taken into account, the 1998 midyear total is about $1 million higher than the comparable 1997 figure,”Lackore said.

Brazil’s Catholic Church debates syncretism

(RNS) The transfer of a black Roman Catholic bishop out of a diocese that is a center of Candomble _ an Afro-Brazilian religion that developed among slaves brought from Africa to Brazil _ has opened a debate in the Brazilian church over the permissible levels of syncretism, the blending or fusing of differing religious beliefs and practices.

Bishop Gilio Felicio, 48, recently named by the Vatican as an auxiliary bishop of Salvador, Brazil, the capital of Bahia in northeastern Brazil, was suddenly transferred out of the diocese by Cardinal Lucas Moreira Neves.

Felicio was the first black clergyman to hold the post of auxiliary bishop in the region.

According to the Latin American and Caribbean Communications Agency, the religiously funded regional news agency, Felicio was transferred because he urged toleration of Candomble and argued there was a”profound link”between the two faiths.

Bur Moreira said he will”continue combatting syncretism”and that while it made sense to support Afro-Brazilian religions when they were banned and persecuted. Now,”each person should follow their own faith, without mixing them,”he said.

The news agency quoted Alberico Paiva Pereira, an expert on religion in Brazil, as saying people in the region”sincerely believe and with strength, in Jesus, the Catholic saints and in the Orixas (Candomble saints).”

Quote of the Day: Rabbi Gerald L. Zelizer of New Jersey

(RNS)”This dawning technology of cloning to alleviate human suffering should also be embraced by formal religion. It enables couples who previously turned to anonymous strangers for egg, sperm or embryo donations to have a genetic tie to their children and fulfill more directly the biblical mandate at Eden, `Be fruitful and multiply.'” _ Rabbi Gerald L. Zelizer, spiritual leader of Neve Shalom, a Conservative congregation in the Metuchen-Edison, N.J. area, in an op-ed column in the Monday (July 27) edition of USA Today.

DEA END RNS