Catholic Convictions in Israel

Relations between the Vatican and Israel are somewhat strained these days. Last month, after Melkite Catholic archbishop Hilarion Capucci of Jerusalem was found guilty by an Israeli court of smuggling arms and explosives for Palestinian guerrillas and sentenced to twelve years in prison, the Vatican voiced its “profound regret and sorrow” over the sentencing. It said the court action could only “aggravate” tensions in the Holy Land. Israeli officials and newspapers reacted with surprise and concern that the Vatican failed to condemn the prelate’s actions. Arab leaders and some Israeli newspapers asked that Capucci, 52, be deported instead of jailed, but authorities indicated last month he would have to serve his sentence.

The Syrian-born Capucci, prelate over 4,500 Eastern-rite Roman Catholics (most of them Arabs) in central Israel, was arrested last August after his return from a trip to Lebanon. Police found large quantities of weapons and explosives stashed in his Mercedes sedan (see October 11, 1974, issue, page 15).

Throughout his trial Capucci maintained that he was innocent and that the charges against him were “trumped up” because of his defense of the rights of the Palestine people. He told the three-judge Israeli court he could not recognize its validity because “Jerusalem is an Arabic city and Israeli law does not apply here.”

Capucci’s case resulted in turmoil within the Melkite church (the Melkites are descendants of Eastern Orthodox members who united with Rome in 1724 while retaining some distinct customs, one of many such Eastern-rite groups). Melkite archbishop Joseph Raya of Acre, overseer of 40,000 Melkites in northern Israel, criticized Capucci after the arrest, saying a clergyman who engages in terrorist activities violates the spirit of Jesus. Raya earlier had defended the Jews’ right to Jerusalem and had made other statements friendly toward Israel. Beirut newspapers denounced him as the “Zionist bishop of Israel,” and pressure was apparently applied by Patriarch Maximos V Hakim, the Beirut-based world head of the Melkites and Raya’s predecessor in Israel. In September Raya announced his resignation and left for a retreat house in Canada. Many Jewish and Christian leaders in Israel expressed regret at his departure, describing him as a man of God and truth who stood by his convictions.

Other ominous clouds appeared last month. A spokesman for the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) vowed that no effort would be spared to secure Capucci’s release.

Ethiopia: Atop A Time Bomb

Overseas missionaries serving in Ethiopia have been relatively unaffected by the political turmoil of the past few months. Mission executives say there have been no hassles with the military government, and the Lutheran World Federation-operated radio station RVOG (Radio Voice of the Gospel) in Addis Ababa has been operating normally.

With nationals involved in politics, however, it’s a different story. Among the fifty-nine executed in November was former Ethiopian premier Endalkachew Makonnen, president of the World Alliance of Young Men’s Christian Associations. And among those in jail awaiting trial last month was Emmanuel Abraham, 61, a former minister of mines, who is president of the 200,000-member Evangelical (Lutheran) Church of Mekane Yesus.

A world-wide outcry by church leaders and others over the executions and imprisonments may have saved a number of lives, including that of the deposed Emperor Haile Selassie, the colorful “Lion of Judah” who reigned over the state Ethiopian Orthodox Church. (About 35 per cent of the 27 million Ethiopians are listed as members. Muslims make up an equal percentage, and 25 per cent are designated pagan.) Selassie delivered an address at the 1966 Berlin World Congress on Evangelism.

The complex political situation involves the rebellious province of Eritrea, land reform, near-famine conditions in some parts, Christian-Muslim tensions, and power grabbing.

Some church leaders say the missionaries are sitting on a time bomb.

HIS AND HERS

His last name was Schmidt, hers was Campbell. But the married couple believed in equality and in sharing everything, so they joined their names with a hyphen.

Both Tom Campbell-Schmidt, 28, and Patty Campbell-Schmidt, 25, are ordained Presbyterian ministers. They share one position as associate minister of Newport United Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Washington. Each is on the job half the time, each gets half the pay, and each does half the household work.

Religion In Transit

Among those killed in the recent TWA plane crash near Washington, D. C., was Epifania R. Castro Resposo, director of Church World Service’s planned-parenthood program. She was formerly a leader in theological education in the Philippines. (The CWF is the relief arm of the National Council of Churches.)

The 150-student Mid-America Baptist Seminary will move this year from Little Rock, Arkansas, to Memphis, Tennessee, where it has purchased a Jewish synagogue adjacent to Bellevue (Southern) Baptist Church. The two-year-old school, founded by Southern Baptists troubled by alleged liberal trends in denominational seminaries, will use Bellevue and the converted synagogue as its campus.

United Church of Christ membership has declined from 2.06 million in 1964 to 1.89 million currently. President Robert V. Moss called for “a new type of evangelism” to counter the slippage.

Divorce in America continues on the upswing, according to Bureau of Census findings. There were 63 divorced persons last year for every 1,000 married persons living with their spouses, compared to 47 in 1970 and 35 in 1960. In the twelve-month period ending in March there were 925,000 divorces, an increase of some 200,000 over the estimated 703,000 divorces in all of 1973.

Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, a Democrat who last month announced his candidacy for the U. S. presidency, is an active Southern Baptist lay leader. He has helped with evangelistic campaigns of Billy Graham and Campus Crusade for Christ, and is himself an outspoken witness for Christ.

Thanks to a change of heart by the rules committee, the new charter of the Democratic party contains in its preamble a reference to being “under God.”

Teen-age Guru Maharaj Ji has decided to leave his $80,000 mansion in Denver and move to a $400,000 estate in the Los Angeles suburb of Malibu, taking along a new sports-car addition, a $22,000 Jensen. In Nelson, British Columbia, Darby McNeal, 31, wants to give her $400,000 inheritance to the guru’s Divine Light Mission, but her sister has asked the B. C. Supreme Court to intervene. Meanwhile, the guru’s New York business agent was indicted on charges of conspiracy, fraud, and sale of unregistered stock.

Anglican bishop John Bothwell, 48, of Niagara, Ontario, couldn’t get any of his thirty-four colleagues in the Canadian House of Bishops to second his motion that individual bishops be allowed to ordain women priests for their own dioceses. The denomination’s General Synod voted approval of women priests more than a year ago, but the bishops decided to bring the issue back for ratification at the 1975 synod.

The sometimes controversial Bruce McLeod, 45, resigned as pastor of the influential Bloor Street United Church in Toronto. No trouble. He says he merely wants time to reevaluate ministerial priorities.

The United Methodist Church sold nearly five acres of its proposed national headquarters property in Washington, D. C., to a condominium developer for $2.2 million cash. (The church retained 11.8 acres of the original nineteen-acre parcel, which cost $1.5 million in 1957.)

The Southern Baptist Convention appointed 250 foreign missionaries in 1974, bringing the total of foreign workers to more than 2,600, an SBC record.

Young Life, an evangelical youth-ministry organization based in Colorado, received a $500,000 grant from the Lilly foundation. To be given over the next two years, the amount completes a $1 million commitment. Young Life will use the funds mainly for field staff recruiting and training. The group now has 425 field staffers.

Personalia

Come mid-January, William M. “Fish Bait” Miller, 65, will head home to Mississippi and maybe a favorite fishing hole there. Miller, a Southern Baptist whose witness is well known on Capitol Hill, lost during a vote of the Democrat caucus his $40,000-per-year post as House doorkeeper, a job he has held for twenty-five years.

Major General Roy M. Terry, a United Methodist clergyman who recently retired as Air Force chief of chaplains, has joined the Fellowship of Christian Athletes as head of its church-related ministries.

Episcopal priest Graham Pulkingham, well-known leader of the charismatic Church of the Redeemer parish in Houston, has resigned to head up a charismatic church on the Isle of Cumbrae, Scotland. A renewal group he developed in London last year will move to Cumbrae, and its outreach ministry will be linked to that of the Houston church.

New presidents: Southern Baptist pastor Landrum P. Leavell II, 48, of Wichita Falls, Texas, to New Orleans Baptist Seminary; Assemblies of God minister Robert H. Spence to the 1,165-student Evangel College in Springfield, Missouri; Church of the Brethren leader J. Henry Long to American Leprosy Missions.

Prominent fundamentalist pastor and author David Otis Fuller, 71, has retired after forty years as pastor of the Wealthy Street Baptist Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

A black American Baptist clergyman, Theodore R. Britton, Jr., who has been serving as an executive with the federal Housing and Urban Affairs department (HUD), was nominated by President Ford to be ambassador to Barbados and Granada.

Evangelism-in-Depth expert Charles E. Koch, Jr., was appointed executive director of the New Jersey-based Latin America Mission, which has 196 missionaries. Koch, a graduate of Philadelphia College of Bible and Houghton College, joined LAM in 1961.

United Methodist executive David James Randolph, a former professor at Drew seminary, is the new senior minister of Christ Church in New York City, succeeding the retired Harold A. Bosley. Bosley’s predecessor at the United Methodist church was the late Ralph W. Sockman, who served there for forty years.

World Scene

The Christian Church in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, has appointed three pastor-evangelists to serve the growing congregation on remote Selayar Island. Since 1972, some 500 members have been baptized and nearly 300 are awaiting baptism, according to an Indonesian Council of Churches report.

A World Council of Churches commission reports the WCC has channeled more than $1.2 million worth of agricultural aid, medical help, and educational supplies to liberation movements in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique.

In one of his first acts as Archbishop of Canterbury, Anglican prelate Donald Coggan launched an $8.2 million appeal to preserve Canterbury Cathedral from the ravages of weather and chemical pollution in the air. The church’s sandstone shell is flaking and its twelfth-century glass windows are endangered. Annually, two million tourists visit the shrine, which marks the spot where Augustine brought Christianity to England in Saxon times.

Some 300,000 pilgrims were expected to journey to Goa on the west coast of India by January 5 for perhaps the last viewing of what is reputed to be the undecayed body of the Catholic missionary Francis Xavier, who died in 1552. It has been shown thirteen times at intervals of about ten years. Church authorities say this may be the last viewing; the body is showing signs of deterioration.

By a single vote, members of the Norwegian Parliament defeated a government proposal for free abortion. Because the socialists have a narrow majority, it was thought the measure would carry, but a socialist M. P. representing a predominantly evangelical sector voted against the government proposal. Socialist premier Tryggve Bratteli says he will try again.

A recent BBC television poll found that only 29 per cent of the British people believe in a personal God (a drop of 9 per cent from poll findings ten years ago) and 39 per cent believe in life after death (down 14 per cent). Forty-two per cent never go to church, and another 11 per cent attend rarely.

Fire recently destroyed the stately old 105-room Powerscourt House in Enniskerry, Ireland. The mansion, built about 1720, was the scene of prophetic conferences in the 1830s. Here in 1833 Plymouth Brethren teacher J. N. Darby expounded the view that the Church will be raptured out of the world before the start of the tribulation mentioned in Bible prophecy.

Under a recently enacted law in Libya, Muslims and non-Muslims alike will be liable to between ten and forty lashes for drinking, selling, possessing, or making alcohol. Anyone found guilty of offering a Muslim an alcoholic drink is subject to a jail term of up to six months. Other laws call for the amputation of a convicted thief’s right hand and for imprisonment and public flogging of adulterers and fornicators.

Bishop Mortimer Arias of the Evangelical Methodist Church in Bolivia reports membership of the denomination doubled in the last four years, from 2,000 to more than 4,000.

DEATH

STEPHEN GILL SPOTTSWOOD, 77, retired bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and board chairman of the NAACP; in Washington, D. C., of cancer.

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