World Scene: May 04, 1979

World Scene

The Baptist Mission of South Haiti, with assistance from Worldteam, has established a congregation among Haitian refugees in Miami Beach, Florida. The congregation of more than 150 has rented an existing church building and called a Haitian pastor, currently a missionary pastor on the Island of Guadeloupe.

Bishops attending a Conference of Latin American Catholic Bishops (CELAM) assembly last month (a follow-up meeting to the much publicized CELAM III [March 23, issue, p. 46]) elected a conservative Colombian prelate as president. Archbishop Alfonso Lopez Trujillo narrowly edged out two progressive candidates.

The editor of a Catholic magazine in Poland is being interrogated by the secret police. Janusz Krupski, editor in chief of the independent quarterly Spotkania, was first picked up by police in Lublin on March 26.

Rebel French Roman Catholic Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre says he will ordain another thirty-one men to the priesthood before the end of the year. Suspended by Pope Paul VI in 1976 for opposing Vatican Council reforms—the ban against celebration of the Latin mass in particular—Lefebvre has continued to ordain priests in defiance of the suspension—most recently last Christmas Eve after his audience with Pope John Paul II. Lefebvre has appealed to the Pope to relax the ban on Latin mass, substituting a policy of laissez faire.

Converts among the Maguzawa people of northern Nigeria are increasing so rapidly that church leaders say “We are no longer able to keep count.” They are part of the predominantly Muslim Hausa tribe, and have been evangelized during the past two years mainly by pastors and Bible school graduates of the Evangelical Churches of West Africa (related to the Sudan Interior Mission). ECWA’s missionary arm, the Evangelical Missionary Society, had planned seventeen short-term Bible schools for the Maguzawas this year, but now is expanding its program to cope with the response.

Coptic Orthodox Christians are being harrassed along with evangelicals in Ethiopia, according to reports from the Lutheran World Federation and the Swedish Foreign Ministry. Those sources report: one Coptic bishop was murdered, four were imprisoned, and nine were deposed after being forced at gunpoint to sign documents saying they were too old to continue in office. Observance of Sunday as a day of rest and worship reportedly has been abolished, and all public officials are compelled to attend Soviet/Marxist indoctrination classes twice a week.

Chinese churches in Singapore are planning to organize their own missionary association. The more than 1.7 million Chinese in Singapore make up about 75 percent of its population, but only about 10 percent of their number are Christian.

Rumors that Jesuits have been invited to enter China to help reopen the medical school at the University of Aurora are without substantiation. Speculation apparently arose from a Le Monde report of exploratory conversations between French and Chinese officials in Peking that included the idea of allowing the French faculty to return to Aurora. The Chinese likely were unaware that the former medical faculty included Jesuits.

The Chinese government has decided to finance a new printing of the Koran and to authorize establishment of a Karanic school in Kunming, according to Peking radio. The broadcast noted that the city’s four mosques, closed since 1970, were reopened in 1977. Kunming is capital of the southern province of Yunnan, while most of China’s estimated 25 million Muslims are in northwestern provinces.

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