ALBANIA
Atheistic Grip Loosens
Religious faith is emerging in the officially atheistic nation of Albania. According to reports from Keston College, a religious-rights monitoring group, Albanian President Ramiz Alia has proposed constitutional reforms that could weaken the Communist party’s monopoly on power and open the door to long-banned religious expression.
Alia told the Communist party’s Central Committee that constitutional changes were needed: “The freedom of conscience is violated because, just as it is anyone’s right to be an atheist, so he must not be prohibited from believing.” He also proposed changes in prohibitions on public places of worship.
While official policy may remain unchanged, in practice the people of Albania have begun to express their religious belief. Keston reports that at the end of last year, an estimated 300 to 2,000 people attended a Catholic Mass in the town of Rrmajit, which was celebrated by Fr. Simoni Jubani, who was apparently released last year after 25 years in prison. Large crowds attended Christmas celebrations and open-air meetings.
IRAN
Christian Pastor Executed
An Assemblies of God pastor has been executed in Iran amid a new wave of repression aimed at Christian believers and churches. Sources inside Iran report that Hossein Soodmand, 55, was hanged December 3 after being tortured during two months of imprisonment.
Pastors who visited a prison in the city of Mashad in northeastern Iran were told of the hanging, shown a coroner’s report, and escorted by prison authorities to a grave-site they said contained Soodmand’s body.
Soodmand was one of a handful of Muslim-convert pastors serving in Iran, ministering 24 years after his conversion. He first worked with the Iranian Bible Society, selling Bibles across the country. Following the closing in 1988 of the church he served in Mashad, Soodmand had conducted private meetings. He had been arrested and released several times prior to his execution.
Western observers say Soodmand’s execution is part of a new, harsh round of repression, especially targeted at believers who are former Muslims. Several Christians have disappeared during the past year and are feared dead. Another ex-Muslim church leader, Mehdi Dibaj, has been held in prison for more than five years.
ISRAEL
Scrolls Editor Replaced
The chief editor of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Harvard professor John Strugnell, has been dismissed and replaced following controversy surrounding anti-Jewish statements by him. Israel’s Antiquities Authority cited health problems of the 60-year-old Strugnell as the reason for his dismissal. But Strugnell had faced growing criticism for delays in the publication of the remaining portions of the scrolls. His comments about Judaism, published in an Israeli newspaper last year, created a further storm of controversy in the country.
In an interview in an Israeli newspaper, Strugnell, who is Roman Catholic, described Judaism as “originally a racist religion … a folk religion. It’s not a higher religion.” Though Strugnell denied he was anti-Semitic, those and other published comments drew severe reaction. A team of fellow scholars recommended he be replaced, and last month Israeli officials named Israeli professor Emanuel Tov as the new editor in chief of the scrolls.
ENGLAND
Christians Get Political
The Movement for Christian Democracy (MCD), an interdenominational group seeking to apply Christian principles to government policy, has been launched in Great Britain. Led by two members of Parliament, Liberal Democrat David Alton and Conservative Kenneth Hargreaves, who have been active prolife leaders, the new group cites the work of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social reformer William Wilberforce as its inspiration.
Alton said about 40 people from various strands of the British church met in early 1990 to discuss the idea of forming the MCD. “We felt very strongly that each of the [major political] parties had had their taproots in Christian traditions, but that each of them had moved away and become increasingly secular. There is now a great urgency for Christ to be involved in political action in a coherent way,” Alton told the British Christian magazine Today.
Whether the MCD will seek to run candidates for office has not been decided, Alton said. The fledgling group, which attracted about 1,500 supporters to its inaugural rally, is now developing policy recommendations, he said.
PEOPLE AND EVENTS
Briefly Noted
Distributed: A record number of Bibles worldwide, according to the United Bible Societies. In 1970, 5,159,032 were distributed; in 1989, a total of 15,686,040. Recent growth is occurring even more rapidly, due in large part to the opening of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
Granted: Approval by the Vietnamese government for the Mennonite Central Committee to set up an office in Hanoi. It is the first American relief agency to be given such permission. Two staff members moved to Hanoi last month to begin overseeing programs for education, agricultural assistance, and economic development.
Admitted: Into membership in the World Evangelical Fellowship, the Evangelical Alliance of Romania, founded in March 1990, and the Christian Association of Evangelical Churches of Uruguay, founded in 1988.
Jorge Serrano Elías took the oath of office as President of Guatemala January 14, after defeating newspaper publisher Jorge Carpio in a run-off election. Serrano had surged to a second-place finish in the general elections last November when former head-of-state Gen. Efrain Ríos Montt was ruled ineligible by the nation’s Supreme Court.
Serrano, 45, a Stanford-educated businessman and politician, won with a better than two-to-one margin (68 percent to 32 percent). His selection marks the first time in Guatemala’s history that a democratically elected civilian president handed over power to an elected civilian successor. It is also the first time in Latin America that an evangelical has gained the presidency through free elections.
Supporters of Carpio, a Catholic, had tried to make Serrano’s faith a campaign issue. They distributed flyers claiming that if Serrano were elected, he would prohibit religious processions, abolish the confradia (local lay organizations dedicated to the care of a particular saint), and destroy images. A barrage of full-page newspaper ads warned that to vote for Serrano was to ensure the demise of the Catholic church and alleged that his candidacy was part of a U.S.-sponsored plot. In the closing days of the campaign, Carpio’s National Centrist Union party also accused Serrano of unethical business practices and massive debts.
“I was elected by the votes of Catholics, evangelicals, Jews, and Buddhists,” said Serrano. Although most evangelicals—who make up 30 percent of the population—probably supported him in the run-off (many voted for other candidates in the first round), at least half the voters from the Catholic majority also marked the rooster, the symbol of Serrano’s Solidarity Action Movement party, on their ballots.
The new government will have to contend with a legacy of corruption, inflation, crime, violence, and empty coffers left by Vinicio Cerezo’s outgoing Christian Democratic administration, as well as a 30-year-old Marxist guerrilla movement. Some leaders are concerned that any failures by Serrano could have negative repercussions for the church.
“It’s a great responsibility,” says Emilio Nunez of the Central American Theological Seminary. “Having an evangelical president means we will be on pins and needles for the next five years.”
Surprise In Colombia
Jaime Ortiz Hurtado, rector of the Biblical Seminary of Colombia in Medellín, was a surprise winner in last December’s elections to that country’s National Constitutional Assembly. The 57-year-old Ortiz, considered one of the top Protestant systematic theologians in Latin America, received the sixth-highest number of votes out of 116 names on the ballot, finishing ahead of many well-known politicians.
The strength of his showing won an additional seat in the 70-member assembly for his party, the Christian Union, a new movement promoted by the Evangelical Confederation of Colombia (CEDECOL). That seat will be filled by another evangelical, university professor Arturo Mejia Borda. The newly elected body will begin work this month drafting a new Colombian Constitution.
The news media took a sudden interest in Ortiz, who bears a striking resemblance to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and dubbed him “Colombia’s Gorbachev.” Articles in the national daily El Tiempo spoke of an “evangelical perestroika,” noting that evangelicals, who number about 2.5 million in the country of about 32 million, might have captured as many as 16 seats had they organized their campaign sooner and voted in bloc. The Christian Union movement came together only about a month before the election.
cedecol leader Hector Pardo told El Tiempo that the Christian Union got involved in the Constitutional Assembly elections out of evangelicals’ desire “to be treated equally under the Constitution.” The preamble of the present constitution links God’s name with the Roman Catholic Church and makes Catholicism the official religion of Colombia. In a telephone interview, Ortiz said he would like to retain God’s name in the preamble, but not link it to any one religious faith.
By participating in the Constitutional Assembly, “my goal is not merely to seek benefits for the evangelicals,” he said. “But we would like to saturate the proceedings with Christian thought.” Ortiz said he also sees the assembly as an opportunity to improve the South American nation’s difficult political and social situation.
