c. 2004 Religion News Service
NCC Head Arrested in Protest Outside Sudanese Embassy
WASHINGTON (RNS) The Rev. Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, was arrested Wednesday (July 14) by the U.S. Secret Service outside the Embassy of Sudan while protesting alleged genocide in the African nation.
“Getting arrested today for this cause is the very least one could do to bring attention to the urgency of now,” Edgar, a former Democratic congressman and United Methodist pastor, told the crowd of protesters. “The solution rests at the door of the government of Sudan and also at the feet of the international community who must act now.”
After his statement, Edgar kneeled in prayer on the front steps of the embassy, where uniformed Secret Service agents waited to take him away. An agent warned Edgar three times that he would be arrested, then led him away to a waiting police van.
“During our watch, people are dying,” Edgar said. “While we were, as a nation, reluctant to go into Rwanda and allowed more than a million people to be slaughtered, we as a faith community cannot stand by and watch not only past deaths, but also the potential of future deaths.”
Arm-in-arm with Walter Fauntroy, former congressional delegate for the District of Columbia, Edgar led a group of protesters in chants and songs decrying the bloodshed and growing humanitarian crisis in Sudan, which U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan recently visited.
Churches and related agencies, including the NCC, have pressed for a U.S.-led intervention in Sudan, international sanctions and immediate aid for the country torn apart by Christian-Muslim violence and charges of genocide and ethnic cleansing. The current outbreak of violence is centered in the western Dafur region and pits Arab militiamen, known as Janjaweed, against black Africans.
An estimated 10,000 to 30,000 people are believed to have died in recent months in the Darfur hostilities and some 150,000 refugees have fled into neighboring Chad.
“We have a humanitarian effort that has been ongoing there and as the dislocation and violence and genocide has increased, we’ve become increasingly alarmed,” said Edgar.
Edgar’s friend and former colleague, Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., was arrested for a similar act of civil disobedience Tuesday. Activists have staged a series of daily protests outside the embassy.
Before his arrest Wednesday, Edgar had twice been detained for civil disobedience, protesting nuclear weapons outside the Nevada nuclear test site, 60 miles north of Las Vegas.
“I prayed my way into a holding cell in a nonviolent act of civil disobedience, and I plan to do the same today,” Edgar said before his arrest.
Edgar paid a $50 fine for disorderly conduct and was released from a District of Columbia police station.
_ Jonah D. King
ADL Blasts Presbyterians on Jewish Outreach Policies
(RNS) The Anti-Defamation League said it was “offended and distressed” by a recent decision by the Presbyterian Church (USA) not to cut off funding for church-sponsored messianic Jewish congregations.
Delegates to the church’s recent General Assembly in Richmond, Va., narrowly voted, 260-233, to preserve national-level funding for new churches, including those like one in suburban Philadelphia that are geared toward Jewish converts to Christianity.
In addition, delegates approved overtures to “re-examine and strengthen” ties with Jewish groups. A 1987 church statement said Jews “are already in a covenantal relationship with God” and do not need to become Christians.
The New York-based Anti-Defamation League said the vote to preserve funding for congregations trying to convert Jews “calls into question” the church’s interfaith outreach. Similar concern has been raised by officials with the American Jewish Committee and the National Council of Synagogues.
The congregation in question, Avodat Yisrael, looks and feels like a Jewish synagogue but proclaims an unabashedly Christian message. It received $260,000 in startup funds from local, regional and national church offices.
“Targeting Jews for conversion to Christianity is an insult to the Jewish people,” ADL National Director Abraham Foxman said in a joint letter with Gary Bretton-Granatoor, the ADL’s interfaith affairs director.
The letter was sent Tuesday (July 13) to the Presbyterians’ top leader, Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick. The Rev. Jay Rock, the church’s interfaith affairs director, was not immediately available for comment.
But at the Presbyterian meeting in Richmond, several delegates, including denomination moderator Susan Andrews, questioned whether the move would be hostile to Jews. A former church moderator, the Rev. Fahed Abu-Akel, argued that it should not be: “Our focus in the 21st century as Presbyterians is for these racial and ethnic ministries to grow. For me, the gospel is for everyone.”
Delegates, concerned over the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian standoff, also voted 431-62 to examine whether the church should divest in businesses operating in Israel. A separate 471-34 vote called on Israel to end construction on its controversial “security wall” that critics say cuts through Palestinian territory.
The Anti-Defamation League also took exception to that.
“Your unbalanced and unfair characterization of the Jewish community’s concern for the safety and security of the State of Israel is deeply troubling,” Foxman and Bretton-Granatoor said.
_ Kevin Eckstrom
Vatican, Russian Officials Discuss Collaboration on Iraq, Mideast
VATICAN CITY (RNS) Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state, met Thursday (July 15) and discussed possible collaboration in the United Nations on Iraq and the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
It was the first such high-level meeting since Russian President Vladimir Putin held talks with Pope John Paul II at a Vatican audience in November. Both Moscow and the Vatican opposed the U.S.-led attack on Iraq and support the search for a Middle East peace plan.
The Rev. Ciro Benedettini, assistant Vatican spokesman, said that Sodano, Lavrov, Vatican Foreign Minister Giovanni Lajolo and Russian Ambassador to the Vatican Vitaly Litvin discussed “the serious problem of peace in the Holy Land and in Iraq.”
“In the course of the meeting there was an exchange of views on bilateral relations between the Holy See and Russia and on the international situation, with particular regard to dialogue between cultures and collaboration within international organizations,” the spokesman said.
“The meeting underlined the cordial relations existing between the parties and the possibility of farther development,” he said.
Lavrov’s visit followed the announcement last week that a Vatican delegation will return a revered icon of the Madonna of Kazan to the Russian Orthodox Church next month in a bid to improve Catholic-Orthodox relations. The icon, smuggled to the West in the 1970s, has been in John Paul’s possession for 11 years.
Strains between the churches have blocked the historic trip to Russia that the Polish-born John Paul has long hoped to make. Putin has withheld an invitation because of opposition from Russian Patriarch Alexey II, but a visit to the Vatican by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople late last month appeared to signal a thaw in Catholic-Orthodox relations.
_ Peggy Polk
House Panel Acts Against Gay Marriage; Charges Dropped Against Clergy
WASHINGTON (RNS) On the same day the U.S. Senate rejected a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, a House committee approved a measure to ban federal courts from ordering states to recognize same-sex marriages.
The House Judiciary Committee voted 21-13 Wednesday (July 14) to approve a bill that would strip federal courts of jurisdiction in the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which allows states not to recognize gay marriages performed in other states.
“When federal judges step out of line, Congress has the responsibility to drop the red flag,” Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, told the Associated Press.
Democrats on the committee said the bill was a political tool, like the Federal Marriage Amendment, to rally supporters. Rep. Tammy Baldwin, an openly gay Democrat from Wisconsin, called it “unnecessary, unconstitutional and unwise.”
The measure now heads to the full House. Republican House leaders have also said they may schedule a vote on the gay marriage amendment before the November elections.
Reacting to the 50-48 Senate vote that effectively killed the gay marriage amendment, President Bush said he would continue his effort to define marriage as being between one man and one woman.
“Activist judges and local officials in some parts of the country are not letting up in their efforts to redefine marriage for the rest of America, and neither should defenders of traditional marriage flag in their efforts,” he said in a statement.
At the same time, a Massachusetts judge said she will decide whether a 1913 state law that has been used to keep out-of-state gay couples from marrying in Massachusetts should be struck down.
Superior Court Judge Carol Ball heard the case of eight couples from New England and New York who were turned away when they applied for marriage licenses. Gov. Mitt Romney said he stands by the law.
And, in New York, charges against two Unitarian Universalist ministers were dropped after they were charged with breaking state law by officiating at the marriages of 13 gay couples.
New Paltz Town Justice Judith Reichler dismissed the charges against the Revs. Kay Greenleaf and Dawn Sangrey. The two women were charged in March after they presided at gay weddings that were briefly allowed in the town.
“There can be no constitutional rationale for denying same-sex couples the right to receive the benefits that are so lavishly bestowed on mixed-sex couples,” Reichler wrote, according to the Associated Press.
Quote of the Day: Bill Moyers, Host of PBS’ `Now With Bill Moyers’
(RNS) “Our times cry out for a new politics of justice. … It doesn’t matter if you’re a liberal or a conservative, Jesus is both and neither. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or Republican, Jesus is both and neither. We need a faith that takes on the corruption of both parties. We need a faith that challenges complacency of all power. … Jesus drove the money changers from the temple. We must drive them from the temples of democracy.”
_ Bill Moyers, host of PBS’ “Now With Bill Moyers,” quoted in Sojourners magazine.
DEA/MO END RNS
