c. 2003 Religion News Service
Religious Groups Organize Help for Fires as Members Deal With Aftermath
(RNS) Religious groups have organized volunteers and donations and are calling for prayer in the aftermath of the fires that have ravaged portions of Southern California.
Clergy and members of their congregations will be joining others in the difficult clean-up efforts after the fires destroyed buildings where they lived and worked.
In Sky Forest, the Wylie Woods Conference Center, one of two conference facilities of a Western synod of the Presbyterian Church, USA, was destroyed by the wildfires, the Presbyterian News Service reported. A Salvation Army camp and conference center in Ramona also was severely damaged.
A United Methodist Church’s parsonage burned to the ground in San Bernardino, the United Methodist News Service reported. An Evangelical Lutheran Church in America pastor’s home was destroyed in Claremont, the ELCA News Service reported.
A network of Orthodox Christians organized by the U.S. Program of International Orthodox Christian Charities is among those working to determine the needs of victims.
The Rev. Theofanis Degaitas, a parish priest of a Greek Orthodox church in San Bernardino, said five families in his congregation lost their homes. “Others have lost buildings on their property,” he said.
The Southern California office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has asked mosques and people of other faiths to pray for rain.
“Perhaps this spiritual effort during the blessed month of Ramadan can add to that of the courageous firefighters who place their lives on the line every day,” said Hussam Ayloush, executive director of CAIR-LA in a statement.
The Rev. Gilbert B. Furst, director for Lutheran Disaster Response, said prayer will help those surviving and fighting the fires.
“The prayers of God’s people are far more powerful than these roaring fires,” he said, the ELCA News Service reported. “Your prayers will sustain those who do not know if they will be returning to intact homes or piles of ashes, destroyed neighborhoods, lost treasured items.”
Catholic Charities, the Salvation Army, the California Southern Baptist Convention and World Relief have provided such services as mobile kitchens, portable showers and counseling.
Among those seeking financial contributions designated for victims of the California fires are:
California Southern Baptist Convention, 678 E. Shaw Ave., Fresno, Calif. 93710
Catholic Charities USA, P.O. Box 25168, Alexandria, Va. 22313-9788; (800) 919-9338; http://www.catholiccharitiesinfo.org/fires.htm
Christian Reformed World Relief Committee, 2850 Kalamazoo Ave., SE, Grand Rapids, Mich. 49560; (800) 552-7972
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Domestic Disaster Response, P.O. Box 71764, Chicago, Ill. 60694-1764; (800) 638-3522; http://www.elca.org/disaster
International Orthodox Christian Charities/U.S. Program, P.O. Box 630225, Baltimore, Md. 21263-0225
Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod World Relief and Human Care, 1333 S. Kirkwood Road, St. Louis, Mo. 63122-7295; (888) 930-4438; http://catalog.lcms.org
Presbyterian Church, USA, Central Receiving Service, Box 300, Louisville, Ky., 40289; (800) 872-3283; http://www.pcusa.org/pda/donate/accounts.htm
Salvation Army, 900 W. James M. Wood Blvd., Los Angeles, Calif. 90015; (800) 725-2769; http://www.salvationarmy-socal.org
_ Adelle M. Banks
Catholic, Orthodox Theologians Reach Agreement on `Filioque Clause’
(RNS) North American delegations from the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches are hopeful that a new agreement on a thousand-year-old point of conflict might help pave the way for eventual reunification of Christianity’s oldest traditions.
The joint agreement announced Oct. 25 on the “Filioque” _ the Western Christian teaching that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son _ recommends the Vatican lift a 13th century condemnation of those who say the Spirit originates with the Father alone. It also urges church bodies around the world to “enter into new and earnest dialogue concerning the origin and person of the Spirit.”
“This is an attempt to model a tone for how these issues are to be discussed internationally,” said Nektarios Morrow, communications director for the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. “It says, `yes, there are things in the past that really do need to be undone.”’
The agreement from the North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation, which has been discussing the issue since 1999, has no binding authority for regional churches. Yet if the Vatican does eventually accept recommendations from the 10,000-word document, Catholics worldwide would drop the phrase “and the Son” from their creed when professing faith during Mass.
Since the end of the first millennium, the Orthodox and Catholic churches have traced their separation in large measure to divergent belief systems, primarily concerning the roles of papal authority and the Filioque. The latter, which means “and the Son” in Latin, emerged as official teaching in 1014 in order to counter contemporary heresies.
But today churches are able to re-emphasize their original common ground, said the Rev. Ronald Roberson, Roman Catholic organizer of the consultation.
“In the West, this seems to be a very esoteric subject that doesn’t affect the lives of ordinary Christians, but in the East it’s a very different thing,” Roberson said. “There it’s seen as the original heresy of the Western church.”
_ G. Jeffrey MacDonald
Pope Seeks Laws Guaranteeing Religious Freedom in Multicultural Europe
VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope John Paul II, addressing European interior ministers, on Friday (Oct. 31) said laws are needed to guarantee religious freedom in an increasingly multiethnic and multicultural Europe.
The Roman Catholic pontiff praised efforts by Christian Europeans to enter into dialogue with the tide of immigrants, many of whom are Muslims, seeking work on the continent, but he said more was needed to insure “unity in diversity.”
John Paul called for “an adequate recognition, even legislative, of specific religious traditions in which all peoples are rooted and with which they often identify in a particular way.
“The guarantee and promotion of religious freedom constitute a test of respect for the rights of others and is realized through adequate juridical discipline for the different religious confessions as a guarantee of their respective identities and their freedom,” he said.
The pope received EU interior ministers concluding a two-day meeting in Rome on interreligious dialogue as a “factor of social cohesion in Europe and instrument of peace in the Mediterranean area.”
Despite his frailty caused by Parkinson’s disease, the 83-year-old John Paul has continued to hold a series of daily audiences. Before addressing the EU ministers he received a delegation of ambassadors to the Vatican, who congratulated him on the 25th anniversary of his pontificate, celebrated Oct. 16.
Ambassador Giovanni Galassi of San Marino, the dean of the Vatican diplomatic corps and a surgeon on the staff of a Rome hospital, said the pope appeared to be “in good condition” and was able to read a brief statement of thanks.
“The pope is tired and suffers from the limitations that everyone can see, but he is absolutely able to do and to continue to do what he is doing,” Galassi said.
_ Peggy Polk
ABC News Looks at `DaVinci’ Novel’s Theories on Jesus, Mary
NEW YORK (RNS) An upcoming ABC News special that explores a number of controversial theories about Jesus and Mary Magdalene, including the possibility that the two were actually a married couple, is garnering protests even before it airs.
“Jesus, Mary and DaVinci,” slated to be aired at 8 p.m. EST Monday (Nov. 3), examines theories from the best-selling mystery novel “The DaVinci Code” by author Dan Brown. The book, which claims to be based partly on fact, suggests that Mary Magdalene and Jesus were not only married but that Mary gave birth to their child after she and other followers of Jesus fled Jerusalem and ended up in what became France.
The book, which also suggests that Mary may have been the Holy Grail, explores the possibility that a “secret society” that included Leonardo DaVinci knew about these claims and kept them a secret.
In a statement issued Friday (Oct. 31), Ray Flynn, the president of Your Catholic Voice and the former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, said the special, hosted by ABC anchor and correspondent Elizabeth Vargas, represented “an all-time low in offending Christians.”
“ABC News somehow expects the world to believe that four Gospel writers and thousands of eyewitnesses somehow missed that Jesus had a wife and a child,” Flynn said. “This is a Halloween prank in the poorest of taste.”
At a preview screening of the special Thursday (Oct. 31) for journalists, clergy and denominational representatives, Nikki Stephanopoulos, press officer for the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America and the mother of ABC correspondent George Stephanopoulos, said while the special made a case that, historically, it might have been possible that Jesus was married, as that was the norm for Jewish men of his time, many of the theories explored in the special would “astonish and offend people.” She said in particular the special slighted Orthodox theology and biblical interpretations.
Vargas, a Roman Catholic, acknowledged that some of the themes may prove controversial and that ABC is braced for negative reaction. “We expected it to be a minefield,” Vargas said, but defended the special as journalistically sound.
Aside from Brown, who appears prominently in the special, scholars interviewed include Elaine Pagels of Princeton University; Karen King of Harvard Divinity School; Jeff Bingham and Darrell Bock of Dallas Theological Seminary; and Richard McBrien, a Catholic priest who teaches at the University of Notre Dame.
When not dealing with some of the more controversial claims suggested in Brown’s book, much of the special deals with themes _ such as the multiplicity of voices and texts in the early Christian church _ that are hardly new or novel. One of the books cited in the special is Pagels’ “The Gnostic Gospels,” which was published in 1979. Vargas and the producers acknowledged that it took a best-selling book “as a news hook” to explore themes, such as the role of women in the early church, that have garnered wide attention from scholars for years.
_ Chris Herlinger
Mike Yaconelli, Former Editor of Satirical `Door,’ Dead at 61
(RNS) Mike Yaconelli, former editor of The Wittenburg Door and the owner and “fearless leader” of Youth Specialties, an organization that trains thousands of church youth workers each year, died early Thursday (Oct. 30) from injuries sustained in a automobile accident.
He was 61.
Yaconelli was returning home to Yreka, Calif., when the pickup truck he was driving went onto the shoulder of southbound Interstate 5 and struck a light standard around 8 p.m. Wednesday, reported the Siskiyou Daily News. Yaconelli was airlifted to a hospital in Redding, Calif., where he died Thursday morning. The cause of the accident is unknown.
Yaconelli founded YS in 1969 with fellow youth minister Wayne Rice, organizing their first national Christian youth workers convention in 1970. The group now claims to train 100,000 youth workers a year through seminars, conferences, resources and a Web site. He was also a lay pastor at a small church in Yreka, which he once joked was “the slowest-growing church in America.”
They founded The Wittenberg Door (now The Door) in 1971 as a youth worker journal. When they realized that “Wittenberg” was misspelled on the first cover, they decided to focus the magazine on religious satire, with features like the “Green Weenie” award that poked fun at some “stupid things” they saw Christians doing. (An early Green Weenie went to the Roman Catholic Church for advertising in Playboy for candidates for the priesthood.)
“We made fun of the church because we loved the church,” Yaconelli, who edited the Door for 25 years, told RNS in an interview earlier this year.
“What we were upset about was all the stupid things the church was doing.
“The Door allowed people who had been ridiculed, put down, shut up, told they were crazy or they were heretics to say, `By God I am not crazy _ there’s other people who see the same things I do,” Yaconelli said.
In his books “Dangerous Wonder” and “Messy Spirituality,” Yaconelli mixed his trademark humor with honest accounts about his struggles with his faith. “I don’t want to be St. John of the Cross or Billy Graham,” he wrote in 2002’s “Messy Spirituality,” which was subtitled “God’s Annoying Love for Imperfect People.” “I just want to be remembered as a person who loved God, who served others more than he served himself, who was trying to grow in maturity and stability. I want to have more victories than defeats, yet here I am, almost 60, and I fail on a regular basis.”
He is survived by his wife, Karla, five children, and four grandchildren. A small memorial service is being planned for this weekend in Yreka, with a larger service being planned in the San Diego area after Thanksgiving.
_ Bob Smietana
Quote of the Day: Baptist Joint Committee General Counsel Hollyn Hollman
(RNS) “Have you ever met anyone who came to know Christ because they saw a monument that was of the government, where the government had decided what monument to promote and to put Scripture on it? Maybe you have, but I don’t think that is the way we promote evangelism and real religion.”
_ Hollyn Hollman, general counsel of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, contributing to a September symposium on church and state relations at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.
DEA END RNS
