c. 2003 Religion News Service

Religious Leaders Mark Sept. 11 With Observances, Statements

WASHINGTON (RNS) With statements and observances across the nation, religious leaders joined in marking the second anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

President Bush started his day with a private service at St. John’s Episcopal Church near the White House before pausing for a moment of silence with White House staffers on the South Lawn at the time the first plane struck the World Trade Center’s towers.

“… Today is a day of prayer,” Bush said in brief remarks as he left the church. “We pray for the husbands and wives and moms and dads and sons and daughters and loved ones of those who still grieve and hurt. We pray for strength and wisdom. We thank God for the many blessings of this nation, and we ask his blessings on those who especially hurt today.”

He had earlier proclaimed Sept. 11 as “Patriot Day” and urged Americans to hold ceremonies such as candlelight vigils and services of remembrance.

In Washington, New York and beyond, people did just that in a range of religious observances that included memorial Masses, an interfaith peace walk and candlelight at the Capitol Reflecting Pool.

Religious leaders issued statements that recalled the day two years ago and addressed future needs.

“As we contemplate the sobering events of Sept. 11, 2001, and their tragic theft of human life and national innocence, let us never forget the victims and their survivors, whose personal histories were savagely altered on that day,” said the Rev. Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches. “We must press tirelessly for justice, freedom and peace in every troubled corner of our world, knowing that injustice, bondage and war breed the kind of hatred that begets terrorists in every culture.”

Southern Baptist Convention President Jack Graham urged continual prayer for Bush and members of the military.

“As a nation, we must be ever vigilant in our efforts to win the peace and end terrorism,” Graham said. “God’s people should be praying as never before for our troops and their families and that both national and international world leaders will know his wisdom. In times like these we should seek spiritual awakening and national unity.”

Officials of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America said the anniversary was simultaneously a time of sadness and hope.

“For in the midst of tragedy we witnessed courage, devotion, commitment, compassion, empathy and so much else that accords with the deep values of the Jewish faith and indeed of all faiths,” wrote Harvey Blitz, the union’s president, and Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, the group’s executive vice president.

Leaders of faith groups that have experienced discrimination in the wake of the attacks spoke out about their desire to enhance Americans’ understandings of them.

“The tragic events of two years ago have prompted Muslims to reach out to their neighbors, become more active in educating others about Islam and renew their commitment to defending America and its civil liberties,” said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Rajwant Singh, national director of the Sikh Council on Religion and Education, said: “We are taking definitive action to put an end to the continued perception that Sikhs are related to terrorist activities and to share the growing relationships between all faiths in America.”

_ Adelle M. Banks

Bishop in Nation’s Blackest City Condemns Sin of Racism

(RNS) The Roman Catholic bishop of Gary, Ind., urged parishioners in America’s most predominantly black city to overcome the “sin of racism” in their community and in the church.

Bishop Dale Melczek, in a 19-page pastoral letter issued Sunday (Sept. 7), said the church is not immune from racism because it “has become so ingrained in the institutions of society that it is a social as well as a personal sin.”

Gary, a gritty steel city in northwestern Indiana, is 86 percent black _ the highest percentage of African-Americans in any major city. Melczek, who is white, has served as bishop since 1995.

“You and I cannot truly be the reflection which our God desires until we have rooted out any traces of racism in our own hearts and decided to embrace all human persons as our brothers and sisters,” Melczek said.

Introducing the letter at Holy Angels Cathedral, Melczek called racism “blasphemy” and the “Achilles heel of Northwest Indiana,” according to the Gary Post-Tribune.

Melczek said “most whites give the issue of racism little thought,” especially the “privilege” enjoyed as a majority. Melczek said racism does not only apply to African-Americans, but also to Hispanics and, lately, Muslims of Middle Eastern descent.

“We wear white for happy occasions and black for sad. White is associated with light and divinity; black is associated with darkness and Satan,” he said. “The statues in our churches usually look Western European even though Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the Apostles were Middle Eastern.”

Melczek urged the 187,000 members of the diocese to discuss the statement and as parishes, schools and families. He called for Lenten and Advent services to include repentance for racism, and announced plans for a diocese-wide “atonement service” in 2004.

“We need more than mere tolerance,” he said. “We need more than a simple `live and let live’ mentality. WE need to join together, whites and people of color, in fraternity and solidarity in an anti-racist approach to building the kingdom of God.”

_ Kevin Eckstrom

Scientists Say Jerusalem Tunnel Dates to Biblical Hezekiah

JERUSALEM (RNS) Using Carbon-14 dating techniques, Israeli and British scientists have determined that Siloam’s Tunnel, a long, circuitous underground passage constructed below Jerusalem’s ancient City of David was probably built about 700 B.C., when King Hezekiah ruled the land of Judea.

The radiometric dating lends weight to the Biblical text (2 Kings 20.20;

2 Chronicles 32:3, 4), as well as to a very old inscription, discovered in 1880, on one of the tunnel’s walls. Although this inscription appears to refer to Hezekiah, it does not do so by name.

This marks the first time that a structure mentioned in the Bible has been dated radiometrically, according to researchers Amos Frumkin, Aryeh Shimron and Jeff Rosenbaum, who published their findings in the Sept. 11 issue of Nature.

While most scholars have long credited the 1,750-foot-long tunnel to Hezekiah _ and in fact call it Hezekiah’s Tunnel _ based on the two biblical

references, a minority insisted the passage was built centuries later.

Among other arguments, the dissenters said that an enterprise this large

would not have been taken during a time of war.

According to the Bible, Hezekiah built the tunnel to protect arid Jerusalem’s precious water supply from the hands of the invading Assyrians. Toward this end the king redirected the water from the Gihon Spring toward the walled City of David _ from one side of the city to the other. Modern scientists view the tunnel as a great work of water engineering.

Both the spring and the City of David are located in the Kidron Valley, outside the walls of the better-known Old City of Jerusalem, in an east Jerusalem neighborhood called Silwan.

Radiometric dating measures the decay of radioactive elements and enables researchers to estimate the age of the material being examined. Here, the scientists dated the organic material within the plaster of the tunnel, and employed uranium-thorium for dating the stalactites that have been growing in the tunnel since the time it was built.

Jon Seligman, Jerusalem District Archeologist, told RNS the tunnel’s radiometric readings were further evidence that the tunnel was indeed excavated during Hezekiah’s time.

“The Bible is an historical sourcebook for the period. In addition, we have the inscription, which is very clearly dated. Confirmation of known dating is always good,” Seligman said.

_ Michele Chabin

Archbishop of Canterbury Stresses Need for `Faith’ Schools

LONDON (RNS) The importance of “faith” schools _ and not just Christian schools _ to strengthen the cohesiveness and openness of the society in which they operate was underlined by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams in an address Thursday (Sept. 11) to the annual conference of the Association of Anglican Secondary School Heads.

Williams noted the tension in educational thinking between those whose concern was primarily and almost exclusively with imparting skills and those who understood education as something that formed the habits of living in a group and making possible cooperation and conversation. He said educational institutions could not be neutral on the debate.

“If you think you are being neutral about the moral or spiritual ethos of a school, you are in fact generating an ethos of individualism, functionalism and ultimately fragmentation,” he said.

“It is the same kind of thinking that imagines you can encourage intense competitiveness in certain areas of life without reinforcing habits of insensitivity in relations between persons generally,” Williams added. “And all this is of intense practical concern not only to Christians but to followers of minority faiths, who experience such an attitude as hostile rather than neutral and, as we all know, will often prefer a school of a religious tradition other than their own to one that has no such link.”

The main thing is that the faith school in general and the church school in particular not only aim at a culture of loyalty and openness but offer resources for such a culture.

“The nurture of loyalty introduces a principle that allows everyone to question their purely individual aims,” Williams said. “The nurture of openness means that loyalty becomes something more than just blind partisanship. The rationale of this kind of educational society is, for the church school, the image of the Body of Christ _ as, for the Muslim school, it would be the umma, the egalitarian community of true believers.”

Williams said that two years ago _ on Sept. 11, 2001 _ many things changed. “It was suddenly a good deal easier to associate religious conviction with terror and bigotry,” he said. “The response to this should not be simply to say `real’ religion promotes tolerance; much more importantly, we have to say that we have been reminded of what a colossally significant role religion plays in the lives of millions; if this is so, do we want religious communities isolated and ghettoized further, or do we need a bold engagement with the vision of religious groups for humanity on the part of public bodies?”

The archbishop distinguished between openness to the distinctive particularity of other people and the kind of tolerance regarded in some quarters as the one vital moral principle to be inculcated in education.

“I don’t think I’m the only person to have struggled with groups of teenagers, trying to get them to articulate values that really matter to them, to discover that practically the only thing they will agree in voicing is the importance of tolerance _ usually seen as an incurious coexistence, even a bland acceptance of mutual ignorance and nonunderstanding, in the name of not passing judgment.

“Openness, in contrast, is a willingness to be curious, to argue, even, yes, to judge, in the sense of trying to assess another’s experience in the light of your own values and decide how deeply it challenges you and how deeply you want to challenge it. It has everything to do with truthfulness at many levels.”

Quote of the Day: Rev. Jeff Ethen, Catholic Priest in Minnesota

(RNS) “Priests don’t need a Sept. 11 to be effective. Any personal, pastoral need is critical for the Christian seeking it from the man in the collar.”

_ The Rev. Jeff Ethen, a pastor of three parishes in Minnesota, who happened to be visiting New York City as a tourist on Sept. 11, 2001. He wrote about how he helped victims at a New York hospital in “We Were There … Catholic Priests and How they Responded,” a compilation produced recently by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

DEA END RNS