4 year old Sikh to convert to Roman Catholic for school admission

Sikh girl will convert for a place at Catholic school

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=476449&in_page_id=1770
By PAUL SIMS - The parents of a Sikh girl want to convert her to Roman Catholicism to win a place at the school of their choice.

Baljit and Bal Singh say they will change their four-year-old daughter's religion if it means she can attend their favoured school next month.

Maya Kaur's Sikh parents are considering changing her religion in the hope she may be allowed into the Catholic school

Maya Kaur has been attending a nursery at St Paul's Roman Catholic School in Wolviston, Cleveland, for the past two years.

But her parents have been told there is no place available for her when she starts full-time education in a few weeks.

After losing an appeal, the couple say they are seriously considering changing her religion in the hope she may be allowed into the school, which gives priority to Catholic children.

Mr Singh said: "We think Sikhism is similar to Roman Catholicism so we put her in that school. She's been there for two years, she goes to church with them, she says a prayer before she eats her dinner.

"I'll baptise her as Roman Catholic so she can go to the school."

St Paul's admissions policy gives priority to children who have been baptised Roman Catholic, have been formally received into the Catholic church and live in the catchment area, or who have a sibling at the school. Priority then goes to other Christian denominations before children of other faiths.

The Singhs' extraordinary proposal is likely to be frowned upon within the Sikh religion, which takes some of its identity from ancestors who were persecuted and martyred for refusing to convert to other faiths.

Among the stories taught within the faith is that of Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth of the founding gurus of Sikhism who was beheaded in 1675 by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb for refusing to convert to Islam.

The Singhs insisted that they were doing nothing wrong in trying to get the best for their daughter.

"Two years ago when they took her into the nursery why didn't they say she wouldn't get a place straight away in the primary school?" said Mr Singh.

"I would have got her baptised then - or I'd have put her in another school."

Maya has been offered a place at William Cassidi School, a nearby Church of England school. But her parents claim she is upset and wants to remain with her friends.

Catherine Connelly, head at St Paul's, said the school had received 34 applications this year, compared to the norm of 24. The class size had also been expanded to the legal limit of 30.

"We are proud of our school's inclusive nature and we have children of several different faiths and ethnic groups," she said.

"We allocated the places according to our published admissions criteria which all parents had access to."

Pope claims Catholicism the only true Christianity

source: http://www.wilmingtonstar.com/article/20070711/NEWS/707110402/-1/State

By Nicole Winfield,
Associated Press

Lorenzago Di Cadore, Italy | Pope Benedict XVI reasserted the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church, approving a document released Tuesday that says other Christian communities are either defective or not true churches and Catholicism provides the only true path to salvation.

The statement brought swift criticism from Protestant leaders. "It makes us question whether we are indeed praying together for Christian unity," said the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, a fellowship of 75 million Protestants in more than 100 countries.

"It makes us question the seriousness with which the Roman Catholic Church takes its dialogues with the reformed family and other families of the church," the group said in a letter charging that the document took ecumenical dialogue back to the era before the Second Vatican Council.

It was the second time in a week that Benedict has corrected what he says are erroneous interpretations of the Second Vatican Council, the 1962-1965 meetings that modernized the church. On Saturday, Benedict revived the old Latin Mass - a move cheered by Catholic traditionalists but criticized by more liberal ones as a step backward from Vatican II. Among the council's key developments were its ecumenical outreach and the development of the New Mass in the vernacular, which essentially replaced the old Latin Mass.

Benedict, who attended Vatican II as a young theologian, has long complained about what he considers its erroneous interpretation by liberals, saying it was not a break from the past but rather a renewal of church tradition.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which Benedict headed before becoming pope, said it was issuing the new document Tuesday because some contemporary theological interpretations of Vatican II's ecumenical intent had been "erroneous or ambiguous" and had prompted confusion and doubt.

The new document restates key sections of a 2000 text the pope wrote when he was prefect of the congregation, "Dominus Iesus," which riled Protestant and other Christian denominations because it said they were not true churches but merely ecclesial communities and therefore did not have the "means of salvation."

The commentary repeated church teaching that says the Catholic Church "has the fullness of the means of salvation."

Norwegian Princes can communicate with angels

source: http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article1904559.ece

Princess draws more flak

Princess Märtha Louise's latest business venture, which she says can teach people how to communicate with angels, has sparked anything but purely angelic reaction.
Officials ranging from the state director of health, to a top politician to religious figures are blasting the princess for alleged offenses ranging from exploiting her position to misusing her physiotherapy training.

Health Director Lars E Hanssen told newspaper Aftenposten Wednesday that the princess needs to be "very careful" about how she uses her physiotherapy authorization in marketing her courses in healing, reading and alternative therapy.

"When you're an authorized health professional, like Märtha Louise is, there are certain demands," Hanssen said. "The more she advertises that she's a physiotherapist, the more careful she needs to be.

"If these angels will only help course participants, that's not treatment and there's no problem," he added. "But if the angels and the course are part of the treatment, that's a problem."

Dr Bernt Rognlien, one of Norway's leading figures within alternative medicine, thinks the princess' course is more religious in nature than health-related.

"The way I read her web site, this is a spiritual and religious offer, not something that can heal the sick," he said, adding that he's not sure the princess realizes that she can appear to be proselytizing when she uses religious terminology about angels and goddesses.

Inge Lønning, a former head of the University of Oslo and top politician for the Conservative Party, said the princess' course involving angels is on a collision course with Christianity.

Lønning, a professor of theology, said her web site resembles the type of religion that existed in Norway before Christianity was introduced, "that being faith in your own powers. In my opinion that can't be combined with Christian faith."

As a member of Norway's Royal Family, the princess is expected to uphold the tenets of the state Evangelical Lutheran church. Calls were made immediately for her resignation from the church, or even her excommunication.

A religious historian at Norway's technical university NTNU, Asbjørn Dyrendal, said he thinks the princess' venture is embarrassing.

"I think this must be embarrassing for the royal couple (Martha Louise's parents, King Harald and Queen Sonja) because they belong to a generation where this type of religion was viewed as eccentric," Dyrendal said. "But this is, of course, a family that's used to eccentric relatives within European royalty, so they may think it's normal for their daughter to charge fees to make contact with angels."

There's been no comment on Princess Märtha Louise's venture, nor the debate surrounding it, from either the king or the queen, both of whom are said to be on holiday.

A survey conducted by newspaper VG, meanwhile, suggests that four out of 10 Norwegians agree with the princess that humans can have supernatural powers, and that it's possible to communicate with angels.

Fervour and naivete lead 'missionaries' into harm's way

sourcehttp://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=b88562b5-320a-4bae-8819-379baca41122

Jonathan Manthorpe, Vancouver Sun

Published: Friday, July 27, 2007

Christianity is a fiercely competitive business in South Korea, with evangelists vying to attract followers by demonstrating ever more outlandish feats of holiness.

Sending missionaries in large numbers to the world's most violent trouble spots is seen as a surefire way of filling the churches with admiring disciples.

These days, dispatching missionaries to Afghanistan and Iraq, into the jaws of militant Islam, is the ultimate demonstration of Christian fervour.

And the larger the army of followers, of course, the larger the spiritual and financial rewards.

It is a tried and true promotional technique that has produced a surge in popularity for Christianity since the Second World War. A recent survey by the Pew organization found 26.3 per cent of South Koreans say they are Christians, a proportion second only to the Philippines in Asia.

Most belong to fundamentalist protestant or evangelical Christian churches where the passion for missionary zeal has always been strong.

There are nearly 13,000 South Korean missionaries operating in about 160 countries.

In some popular missionary destinations, such as Africa, there are sometimes hundreds of South Korean missionaries in the same town. There are even reports that the competition among evangelists sometimes becomes so intense there have been fistfights over territory.

Only the United States with 46,000 missionaries abroad has a larger army of faith, but as a proportion of population the South Korean missionary force is much larger.

However, to call these people missionaries is not always accurate. Most are not bent on making converts, but are more like aid agency workers.

Indeed, the South Korean missionary operations are more like those Japanese television game shows where the prize goes to the contestant who takes the greatest humiliation and still comes up grinning.

The missionaries are frequently naive young people driven by an unfocused desire to do good, just like most of the 23 South Korean hostages taken by the Taliban on the road from Kabul to Kandahar in Afghanistan last week.

The group is made up mostly of young women who were not off to try to convert Afghan Muslims to Christianity, but to provide medical and child-care services for needy people.

They were led by pastor Bae Hyung-kyum from their Saemmul Presbyterian Church, just outside the South Korean capital Seoul. The Taliban demanded that some of their people being held by the Afghan government be released, but there seems also to have been a ransom demand.

It is not yet clear whether the negotiations stumbled over the refusal of the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai to release Taliban prisoners -- though it did so in March to get the freedom of a kidnapped Italian journalist -- or the Kabul government's obstruction of the Koreans' efforts to pay a ransom.

At any rate, the Taliban became agitated, shot Bae a dozen times and dumped his body by the highway.

This is not the first time South Korean missionary operations have come to grief in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere.

In April 2004, terrorists in Iraq kidnapped and beheaded an aspiring South Korean missionary, Kim Sun-il. Earlier this year a South Korean pastor was killed in Kenya and hundreds of South Korean missionaries are believed to be in prison in China after trying to convert people in refugee camps for North Koreans.

In August last year a potentially highly dangerous event was narrowly avoided when the Kabul and Seoul governments managed to stop 1,300 South Korean evangelicals from travelling to Afghanistan to hold a public peace rally.

The giggly group of young Saemmul Church missionaries even posed with raised clenched fists for a photograph before their July departure from Seoul's international airport in front of a government notice advising Koreans not to travel to Afghanistan.

But avoiding government barriers and disapproval in both Seoul and Kabul is one of the joys of competition in these missionary contests. Overcoming bureaucratic hurdles brings bragging rights and more followers.

The death of Bae and the uncertain fate of the remaining 22 young hostages has had a sobering effect on South Korean public opinion. There is now much questioning of the habit of sending neophyte young people to these dangerous places without even the most basic training in the type of cultural quagmires they will face.

Sun International Affairs Columnist

jmanthorpe@png.canwest.com

Two U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan convert to Islam - paper

KABUL (Reuters) - Two American soldiers have converted to Islam and married in Afghanistan, a state newspaper said on Thursday.

A U.S. military spokesman said he was checking the reports and pointed out that freedom of religion was enshrined in the U.S. constitution.

The Hewad Daily reported the pair served as soldiers in the U.S. army at Bagram air base which is the hub of U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan and lies to the north of the capital Kabul.

Several dozen Westerners visiting Afghanistan have become Muslims since the Taliban were toppled in 2001, but it was the first time any U.S. soldiers were reported to have converted to Islam.

A religious cleric welcomed their conversion. "If any body embraces Islam, ..., his sins committed in this world will be forgiven and Allah praises him and his family, and will bless him in the coming world too," Hamidullah said.

Pope's aide warns of 'threat by Islam'

source http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/07/27/wislam127.xml

The Pope's private secretary has given warning of the Islamisation of Europe and stressed the need for the continent's Christian roots not to be ignored, in comments released yesterday.

"Attempts to Islamise the West cannot be denied," Monsignor Georg Gaenswein was quoted as saying in an advance copy of the weekly Sueddeutsche Magazin to be published today.

"The danger for the identity of Europe that is connected with it should not be ignored out of a wrongly understood respectfulness," the magazine quoted him as saying.

He also defended a speech that the Pope gave last year that linked Islam and violence, saying it had been an attempt by the pontiff to "act against a certain naivety".

In the speech during a visit to Germany in September, the Pope appeared to endorse a view, contested by most Muslims, that Islam's followers spread their religion in its early days by violence.

The Pope quoted Manuel II Paleologus, the 14th-century Byzantine emperor, who said: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." Muslims around the world protested against the speech.
Churches were set ablaze in the West Bank and a hard-line Iranian cleric said that the Pope was united with President George W Bush to "repeat the Crusades".

When an Italian nun was shot in a Somali hospital where she worked, the Vatican expressed concern that the attack was a reaction to the Pope's remarks.

Recently, Joachim Meisner, the influential archbishop of Cologne, said in a radio interview that the "immigration of Muslims has created a breach in our German, European culture".

Ex-Presidents Honor Graham at New Library

By Rachel Zoll

Associated Press
Friday, June 1, 2007; Page A05

CHARLOTTE, May 31 -- Three former U.S. presidents came together Thursday to praise evangelist Billy Graham and help dedicate a library in his honor, a $27 million complex that traces the preacher's rise from farm boy to the most widely heard minister in the world.

On a stage in view of a 40-foot glass cross that serves as the museum's front door, the frail preacher said that he was embarrassed by the attention and that there was "too much Billy Graham" in the exhibits....read entire story here....http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/31/AR2007053102161.html

wish to read more about Graham. You can check the cover story in The Time
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,979573,00.html
God's Billy Pulpit
Monday, Nov. 15, 1993 By NANCY GIBBS AND RICHARD N. OSTLING/MONTREAT

What is it in this man, in his urgent voice and eager eyes, in the message and the messenger, that overwhelms even those who are predisposed to distrust him? Long ago, Billy Graham gave up the shiny suits and technicolor ties of the brash young evangelist; the silver mane is thinner now, the step may falter a bit, he no longer prowls the stage like a lynx. In his preaching as well, the temperatures of hellfire have been reduced, the volume turned down. Graham knows he needs to save his strength: he is fighting Parkinson's disease, a progressive nervous disorder that has already made it impossible for him to drive or write by hand. But while he has learned to number his days, Graham intends to make the most of them: "The New Testament says nothing of Apostles who retired and took it easy."
......There may have been cleverer preachers and wiser ones, those whose messages seemed safe, logic sound.....

.....

Billy Graham turned 75 this week, an occasion for some reckoning of a life and career full of blessings and contradictions. Everyone has a preferred ; description. George Bush called him "America's pastor." Harry Truman called him a "counterfeit" and publicity seeker. Pat Boone considers him "the greatest person since Jesus." Fundamentalist leader Bob Jones III says Graham "has done more harm to the cause of Christ than any other living man." Biographer William Martin calls him "an icon not just of American Christianity but of America itself."

Weathering both applause and derision, Graham has through the years become America's perennial deus ex machina, perpetually in motion, sweeping in to lift up spirits befuddled by modernity. When Presidents need to pray, it is Graham whom they call; he ministered to Dwight Eisenhower in the White House, spent the night with the Bushes on the eve of the Gulf War. Richard Nixon offered him the ambassadorship to Israel at a meeting with Golda Meir. "I said the Mideast would blow up if I went over there," Graham recalls. "Golda then reached under the table and squeezed my hand. She was greatly relieved." When Billy arrived for a crusade in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1989, Hillary Rodham Clinton invited him to lunch. "I don't eat with beautiful women alone," Billy told her, so they met in a hotel dining room and talked for a couple of hours.

....And Graham is the master marketer of that faith....
.."I feel like I've been wrestling with the devil, who has been doing everything in his power to keep those people from getting a clear message of the Gospel." At the moment he gives the invitation, he explains, "some sort of physical energy goes out of me and I feel terribly weak. I'm depleted." After a crusade he returns to relax with his wife Ruth in the rambling log home that she designed years ago as their sanctuary. It sits up in the Blue Ridge Mountains above Montreat, North Carolina, a retreat from the demands that press upon him continually....
....Four decades later, it's not over yet. William Franklin Graham Jr. grew up on a North Carolina dairy farm, the son of pious parents who believed in spankings and Bible readings and persistent instruction in clean living. In 1933, on the day Prohibition was repealed, his father made Billy and his sister Catherine drink beer until they vomited, an early exercise in aversion therapy that lasted a lifetime.....
..."I didn't have any tears, I didn't have any emotion, I didn't hear any thunder, there was no lightning," he says. "But right there, I made my decision for Christ. It was as simple as that, and as conclusive."....
...Heaven, he used to explain, measured 1,600 sq. mi.: "We are going to sit around the fireplace and have parties, and the angels will wait on us, and we'll drive down the golden streets in a yellow Cadillac convertible." Decades later, the vision has matured. "I think heaven is going to be a place beyond anything we can imagine, or anyone in Hollywood or . on Broadway can imagine," he says now. "There is a passage in Revelation that says we will serve God in heaven. We're not going to have somebody fan us or sit around on a beach somewhere."....

(in Illinois)There he met Ruth Bell, the daughter of missionaries to China who herself wanted to go and evangelize in Tibet. Graham talked her out of it, arguing that she knew God wanted them to marry, so "I'll lead and you do the following."...
...The YFC (Youth for Christ)rallies included blaring bands, quiz shows, horse acts, emcees with bow ties that lit up. As for Graham, so loud and fast was his delivery that journalists called him "God's Machine Gun." "Christian vaudeville," sniffed skeptics....
...One day in 1948, Graham gathered his tiny retinue in a Modesto, California, hotel room to inoculate them against temptation. To prevent sexual rumors, each agreed never again to be alone with a woman other than his wife. The "Modesto Manifesto" also pledged honest statistical reports and open finances. The money setup was further cleansed in 1950 after the Atlanta Constitution ran a photo of Graham next to a picture of ushers with sackfuls of cash.....

..Graham always appreciated the importance both of appearances and of self- promotion....
.. Even as Graham's preaching grew more confident, his concern about his intellectual preparation lingered. But when his friend and fellow YFC revivalist Charles Templeton urged him to come to Princeton Theological Seminary and lay a deeper academic foundation for his preaching, Graham balked. When they met on their travels, they fell into deep debates, with Templeton now armed with philosophy, anthropology and a willingness to read the Bible as metaphor. Graham found he couldn't muster the logical responses.

As Martin tells it, this led to a spiritual and intellectual turning point. "Chuck, look, I haven't a good enough mind to settle these questions," Graham finally declared. "The finest minds in the world have looked and come down on both sides." Graham concluded that "I don't have the time, the inclination or the set of mind to pursue them. I found that if I say 'The Bible says' and 'God says,' I get results. I have decided I'm not going to wrestle with these questions any longer."..

...Templeton charged him with committing intellectual suicide. But Graham came to believe doubt was a dangerous distraction from his calling. He decided the Bible was the one true Word in its entirety and never wavered. Looking back today, Graham says, "I had one great failure, and that was intellectual. I should have gone on to school. But I would talk to people about that, and they'd say, Oh no, go on with what you're doing, and let others do that. I do regret I didn't do enough reading, enough study, both formal and informal."....

...In the 1950s Graham's warnings about a diabolically inspired Soviet empire helped inspire his frightened audience to seek solace and protection in faith. By the 1980s he was joining the peace movement. Graham was pilloried in 1982 for speaking to a staged "peace" conference in the Soviet Union and resolutely downplaying religious repression....

..He opposes abortion except in cases involving rape, incest or danger to the mother's life, but he is critical of Operation Rescue....

.."I don't think you can save souls without working for justice," says Professor James Cone of Union Theological Seminary in New York City. "I hear Billy Graham as interested in saving souls of the poor but not interested in changing the conditions that create the poverty."...

..His ministry rests on the notion that if individuals are brought to God and their lives transformed, they in turn will go out and transform society. That priority, and even more his zeal for social orderliness, often kept Graham on the sidelines, particularly during the civil rights movement. Though he insisted on racially integrated seating at his revival meetings, Graham says Martin Luther King Jr. himself advised in a lengthy talk that "if you go to the streets, your people will desert you, and you won't have the opportunity to have these integrated crusades." But then and ever since, he has been criticized for his role. "He should have been more deeply involved earlier on," argues Dean Joseph Hough Jr. of Vanderbilt University's Divinity School. "Had he been, he could have had quite an impact."...

..."I was distraught and offended when he spent the night in the White House before Bush launched Desert Storm," says Alan Neely, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. "I saw that as Graham giving his sanction for what was about to take place. I don't think that's the role of the Christian minister."...

..He has a list in his computer of 43,000 evangelists around the world, whom he visits when he travels or invites to training meetings. If he can inspire one preacher, who goes home and converts his family and neighbors, who in turn breathe new life into a gasping church, which shines new light on a lost city . . . who knows how far it may go?..

Wish

Thousands of Christians, Dalits court arrest in Delhi

http://mangalorean.com/news.php?newstype=local&newsid=44634

New Delhi, May 29 (IANS) At least 3,000 Christians, Dalits and rights activists from across the country courted arrest here Tuesday while protesting against the "silence" of the government on the alleged rise in anti-Christian attacks.

At a rally, "Stop Violence on Christians", held at Jantar Mantar here, Christian and Dalit leaders, including All India Christian Council (AICC) president Joseph Dsouza, National Integration Council member John Dayal, Justice Party president Udit Raj and Mount Carmel School principal V.K. Williams, warned Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that his silence could lead to killing of innocent people at the hands of communal forces.

"The protest is in the wake of attacks on Pastor Walter Masih in Jaipur, Rajasthan on April 19 and priests Ramesh Gopargode and Ajit Belavi on May 7 in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, and a high incidence of communal assaults this year thus far," Madhu Chandra, an AICC leader, told IANS.

Chandra said that in 2006, the AICC recorded at least one incident of anti-Christian attack every third day, "but this rose to one attack every alternate day during the first four months of this year".

The participants, who were from several states including Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Punjab, Orissa and Andhra Pradesh, shouted slogans against the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, saying, "UPA government, wake up and stop atrocities on Christians."

Also present at the rally were victims of communal violence, including Masih and two Christians from Himachal Pradesh, Bernard Christopher and Ravinder Gautam, who were allegedly tonsured and forcibly "reconverted" to Hinduism in Kullu district May 23.

Dayal said Christianity had been reduced to a "daylight religion", because "the people of the community feel unsafe after sunset".

Expressing disappointment with the Congress party that leads the UPA, Dayal added that it was no longer only the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that should be blamed for anti-Christian agenda. "Look at the Congress-government in Himachal Pradesh, which enacted the anti-conversion law," he said.

Dalit leader Raj told the Christians not to trust any political party including the Congress saying, "You must have hopes only from yourselves."

Offering Dalits' support to the Christian community, Raj added that they should "learn to identify their friends".

The crowd left the Parliament Street police station, where they courted arrest, at 2.15 p.m. after an official announced that there were not enough jails to keep such a huge number of people.

Christians in Mumbai also staged a rally at Azad Maidan to show solidarity with the protesters here.

Prosecutor describes a molester; defense sees a 'touchy-feely guy'

A longtime Fresno church volunteer is guilty of "being touchy-feely" -- but not guilty of molesting children, Jamie William Soria's defense attorney said Wednesday.
Soria, 36, is accused of preying on single mothers and their sons at Northwest Church and Malloch Elementary School in what prosecutor Galen Rutiaga called a pattern of pursuing young, overweight boys.
"He's always around boys. He has a preoccupation with male kids," Rutiaga said during his closing arguments in Fresno County Superior Court. "He wants photos of chubby boys -- sex acts with chubby boys." READ FULL STORY HERE http://www.fresnobee.com/263/story/49625.html