World News Gathered & Syndicated

Thousands Attend Ethiopian Church Leader’s Funeral Marthe Van Der Wolf ("Voice of America," August 23, 2012)

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia – Thousands of Ethiopians gathered Thursday for the funeral of Abuna Paulos, head of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Abuna died last Thursday at the age of 76, four days before the death of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

Abuna Paulos’ funeral was held at the Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa. Among the mourners was Deputy Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, who is set to take over as Ethiopia’s new leader.

Most people had to listen to the service on the radio outside the church compound, as the crowd was too large to accommodate everybody. Many people were crying outside, mourning the death of their religious leader.

Bezawit is a clinical nurse in Addis Ababa and and says she respected the religious leader for his work in the community.

“He is a father of the poor and educates them. He wants us to know what we really believe in. And he also helped to control the spread of HIV amongst the youth. We’re very sorry that he died as he was a good father,” she said.

Woldesemait, an Ethiopian businessman, praised how Abuna Paulos’ treated people.

“Father Paulos is a very good person. We came to the funeral because we heard he passed away. He looks at all people equally. He built schools and was a person that helps everybody,” he said.

Many people at the funeral said they will remember Abuna Paulos mostly for his development work in Ethiopia.

But the patriarch was also frequently criticized. His critics felt that his ties with the government were too strong. They also said he tried to make his own position more powerful by attempting to put the patriarch position above the synod, the council of the church.

Also, Abuna Paulos was appointed leader while his predecessor, Abuna Merkorios, was in exile. The Ethiopian Orthodox church officially states that no new patriarch can be appointed if the former one is still alive. Abuna Merkorios and his followers started a rival synod in the United States.

General secretary of the Orthodox Catholic Church, Abuna Heskin, says that people who are criticizing Abuna Paulos are judging without knowing the truth.

“They don’t know him in depth or closely, but he was a good father. We hear some things without having the chance to talk to them personally,“ Heskin said.

Ethiopian Orthodox followers are the dominant religious group in Ethiopia. Abuna Paulos had led the Orthodox Church since 1992. The synod will hold meetings soon to appointment a new patriarch.

Christian groups allege threats to religious freedom in anti-Chick-fil-A campaignsDan Gilgoff ("CNN," July 30, 2012)

The nation’s biggest evangelical group said Monday that religious freedom is threatened by American mayors who say Chick-fil-A is not welcome in their cities because of the restaurant leader’s opposition to gay marriage.

“Individuals have the right to decide whether or not to ‘eat mor chikin.’ But no government leader should restrict a business or organization from expanding to their district based on the personal or political views of the owners,” Leith Anderson, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, said Monday.

“Such evident discrimination and attempts to marginalize those with religious values have no place in American democracy,” Anderson said.

The National Association of Evangelicals is the country’s largest evangelical umbrella group, representing 45,000 local churches from 40 denominations.

Last week, a handful of mayors urged Chick-fil-A to stay out of their cities after the chain’s president, Dan Cathy, weighed in on same-sex marriage by saying his company backs the traditional family unit.

“Chick-fil-A’s values are not Chicago values,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat, said last week. “They’re not respectful of our residents, our neighbors and our family members.”

San Francisco Mayor Edwin M. Lee tweeted last week: “Closest #ChickFilA to San Francisco is 40 miles away & I strongly recommend that they not try to come any closer.”

Those comments and other criticisms have prompted conservative Christian groups to rally to the restaurant’s side.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has called for a “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day” on Wednesday, while former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin tweeted a picture of her and her husband holding Chik-fil-A takeout bags last weekend.

“I have been incensed at the vitriolic assaults on the Chick-fil-A company because the CEO, Dan Cathy, made comments recently in which he affirmed his view that the Biblical view of marriage should be upheld,” Huckabee, a Republican and former pastor, wrote in a Facebook posting announcing the Wednesday event.

More than 300,000 people have accepted Huckabee’s Facebook invitation to participate in the event.

Evangelical groups like Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council have also urged their followers to see campaigns against Chick-fil-A as threats to religious freedom.

“For the government to engage in viewpoint discrimination is not only bad politics – it’s unconstitutional,” the Family Research Council said in an e-mail to supporters last week. “Chick-fil-A may be a private company, but that doesn’t mean it has to surrender its beliefs at the dining room door.”

“Under the First Amendment, executives at Chick-Fil-A are just as entitled as any American to speak publicly about their views,” the statement continued.

China Assails U.S. ‘Arrogance’ in Report on Religious FreedomMark Mcdonald ("International Herald Tribune," July 31, 2012)

Hong Kong – The United States has issued its annual report on religious freedom around the world, taking particular aim at repression and crackdowns in China, North Korea and Myanmar. China shot back that the report was “full of prejudice, arrogance and ignorance.”

“More than a billion people live under governments that systematically suppress religious freedom,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in remarks summarizing the new report.

“New technologies have given repressive governments additional tools for cracking down on religious expression,” Mrs. Clinton said. “Members of faith communities that have long been under pressure report that the pressure is rising.”

In terms of religious freedom as a human right, she said, “the world is sliding backwards.”

The report noted a rising tide of anti-Semitism around the world, “manifested in Holocaust denial, glorification, and relativism; conflating opposition to certain policies of Israel with blatant anti-Semitism; growing nationalistic movements that target ‘the other’; and traditional forms of anti-Semitism, such as conspiracy theories, acts of desecration and assault, ‘blood libel,’ and cartoons demonizing Jews.”

Four Asian countries — China, Myanmar, North Korea and Uzbekistan — were among eight nations designated by the State Department as “countries of particular concern” on religious freedom.

The China section of the new report found “a marked deterioration during 2011 in the government’s respect for and protection of religious freedom.”

It cited tightened restrictions on Buddhist clergy and worship in Tibet and Tibetan areas, saying, “Official interference in the practice of these religious traditions exacerbated grievances and contributed to at least 12 self-immolations by Tibetans in 2011.”

From the report’s separate section on Tibet: “There were numerous and severe abuses of religious freedom, including religious prisoners and detainees. Monasteries were increasingly forbidden to deliver traditional educational and medical services to the people of their communities, and official intimidation was used to compel acquiescence and preserve a facade of stability.”

Beijing continued to “severely repress Muslims” living in the Xinjiang region, and there were further crackdowns on Christian house churches, according to the report.

China issued a biting response on Tuesday, saying the U.S. report continued “a notorious practice of blatantly interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, including China, in the name of religion.” A slightly condensed excerpt from the response, published as a commentary by the official news agency Xinhua:

The annual report, largely based on unconfirmed media reports and groundless allegations from outlawed groups and organizations with ulterior motives, is nothing but a political tool used by the U.S. government to exert pressure on other countries, mostly deemed as its rivals.

The U.S. practice of releasing such a report, which is full of prejudice, arrogance and ignorance, is unimaginative and even counterproductive.

Only a few members from banned cults and illegal extremist religious organizations, which engage in illegal or splittist activities under the guise of seeking religious freedom, have been punished in China strictly according to the laws.

Falun Gong followers — there are said to be tens of millions of believers in China — were said to be especially targeted for harassment and even detention in high-security psychiatric facilities for the criminally insane, although the report acknowledged that such charges were difficult to verify.

“Some neighborhood communities reportedly were instructed to report on Falun Gong members to officials; monetary rewards were offered to citizens who informed on Falun Gong practitioners,” the report said.

The report noted that China’s central government “stated that it did not detain or arrest anyone solely because of his or her religion.”

The report found encouraging signs in China, too. Three Catholic bishops were ordained in 2011, “with the approval of both the Vatican and the official Chinese Catholic church.” Church groups were encouraged to provide social services in quake-hit areas of Sichuan Province.

In its assessment of North Korea, the U.S. report acknowledged that “little is known about the day-to-day life of religious persons in the country.” An excerpt:

Members of government-controlled religious groups did not appear to suffer discrimination, while members of underground churches or those connected to missionary activities were reportedly regarded as subversive elements. Some reports claimed, and circumstantial evidence suggested, that many if not most of the government-controlled religious organizations were created for propaganda and political purposes, including meeting with foreign religious visitors.

Some NGOs and academics estimated there may be up to several hundred thousand Christians practicing their faith underground in the country. Others questioned the existence of a large-scale underground church or concluded that it was impossible to estimate accurately the number of underground religious believers. Individual underground congregations were reportedly very small and typically confined to private homes.

Washington has welcomed recent political reforms in Myanmar, the former Burma, and Mrs. Clinton seems to have connected personally with the opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. And the State Department noted the passage of “the first law in several decades to allow peaceful assembly.”

But the report also cited ongoing and widespread abuses of religious freedoms, from arbitrary arrests of Muslims to the harassment of Baptists.

Traditional Christian and Islamic holidays continued to be controlled by the authorities, the report said. Permits to build or repair mosques were said to be rarely granted; Muslims living in Rakhine State often needed to pay bribes to get permission to travel for any purpose; and ethnic Rohingya Muslims “continued to experience the severest forms of legal, economic, educational, and social discrimination.”

An excerpt from the Myanmar report:

The government continued its efforts to exert control over the Buddhist clergy (Sangha). It tried Sangha members for “activities inconsistent with and detrimental to Buddhism” and imposed on the Sangha a code of conduct enforced by criminal penalties.

The government continued the detention, imprisonment, and interrogation of politically active Buddhist monks. In prison, some monks were defrocked and treated as laypersons. In general they were not allowed to shave their heads and were not given food compatible with the monastic code, which dictates that monks should not eat after noon. They often were beaten and forced to do hard labor.

The State Department’s report on religion is separate from its annual assessment of human rights, which was published in May.

It is also not to be confused with another report, also recently issued, by the independent federal panel known as the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.