Although 29,000 Jews emigrated from Russia last year—the highest numbers in five years—the numbers of ungranted requests to leave also increased, reports the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. The U.S.-based agency notes a backlog in emigration requests. More than 180,000 Jews have submitted the required “letter of invitation” from an Israeli relative.
The Roman Catholic Church in Poland last year supported approximately 1,000 of its own missionaries, who work in sixty different countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Church officials say this figure represents an increase of 400 Polish missionaries of “both sexes” since 1965.
Numerous churches in southern and central Ethiopia reportedly were looted and closed during successive Sundays in December, as part of a “cultural revolution.” Eye-witnesses say Christians were imprisoned and, in some instances, tortured. Religious News Service said that evangelical Christians in the Bale Province were given fifteen days to renounce their faith or be executed.
The South African government is allowing integration in previously all-white private church schools. In so doing, officials of the ruling National Party, which stands for a racial policy of apartheid, may avoid a confrontation with English-speaking churches. Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, and Methodist leaders had said they could no longer justify segregation in their church schools. The policy reportedly has functioned well and without racial incidents.
Christian Aid, the relief arm of the British Council of Churches, recently provided $200,000 in grants for Rhodesian war victims. Kenneth Slack, agency director who earlier this year criticized the World Council of Churches’ $85,000 grant to the Rhodesian Patriotic Front, emphasized at a press conference that Christian Aid money was given to “specifically neutral institutions”—namely, the Red Cross and to Christian Care, an ecumenical agency working with refugees.
Deaths
CLIFFORD E. BARBOUR, 83, former moderator in what was then the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (which later merged into the United Presbyterian Church in the USA) and past president of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, who tried to reunite his northern branch of Presbyterianism with the southern Presbyterian Church in the United States, on January 10, in Knoxville, Tennessee, of a heart ailment.
JOSEF FRINGS, 91, Roman Catholic cardinal and popular church leader in West Germany, a leader of the progressive wing at Vatican Council II who helped pass the rule recognizing marriages of mixed faiths; on December 17 in Cologne.
