c. 2006 Religion News Service
British Judge Rules for `Da Vinci Code’ Author
LONDON (RNS) Britain’s High Court ruled Friday (April 7) that author Dan Brown did not plagiarize and breach the copyright of an earlier book in writing his global best-selling novel “The Da Vinci Code.”
Two of the three authors of “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” had claimed that Brown lifted parts of their 1982 book, which theorizes that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child, and that the bloodline continues to this day.
“The Da Vinci Code,” which has sold more than 40 million copies and has reportedly made Brown the highest-paid author in history, explores a similar theme to the 1982 book.
Brown conceded in testimony during the five-week trial that the earlier book was one of a number of sources that he used in researching “The Da Vinci Code,” which was published in 2003. However, he insisted that he had not copied its central premise, nor had he even finished reading it.
Director Ron Howard’s film adaptation of the book, starring Tom Hanks, is due in U.S. theaters May 19.
The 71-page ruling by High Court Justice Peter Smith said “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” did not have a central theme in the way its authors suggested. The theme was instead “an artificial creation for the purposes of the litigation working back from `The Da Vinci Code,”’ he said.
“Even if the central themes were copied,” Smith said, “they are too general or too low a level of abstraction to be capable of protection by copyright law.”
The case brought by authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh “has failed,” the judge said. “Dan Brown has not infringed copyright. None of this amounts to copying `The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.”’
The publicity-shy Brown said the court’s ruling “shows that this claim was utterly without merit. I’m still astonished that these two authors chose to file their suit at all.”
The judge ordered Baigent and Leigh to pay 85 percent of the costs incurred by Brown’s publisher, Random House, estimated at $2.25 million, and their own costs of $1.4 million. He also denied them any right to appeal.
_ Al Webb
Religious Leaders Sign Declaration Condemning Violence Against Women
WASHINGTON (RNS) Dozens of religious leaders from a broad array of faiths have signed a declaration calling violence against women “morally, spiritually and universally intolerable” and have called for proper use of sacred texts to condemn abuse.
“While as people of faith we hold divergent opinions on a wide range of issues, today we proclaim with one voice that violence against women exists in all of our communities and is intolerable,” said the Rev. Marie Fortune, founder of FaithTrust Institute, a Seattle-based organization that offers resources to religious organizations to address abuse.
The letter was released Wednesday (April 5) at a news conference. Signatories include representatives of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Jainism and Buddhist organizations.
“People don’t like to think about their religious communities as … including these kinds of problems,” said Rabbi Elliott Dorff, a Conservative rabbi and president of Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles, which offers programs for abuse victims and for abusers. “This declaration … takes it out into the open and it says that we do in fact realize that this is happening in our communities.”
Imam Mohamed Magid of Sterling, Va., a member of the executive council of the Islamic Society of North America, said he has preached about domestic violence and urges other imams to do the same so mosques can be a place where women can seek assistance.
“I tell them … in my Friday sermons, if you beat your wife at home, it’s not your own business, it’s my business as well,” he said.
Retired Major Marilyn White of the Salvation Army said her evangelical denomination joined with the other faith groups in addressing the issue because “our religious and spiritual traditions compel us to work for justice, and that means the eradication of violence against women.”
Declaration supporters are hoping others will sign onto the document at http://www.faithtrustinstitute.org and that it will be posted at women’s shelters and on bulletin boards of houses of worship across the country.
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Fortune said the declaration shows widening interest among faith leaders in addressing abuse. Her organization, which previously was known as the Center for the Prevention of Sexual and Domestic Violence, has worked on the issue for decades. More recently, groups such as Peace and Safety in the Christian Home have begun holding conferences to draw more attention to domestic violence.
_ Adelle M. Banks
New Web Site Explains What’s Kosher for Passover
(RNS) The New York-based Orthodox Union (OU) has launched a Web site to answer questions that confront kosher consumers preparing for Passover.
Advertised as a “one-stop-shop for all Passover-related queries,” the site (http://www.oupassover.com) will convey whether a certain food, medicine, cosmetic, pet food or even house-cleaning product is considered kosher for Passover according to the criteria of the Orthodox Union, which provides kashrut (kosher) certification to more than 400,000 products in 80 countries.
Passover, a week-long holiday that this year begins at sundown on April 12, recalls the ancient Israelites’ escape from slavery in Egypt. As the Passover Haggadah recalls, the Jews fled in such haste that the bread they were baking failed to rise.
In addition to not eating bread during Passover, Jews are prohibited from using any product made from wheat, barley, rye, oats and spelt throughout the holiday.
The Web site includes the annual Jewish Action Guide to Kosher for Passover Foods _ products the OU certifies as kosher for Passover. It also contains information on fish, meat and poultry, as well as baby formula.
The Medicine Guidelines section is particularly important in determining which pills, medicinal creams, injections and liquid medications are kosher for Passover, and which are not. If a patient knows that his allergy medication is not kosher for Passover, for example, and learns of another one that is, he will be able to purchase the Passover brand.
However, the Web site strongly recommends that patients “exercise extreme caution” and “consult one’s doctor and rabbi” prior to making a decision to switch or discontinue medications during the holiday.
_ Michele Chabin
Canadian Catholic Priest Excommunicated Over `Schismatic’ Church
TORONTO (RNS) A Canadian Roman Catholic priest who supports the ordination of women has been excommunicated after he held services in what authorities called a “schismatic church.”
The Palm Sunday service was the second held by the Rev. Ed Cachia at his newly formed Christ the Servant Catholic Church, and was attended by about 250 people who have followed the ousted priest to a rented hall in Cold Springs, a village about 80 miles northeast of Toronto.
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Peterborough promptly declared it a “schismatic church” and said Cachia had “incurred automatic excommunication by virtue of the law of the church.”
“The Christian faithful should not frequent this breakaway church nor support the disobedience of Father Cachia,” Peterborough Bishop Nicola De Angelis said in a letter read in churches in the diocese Saturday (April 8) and Sunday.
Cachia “excommunicated himself” by celebrating “invalid sacraments (that are) fundamentally at odds with the teaching of the church,” diocese spokesman the Rev. Tom Lynch said in an interview.
Cachia, 56, first ran afoul of the church last July when he applauded the ordination of nine women as “priests” on a boat on the St. Lawrence River.
In October, he was fired as pastor of St. Michael’s Parish in Cobourg, east of Toronto, after he wrote a letter to the local newspaper urging his church to admit women to the priesthood. Reportedly, he also told his bishop that he had celebrated Mass with women priests in the United States.
He told supporters Sunday that he was saddened to be excommunicated during Holy Week. “I never in my whole lifetime ever dreamed it would come to this,” he told a Canadian newspaper.
Lynch said “those who ought to know better” should beware of the consequences of establishing a new church and celebrating sacraments with “invalidly ordained communities.”
_ Ron Csillag
Conservative Episcopalians Launch Separate Clergy Pension Plan
(RNS) Conservative Episcopalians have launched their own clergy pension plan, a further sign that dissidents may be laying the groundwork for a parallel church structure if the Episcopal Church breaks apart.
The Pittsburgh-based Anglican Communion Network, which counts 200,000 members in 800 congregations across 10 U.S. dioceses, said the program is available for clergy who are no longer enrolled in the Episcopal Church plan.
Typically, when an Episcopal priest leaves the denomination, any pension benefits are frozen _ but are not rescinded _ until he or she reaches retirement.
Wicks Stevens, chancellor for the Pittsburgh network, said benefits in the new plan are “transportable,” meaning they can be combined with other retirement plans such as a 401(k), and can follow a priest even after he or she withdraws from the program.
“We are concerned about looking out for people,” Stevens said, “and we are concerned with seeing that they get the benefits they have lost by leaving the Episcopal Church.”
The Network already has its own overseas relief agency and supports two evangelical seminaries. Stevens said his office also hopes to launch property insurance and health insurance programs. Stevens said similar groups, such as the Reformed Episcopal Church, may also be eligible to enroll.
The Network, which opposed the election of the church’s first openly gay bishop, has called for a “re-alignment” of Anglicanism in North America, and critics have accused it of sewing seeds of schism in the U.S. church.
“What all of this will eventually mean, everyone can speculate about,” he said. “We’re not waiting for some future time (to make decisions). Our folks are entitled to benefits and we’re committed to making sure they get them.”
_ Kevin Eckstrom
Report: Overall Anti-Semitic Incidents Down, But Up on College Campuses
(RNS) The number of anti-Semitic incidents in 2005 dropped slightly compared with the previous year, but the number reported on college campuses rose by almost a third, according to a new report from the Anti-Defamation League.
Overall, there were 1,757 anti-Semitic incidents last year, a 3 percent drop compared with 2004, when the 1,821 total marked a nine-year high. The incidents ranged from harassment, including physical assaults and threats, to vandalism including anti-Semitic graffiti.
Acts of vandalism decreased by 4 percent, and harassment decreased by 3 percent.
“While any decline is encouraging, we remain concerned because too many people continue to act out their Jewish hatred,” Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a statement.
“The numbers remain sobering because we know from painful experience that it only takes one incident of anti-Semitism to affect an entire community.”
On college campuses, 98 incidents were reported in 2005, compared with 74 in 2004. These figures were lower than the high of 106 reported in 2002.
Many of the college cases involved vandalism, including a report from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where swastikas were carved into a bulletin board, and a case at Atlantic Cape Community College in New Jersey where swastikas and other extremist symbols were carved into freshly poured concrete.
Other concentrations of incidents were attributed to public activities by neo-Nazi and other hate groups and anti-Jewish harassment in high schools and middle schools.
In the eight states with the highest number of harassment reports, 13 percent were due to extremist group activity, including distribution of fliers.
The annual Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents includes data collected from 42 states and the District of Columbia. It’s based on crime statistics and information collected from the organization’s 30 regional offices.
_ Ansley Roan
Presbyterian Minister Frederick Buechner Honored
WASHINGTON (RNS) A lifetime’s worth of inspirational sermons, and the man who wrote and delivered them, were honored at a special ceremony at the Washington National Cathedral Wednesday (April 5).
Frederick Buechner, a 79-year-old Presbyterian minister, acclaimed author of more than 30 books and an inspiring figure for generations of Christian ministers, was the star of the event.
“`Tell the truth,’ he would say to us budding preachers. `Tell the truth of our lives as candidly and overtly as we can,”’ said the Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, dean of the Washington National Cathedral.
Like most of the speakers, Lloyd said that reading Buechner’s guide to sermons, “Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale,” changed his life.
“We are grounded, more honest, more aware preachers because of Fred,” Lloyd said.
The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor, author and religion teacher at Piedmont College in Demorest, Ga., shared lessons learned from Buechner.
“You have remained one of my best angels, and not just mine, but all of ours,” she said, spreading her arms out to the crowd. “From you I’ve learned it’s only when I give my full attention to what it means to be human that I am granted a glimpse of what it means to be divine.”
The Rev. Thomas G. Long, author and professor of preaching at Emory University in Atlanta, said Buechner’s words gave him the courage to preach, and that sermonizing itself changed because of Buechner.
“We began to see American preaching, instead of talking about the big picture and bold topics, to describe the everyday,” he said.
Buechner shared excerpts of two sermons featured in his new book, “Secrets in the Dark,” about the innkeeper who turned away Mary and Joseph the night Jesus Christ was born, and about Jairus’ daughter, who was resurrected by Jesus, according to the Bible’s Book of Mark. Both offer comparisons of the lives and moral struggles of people today and those of biblical characters.
Buechner ended the evening by asking for silence, to celebrate “the preciousness of this moment.” He closed his eyes and arched his neck so he faced the sky as silence enveloped the room, broken only by the dropping of a pen and a honking car in the distance.
Buechner then broke the stillness with parting words taken from his novel about the 12th century saint, Godric.
“What’s lost,” Buechner said, taking a long pause, “is nothing to what’s found.”
_ Piet Levy
Bishop Assails Removal of Catholic Nuns From Leprosy Hospital in India
(RNS) Christian leaders in India are protesting a decision by the pro-Hindu state government of Gujarat to terminate a contract with Catholic nuns who had run a leprosy hospital for more than 50 years.
“There is absolutely no reason why they should not have renewed this contract save for the fact that we are Christians,” said Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Macwan of Ahmedabad, where the hospital is located.
The Evangelical Fellowship of India also expressed shock at the government’s decision to end the contract on the grounds that the nuns were preaching Christianity to the hospital’s patients _ a charge the nuns have strongly denied.
“It is clear that `conversion’ is merely being used as a ploy to carry out the government’s agenda to hamper the Christian community’s service in public space,” the EFI said in a statement.
The EFI said that, instead of recognizing the nuns’ “tireless service,” the government “has used the state machinery to disrupt and stop their work, with total disregard of the consequences for the leprosy patients.”
The government order to remove the five sisters of the Salesian Missionaries of Mary Immaculate was made in March, with a five-year contract expiring at the end of the month. The nuns were running the institution on behalf of the Catholic diocese.
Nuns of the mission first took up the administration of the hospital, which had earlier been managed by the state government itself, in October 1949. Gujarat was then part of Bombay state, which was later split into the two states of Maharashtra and Gujarat. The hospital, located on a 25-acre plot of government land, had some 40 in-patients and treated hundreds of outpatients.
The state government had been renewing the contract with the missionaries routinely until 2001, when a new government led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power.
Gujarat’s health minister, Ashok Bhatt, told journalists the state government had plans to expand the hospital’s services, and the termination of the contract with the nuns had nothing to do with any ideology.
_ Achal Narayanan
Jewish Group Wants Anti-Semitic Books Banned From German Book Fair
(RNS) The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center is asking that seven anti-Semitic books be banned from a prestigious book fair in Frankfurt, Germany.
A new version of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” an atlas that replaces Israel with Palestine and several books that attribute the Sept. 11 terror attacks to American Jews need to be banned from this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, the Jewish human rights organization said in a letter.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center released the list in anticipation of the Oct. 9-14 fair. According to Spiegel Online, last year’s fair ended in scandal after organizers realized that some stalls were selling anti-Semitic books.
To avoid a repeat, book fair president Juergen Boos asked the Simon Wiesenthal Center to help him identify anti-Semitic books. The books listed by the center are:
_ “The Protocols of the Sages of Zion,” which attributes the Sept. 11 attacks to Jews and calls for their extermination.
_ “Mein Kampf,” an updated version with a focus on a passage urging the deaths of Jews.
_ “The Beginning of the End of the Nation of the Children of Israel.”
_ “The Partition Plan for the Arab Nation: Who After Iraq?,” which also blames American Jews for the Sept. 11 attacks.
_ “The Messiah Expected in the Iraq War,” which outlines American and Jewish offenses to the Islamic Prophet Muhammed and plans for a war against Muslims.
_ “Geographical Atlas of the Islamic World,” which displaces Israel with Palestine.
_ “The World Map,” which also replaces Israel with Palestine.
The Wiesenthal Center is one of the world’s largest Jewish human rights organizations, with more than 400,000 member families in the United States alone. Shimon Samuels, the center’s director for international affairs, argued that the books had no place at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which has a 500-year history.
“Indeed, to permit the display of such texts in Frankfurt would violate German law and European Union conventions,” said Samuels, noting that the center will stay on the lookout for other books that should be banned from the fair.
_ Niels Sorrells
Quote of the Week: Paige Blair, rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church in York Harbor, Maine
(RNS) “I don’t think the church gets everything right. We are only human. I go because if I didn’t, people would ask me why. After all, I am the priest of this parish.”
_ Paige Blair, rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church in York Harbor, Maine, speaking in a new 30-second television spot designed to encourage women in their 20s and 30s to visit the church. It is scheduled to air nationally beginning April 30, according to Episcopal News Service.
MO/RB END RNS
