Ruth Gledhill - Times Online - WBLG

Persecution Index 10: Pakistan

Some extremists in Pakistan are calling for a Christian doctor to be hanged publicly for blasphemy, according to a news story on Persecution.org. Dr Robin Sarder was charged ten days ago with violating Pakistan's blasphemy laws. A Muslim who he had been friends with for many years, but who according to the story became jealous of his professional success, told police he had made derogatory comments about the Prophet Mohammed's beard and about the Koran. After the complaint was lodged against him, a crowd of 200 Muslims wearing green turbans, a sign of orthodoxy, attacked his clinic and home. Observers say that if the police hat not intervened, he would have been killed. He is currently being held in jail. The Roman Catholic Church, through its organisation the National Commission for Justice and Peace, has taken up his case. You can email the embassy here on his behalf. Fifteen people have been accused of blasphemy in Pakistan so far this year. Dr Sardar is the only Christian to be so accused. In 1998, Bishop John Joseph , the Catholic bishop of Faisalabad, committed suicide in a protest against Pakistan's draconian blasphemy laws, introduced in 1986. The pic here comes from a BBC report of Christians demonstrating against the laws.

Women priests say 'no' to women bishops at any price

Women in Britain can become Prime Minister but not bishops. Canon Lucy Winkett, pictured here, Precentor at St Paul's, is among the 700-plus women who've sent an open letter today to the Church of England's bishops stating that they want  women bishops, and the time is right to have them now. But they do not want them at any price. And legislation to introduce 'safeguards' to 'protect' traditionalists is a price they are not prepared to pay. Read the full letter below. Women and their supporters in Wales took a similar stance, and the result was the defeat of their own bill to consecrate women bishops. A similar outcome is looking rather likely for the Church of England, it seems. The photo was taken at a service last year to mark the anniversary of the start of the Falklands War, the conflict that prompted the extraordinary clash between Church and State, in the persons of Margaret Thatcher and the late Robert Runcie.

Teenage female suicide bomber kills Iraqi captain

Reports coming out of Iraq this afternoon suggest that a teenage suicide bomber has killed an Iraqi captain and injured four soldiers south of Baghdad. Apparently the attack happened today as the teenager, a young woman or girl, approached the Iraqi commander in Youssifiyah, one of the areas in Iraq being targeted by Al Qaeda as the US 'surge' in Baghdad proves increasingly successful. The bomb was detonated by remote control, killing Captain Wassem al-Maamouri and injuring four soldiers. American troops are searching for those responsible.

Of course female suicide bombers are not unprecedented.

Persecution Index 9: Burma

Poor Burma. Its people's troubles are endless, as the story from which this pic is taken shows. There is a long history of persecution of Christians in Burma, as this article from January last year illustrates. But really Christians there are not targeted more than any other group, as the writer of the piece makes clear. The Buddhist religious are equally victims, as we have seen recently, of a regime determined to keep itself in power, even when its population is dying by the thousands  because of a freakish 'act of God'.

Rowan Williams: Lambeth will be 'painful'

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has admitted the coming Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Church's bishops from around the world may well be a "painful" experience for many. As we report, he said he hoped a "way forward" could be found in a Church facing almost inevitable schism between the liberal West and evangelical South over the issues of homosexual ordination and same-sex blessing services. He also said that instead of the usual confrontational parliamentary methods of debate, the conference will be run using 'indaba' groups, a form of Zulu negotiation. I thought I might invest in one of these T-shirts, as a tribute to the idea. He disclosed that he has been holding private meetings with bishops from both sides on how to be 'part of a shared vision.' In a letter to all the Church's 800-plus bishops, of which about a quarter will be boycotting Lambeth and attending instead the 'alternative' Global Anglican Future Conference in the Middle East next month, he made it clear that he did not want the focus at Lambeth to be on the divisive issue of sexuality when there is so much in the areas of poverty, violence and injustice to be addressed in the wider world. Read the full text below. I believe this must at last be the letter that the Bishop of Durham Dr Tom Wright referred to a short while ago. Graham Kings has also been speculating recently on Gafcon, as Pluralist reported the other day. Pluralist has also posted a truly insightful comment on Dr Williams' Pentecost letter.

Faith equals happiness, no faith equals misery

Shadow Attorney General Dominic Grieve MP gave an interesting speech last week to the Conservative Christian Fellowship which you can download here , addressing the issue of British identity. But he also touched on well-being, a topic of concern to party leader David Cameron and which is the focus of an interesting report by a cross-party group of MPs. We've got a story in the paper today on this, which on which I was interested to see this morning a supportive comment by one Benita Hewitt! St Louis Catholic has also posted an interesting response.

Latest religious trends

While Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, as we report, has been arguing the case for the need for religion in our society, some commentators have been querying the statistics on which I based my story  and commentary of yesterday. One person has even suggested the whole report does not exist, as they couldn't find it on the Christian Research website! Well I wonder why they have not put it up there? What could their reasons possibly be!  I understand that the view among senior staff at the C of E is that there is no problem here with the journalism, although they are concerned that I could have better reflected in my report the inadequacy of Christian Research's methodology. Their official statement is here. Also, see Rev John Richardson's excellent and refreshingly honest analysis of the substance of my report and the CR research. Ron Dreher on BeliefNet also has a good understanding of the issues.

For those of you who want to check it out, the report does exist, it was published on Tuesday and if you doubt it, the ISBN is 978-1-85321-176-8. Below I've reproduced the three tables most relevant to what I wrote. They are tables 12.6.1, which forecasts church attendance tghroughout the whole of Great Britain in 2050 to be at 899,000, down from around four million today, while 12.8 shows how the number of religiously active Muslims will increase from around a million today to 2.66 million in 2050, with the crossover taking place around 2035.

Ata mefutar!

As we report, the Jewish Chronicle has today published its list of the top 100 people most influential on the Jewish Community. The omission of The Apprentice's Alan Sugar is surprising. But even more remarkable is the omission of Chelsea's Avram Grant, especially given Chelsea's deserved and amazing victory over Man United the other day. Oh how the Man U supporters in our house wept that night. How we secret Chelsea fans gloated. (You have to be a bit secretive about it if you dare to support Chelsea in the little enclave of liberalism where we live, even though it is technically our 'local'.) Read the list in full on the JC website here, here and here.

Come be 'baptised' with us sinnners at Lambeth

The first Lambeth Conference I attended, in 1988, was fantastic fun. Robert Runcie presided like a benign saint over proceedings that were
stimulating, enjoyable and productive for everyone. We in the media looked forward eagerly to the next one. But as far as the press operation was concerned, the last Lambeth Conference was a total disaster. At the start, everyone, bishops included, was handed badges. We got bright pink ones, the bishops purple, and everyone else yellow or some other anodyne colour. The bishops were assembled by the 'excommunications officers', as I was soon calling them, and told: 'Purple is safe, yellow is secure, pink means danger.' Things went abysmal from there.

(This is my latest CEN column.)

Comment of the Day: Anglican shot dead in Somalia

Comment of the Day, from Joe: 'This is to let you know the sad news that David Mohamed Ali, a Somali Christian evangelist and a long-standing member of St Matthew's, was shot dead last week by two Islamist terrorists in Badoia, Somalia, because of his Christian faith. He had been sent to Badoia by Ethiopian and Somali border police, for reasons that are not clear. David was an intelligent and gifted evangelist who thought deeply about his faith.'

Read it all here.

Sir Cliff to the rescue

Today, we carry in the main paper a lengthy spread and commentary about the latest Religious Trends, where Christian Research finds that church attendance in this country is declining at such a rate that within a generation, mosque attendance will outnumber churchgoing. Followed up by The Lead among others, it seemed to me that there was a link that the Government is failing to address in its current thinking on the issue of 'Britishness' between religion and identity. Well there is one man who perhaps can save both the Christian religion in Britain, and even British identity itself, from extinction. In my view, this man personifies Britishness, a man both timeless in his appeal and in the strength of feeling he arouses in people. It is Sir Cliff Richard. Later today, he is launching his new book and CD of his 50 Favourite Bible Stories.  (Update Friday: Another spread, this time featuring Sir Cliff and his book of Bible stories, in the paper today.)

Telegraph appoints Anglican priest to write on religion

Not sure what I think about this. But at risk of publicising the opposition, I thought it merited drawing attention to. I still miss Jonathan.

Telegraph Media Group new appointments

Telegraph Media Group announces the following appointments:

'George Pitcher has been appointed Religion Editor for The Telegraph. He will be writing regularly for The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and Telegraph.co.uk. George is Curate at St Bride’s and was ordained a priest in 2006.  George is a former industrial editor of The Observer and has held a variety of posts as a commentator and columnist in newspapers and magazines. He co-founded the PR firm Luther Pendragon in which he sold his interest in 2005. 

Persecution Index 9: United Kingdom

Update: The PMOI won their case, the British government lost. Bartholomew's blog has more details.

Opposed to the regime in Iran is an organisation called the People's Mojahedin Organisation of Iran. This is a resistance operation that has the support of a number of organisations. But in the United Kingdom, this organisation, one of the few Islamic organisations that campaigns with a feminist agenda and is wholly committed to women's rights, is proscribed by the British Government. The EU is among the organisations and states that has designated it a terrorist organisation, although the European Court of Justice overturned this. The group officially renounced violence in 2001. Its political arm, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, has helped provide intelligence on Iran's nuclear activities. Iran has also denounced the organisation as un-Islamic.Why am I writing this now? Because after legal action by no fewer than 35 MPs, the UK's Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission ordered that these people be removed from the proscribed list, a list that influences directly the EU designation.  The Home Secretary has gone to the Court of Appeal to get this ruling overturned. The British Government remains convinced that these people are terrorists. Tomorrow, Wednesday, we get the result from the panel of three judges chaired by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips.

Comment of the Day: accommodating others

George Parr wrote:
'Part of accommodating others is to display high levels of tolerance, in a rational world hopefully restricted to things that actually matter. Otherwise rancour and violence is liable to result over the minutiae. There could not be a better example of hubristic nonsense than carrying on in an alarming manner over signs and symbols deemed by some to be sacred whilst others not.'

Read it here.

Protestant or Catholic: Anglicans must decide

Hard words for Anglicans from the head of the Council for Christian Unity in Rome. Cardinal Walter Kasper has told the Catholic Herald that now, with Lambeth approaching, is the time for Anglicans to decide whether they are Catholic or Protestant. 'Ultimately, it is a question of the identity of the Anglican Church. Where does it belong?' he said. 'Does it belong more to the churches of the first millennium -Catholic and Orthodox - or does it belong more to the Protestant churches of the 16th century? At the moment it is somewhere in between, but it must clarify its identity now and that will not be possible without certain difficult decisions.' The genius of Anglicanism has always been its ability to straddle the divide, but maybe the Cardinal is right and the Communion's present difficulties reflect the impossibility of continuing to do this.

Photos: ACNS Rosenthal

Persecution Index 8: United States

It appears that the pig is being persecuted in the United States. Please don't laugh. A regular reader of this blog has sent me the following from Front Page Magazine: 'The practice of political correctness may soon be tallying another casualty: the pig. Increasingly, as America and the rest of the Western world continue accommodating Muslim religious demands, pork food products are being singled out for removal from dining tables and pig-related trinkets banished from the desks of office workers.'

Read the rest here.

Meanwhile, some blogs have picked up the AP report that leaders of Ireland’s main Christian churches were barred from praying at Jerusalem’s Western Wall yesterday because they refused to remove the crosses they were wearing. 'Roman Catholic Cardinal Sean Brady, Church of Ireland Archbishop Alan Harper and Presbyterian and Methodist Moderators John Finlay and Roy Cooper arrived at the wall, Judaism’s holiest prayer site, without giving prior notice to Israeli authorities, Brady told the Irish broadcast network RTE.'

I look forward to hearing how they got on when they tried entering the Al-Aqsa Mosque without taking their shoes off.

 

Comment of the Day: Bishop Gene

Michael Stevens wrote: 'Has Bishop Robinson been excommunicated by the CoE? If not, as a Bishop with full Apostolic succession, and leading a more blameless life than many, I find the Archbish's position strange to say the least.'

Read it all here.

'St Boris's Day'

With victory less than half a prayer away for Boris Johnson in the London Mayoral elections, it is worth pointing out that 2 May is the saint day of St Boris in the Russian Orthodox Church. And although, as Sean Clarke notes, the Russian church uses the Julian Calendar where 2 May will not take place until 15 May, it seems nevertheless amusing that Boris should take the day on what still appears to us Gregorians as St Boris' Day. St Boris from now on?

Suicide bombing 'un-Islamic' says top Muslim peer

A very good speech from interfaith expert Lord Hameed in the House of Lords tonight, on why suicide bombing is un-Islamic and how inadequate leadership in Britain's Muslim community is fomenting radicalism among its youth. I've posted the full text below. Lord Hameed was recently awarded the Interfaith Gold Medallion by the Sternberg Foundation.

Bishop Gene 'banned'

Episcopal Cafe has a good story in its 'lead', that Bishop Gene Robinson has been denied permission by the Archbishop of Canterbury to preach while in this country during Lambeth. I've been following this for some time, as there was a story going round that Sir Ian McKellen, the gay actor, would take part in a service and 'preach' the sermon for Bishop Gene while he stood silently beside the pulpit. Sir Ian is understood to have expressed his sympathies for Bishop Gene in writing. Also, when my own husband interviewed him a while back for The Times Magazine, although these quotes didn't make it into the finished article because they weren't relevant, Sir Ian was clear in his outrage at the Anglican goings-on. When I spoke to Sir Ian about it a few days ago he was adamant that he wished to make no comment. And Sir Ian's office tells me he has no plans to do anything for Bishop Gene at present. In any case, whether he did or not would depend on Bishop Gene being banned from preaching in the first place. So has he or hasn't the bishop been banned? Will Bishop Gene and Sir Ian put on a 'double act' at St Mary's Putney, an event that would be a massive publicity coup for Inclusive Church and Bishop Gene's supporters? (Update: see Peter Carey's follow-up to this story.)