c. 1999 Religion News Service
Fever forces pope to cancel engagements on 11th day of visit to Poland
(RNS) Pope John Paul II took to his bed with a fever today, canceling plans to celebrate Mass for an expected 1 million people to mark the 1,000th anniversary of the founding of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland.
It was only the second time in his 87 trips abroad the pope has been forced to cancel an event because of illness, Vatican officials said. The first was in Peru in 1985 when he suffered a throat infection.
Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said the 79-year-old Roman Catholic pontiff began running a mild fever, probably caused by a virus, during the night. He said the pope’s temperature had risen to just under 100 degees Fahrenheit but late Tuesday had dropped.”The pope is feeling better,”Navarro-Valls said.
The spokesman, who has a medical degree, said the pope spent the day resting in the residence of the archbishop of Krakow and following”an anti-influenza therapy.” It was unclear late Tuesday what effect the illness would have on the rest of the pope’s itinerary, including an unexpected, last-minute addition to the trip that had the pontiff spending one more day in Poland and then traveling to Armenia for several hours.
But late Tuesday, the pontiff did appear at a window of the residence to greet the hundreds of faithful who had gathered. The crowd cheered his appearance.
On Saturday (June 12), John Paul slipped and fell in the residence, suffering a cut in his right temple that required three stitches to close, but he kept to his program, wearing a bandage on the wound.
Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state, celebrated Mass in the pope’s place today in a meadow at Blonia just outside Krakow. The mass marked the 1,000th anniversary of the creation of Poland’s church hierarchy.
Cardinal Franciszek Macharski, John Paul’s successor as archbishop of Krakow, read the pope’s homily, in which he called on his fellow Poles to guard against the erosion of their faith in the country’s new, permissive society.”We must plan for the future so that it will be seen that the treasure of faith, hope and charity, which our fathers kept in the midst of struggles and which they handed down to us will not be lost by this generation lulled into sleep, no longer by the dream of freedom but by freedom itself,”the pope said.
John Paul became ill on the 11th day of a 13-day trip, the fourth longest he has made outside Italy since he became pope in 1978 and his longest to a single country.
His illness followed the surprise announcement Monday (June 14) that instead of returning to Rome Thursday (June 17), he would spend another night in Krakow and on Friday (June 18) fly to Yerevan in the Caucases to pay a visit of several hours to the seriously ill Armenian Orthodox Patriarch Karekin I.
There was no word on whether the trip to Armenia would be cancelled but Polish Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek told reporters it looked increasingly unlikely the pope would go ahead with the visit, Reuters reported.
The pope’s schedule for Wednesday (June 16) called for him to canonize the Blessed Kinga, a 13th century Polish princess who became a nun and founder of a convent, and to visit Wadowice, the city where he was born.
Although his doctors consider John Paul to be in generally good health for a man of his age, he is believed to suffer from a neurological disorder and twice curtailed his schedule last winter because of influenza. He has undergone major surgery three times since he became pope and twice suffered injuries in falls.
The pope first underwent abdominal surgery to save his life after a would-be assassin shot and wounded him during an audience in St. Peter’s Square in May 1981.
Surgeons removed a large, pre-cancerous tumor from his intestines in July 1992, and operated again to repair the thigh he broke in a fall in his bathroom in the Apostolic Palace in April 1994. Six months earlier, he had dislocated his right shoulder when he tripped and fell three steps during a public audience.
John Paul walks slowly and usually with a cane, and he has a tremor in
his left hand believed caused by Parkinson’s Disease.
New York Catholics: reform state drug laws
(RNS) Arguing that many drug addicts need treatment not incarceration, New York’s Roman Catholic bishops have asked the governor and the legislature to overhaul the state’s stringent drug laws.
In a statement released Monday (June 14) the New York State Catholic Conference called the state’s mandatory drug sentencing laws”ineffective and unduly restrictive,”and urged a more humane system for rehabilitating nonviolent addicts.”As moral teachers, we believe the time has come, after a quarter century of experience, to urge all New Yorkers to advocate for a more humane and effective system to rehabilitate addicts and protect public safety,”the prelates said.
The 26-year-old mandatory drug laws, enacted during the tenure of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, are among the strictest in the country. The bishops said the laws, which stipulate sentences of at least 15 years in prison for possessing as little as four ounces of illicit drugs or selling as little as two ounces, fail to distinguish between dangerous drug kingpins and low-level, nonviolent offenders.”These laws are expensive in terms of human lives and public dollars,”said Richard McDevitt, a spokesman for the Conference, which represents the state’s 24 bishops, including Cardinal John O’Connor of the Archdiocese of New York.”When you incarcerate at this level, with such lengths, it commits the state to the expansion of cells and that compromises other objectives like education, roads and public health.” The statement asks government leaders to give judges and prosecutors more flexibility in determining the sentencing for nonviolent offenders.
Gov. George Pataki has proposed some changes to the laws _ among them the reduction of the minimum sentence to as little as 10 years in cases involving first-time felons convicted of minor crimes _ but is facing opposition from Democrats in the state legislature.
More than 23,000 of the state’s 70,000 inmates are serving sentences for drug convictions, many have not committed a violent crime, and nearly 60 percent of women in New York prisons are incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses, according to the statement.
The bishops cited their experience running drug treatment programs and that of Catholic prison chaplains as the basis for their belief that treatment can work and reduces the chances of criminal recidivism.
Church bodies welcome end of Kosovo hostilities
(RNS) Four major international church organizations, including the World Council of Churches, have issued a statement welcoming the end of active hostilities in Kosovo and Serbia.”Churches, Christians and people of other faiths around the world have worked and prayed for an end to the terror of ethnic cleansing, and to the destruction inflicted on Kosovo and Serbia by 11 weeks of NATO bombing,”the four groups, all based in Geneva, said.”We thank God that the parties have finally reached an agreement to bring an end to the conflict, and for the efforts of the secretary general of the United Nations and all others who have worked so tirelessly to achieve this result,”they added.
The statement, dated June 11, was issued jointly by the WCC, the Lutheran World Federation, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and the Conference of European Churches.
The church bodies also said that while reconstruction in Kosovo, the disputed province of Serbia, is”a central task and a prerequisite for the return of refugees”driven from their homes by Serb forces, the repair of damages done in Serbia by the NATO campaign”and the removal of punitive economic constraints are also essential to the establishment of peace, to alleviating the suffering of the people and to reconciliation in the region.” It said all those who have been internally displaced from Kosovo must be allowed to return to their homes in safety and that”the local ethnic Serb communities in Kosovo must be protected from reprisals and violations of their human rights.””The churches will have a key role to play in the enormous task of reconstruction, refugee repatriation and reconciliation which must begin immediately,”the statement said. It urged the churches of North America and Europe especially to respond”actively and generously”to this challenge.
English Catholic bishop would consider sitting in reformed House of Lords
(RNS) Roman Catholic bishops would under certain circumstances consider sitting in a reformed House of Lords, the bishops of England and Wales said in a 2,000-word submission to the Royal Commission considering an overhaul of Britain’s upper house of Parliament.
In its proposals for reforming the House of Lords, published in January, the British government suggested keeping the present 26 most senior bishops of the Church of England but said it also wanted to see representation of other religious traditions, particularly in view of the multicultural nature of modern British society.
In their submission to the commission, the Catholic bishops said they thought a better word than”representation”would be”voice”to describe a Catholic presence in a reformed House of Lords.”If the House were to have members on behalf of the church itself, they would not be there in a personal capacity, nor there primarily to represent a particular constituency, but rather to give voice to the moral and spiritual teaching of the Catholic church,”they said.
Distinguishing the involvement of Catholic lay people in public life from the role of the bishop, which is primarily to expound the church’s authentic teaching, the bishops said a number of Catholic parliamentarians had suggested that, if there were to be an official Catholic voice in a reformed House of Lords, it should be provided by the bishops.
Much would depend on how a reformed House of Lords was constituted.”A wholly elected chamber, for instance, like the House of Commons, would find its Catholic voice through those Catholic lay people who were successfully elected,”said the bishops.”If, however, it were to be proposed by the government of the day that either ex-officio or through nomination there should be a number of members of the Second Chamber there specifically on behalf of the Catholic church, we are inclined to the view that those members should be Catholic bishops, subject of course to the approval of the Holy See,”the bishops’ response said.
Vatican approval would be necessary because of the ban in canon law on clerics assuming”public office whenever it means sharing in the exercise of civil power _ a provision that forced at least two U.S. priests to choose between remaining clerics or serving in Congress.
The bishops said it was not part of their job to seek power, but at the same time there could not be any”no go”areas for the church.”Our duty is to serve the gospel, to give voice to the fundamental spiritual and moral truths about humanity, and to speak for those who have no power, no voice, or who are dispossessed,”they said.”If an invitation were extended to us which would enable us to do this more effectively, without in any way compromising either our role as bishops or the law of the church, or the presence, by election or appointment, of other Catholics … our view is that we should accept it.”
Rick Fields, writer on American Buddhism, dies
(RNS) Rick Fields, a journalist, poet and author of pioneering studies of the growth of Buddhism in the United States, has died of cancer at 57.
Fields died June 6 at his home in Fairfax, Calif.
Fields’ best-known book was”How the Swans Came to the Lake”(Shambhala), published in 1981. The book traced the growth of Buddhism in the United States, beginning in the mid-19th century. The book was revised in 1991.
Fields, a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, wrote or co-wrote at least five additional books on Buddhism, plus a book of poetry about battling lung cancer. Until recently, Fields served as editor of Yoga Journal.
He was also a contributing editor of New Age Journal and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, editor of Vajradhatu Sun (now Shambhala Sun), and taught at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo.
H. Boone Porter, influential in revising Episcopal prayer book, dies
(RNS) The Rev. Canon H. Boone Porter, an Episcopal scholar and theologian who played a major role in revising his denomination’s Book of Common Prayer in the 1960s and ’70s, has died of pneumonia at 76.
Porter died June 5 at a hospital in Bridgeport, Conn. He lived in Southport, Conn.
Porter, born in Louisville, Ky., was an influential member of the Episcopal Church’s Standing Liturgical Commission, which revised the wording of the denomination’s holy communion service in its Book of Common Prayer. Porter is credited with having written most of the revised service, designed to be more accessible to contemporary churchgoers.
At his death, Porter was senior editor of The Living Church, a weekly magazine. Earlier, he taught at the Episcopal Church’s General Theological Seminary in New York, where he established the first doctoral program in liturgical studies in the United States.
Quote of the day: the Rev. Konrad Raiser, general secretary of the World Council of Churches
(RNS)”I certainly understand that some of our friends among the dissident groups in the East have a fairly bitter taste when the WCC is being praised for being among the advocates against oppression and the voice of those without a voice.” _ The Rev. Konrad Raiser, general secretary of the World Council of Churches, acknowledging the failure of the WCC to stand up for dissidents in Eastern Europe during the Cold War while it battled apartheid in South Africa and right wing dictatorships in Latin America.
DEA END RNS
