IDEALS

CAIRO, (Aug. 24, 2009) IPS/GIN – Leaders of Egypt’s Coptic
Christian Church have voiced support for Gamal Mubarak, son of
President Hosni Mubarak, as their preferred candidate for
president. Concurrently, however, some Coptic activists are calling
for demonstrations against what they see as official state bias
against Christians.

“Comments in support of Gamal Mubarak by church officials don’t
represent the opinion of all Egypt’s Copts,” Youssef Sidhoum,
editor-in-chief of Coptic weekly Al-Watani told IPS. “Calls for
strikes and demonstrations by online Coptic activists, meanwhile,
represent only the views of a small minority within the Coptic
community.”

Christians are estimated to represent between six and 12 percent
of Egypt’s population of some 82 million, although precise figures
are notoriously difficult to ascertain. Most Christians belong to
the Egyptian Orthodox, or Coptic church, while the rest of the
population is almost entirely Sunni Muslim. Read the rest of this entry →

HAVANA, (May 18, 2010) IPS/GIN – Interest in religion is on the
upsurge in Cuba, indicated by the growth and variety of the faiths
being practiced as well as by the ease with which people
participate in more than one spiritual community at a time.

According to Ana Celia Perera, a researcher at the government’s
Centre for Psychological and Sociological Research (CIPS), a
religious “revival” can be said to be occurring in Cuba because new
groups and actors are flourishing, and the devout are extending
their social involvement.

She was speaking at a workshop on “Discovering Channels for
Communication and Coming Together”, organised by the Oscar Arnulfo
Romero Reflection and Solidarity Group (OAR), a civil society
organization of Christian inspiration that is celebrating its 25th
anniversary.
Read the rest of this entry →

LISBON, (May 11, 2010) IPS/GIN – Pope Benedict XVI began a four-day
visit to Portugal Tuesday amidst a global sex scandal that has
tarnished Catholic Church leadership and has yet to die down.

Although Portugal is one of the countries with the highest
proportion of Catholics in the world, the number of faithful has
been falling steadily since the mid-1970s. According to the latest
census, carried out in 2001, half a million people said they had
become agnostics.

While 84.5 percent of the 10.6 million people in this southern
European country identify themselves as Catholics, only 18.7
percent are practicing Catholics.

In addition, just 10.3 percent of the population are regular church
goers, and only half of all weddings are held in churches, while
divorce and abortion are legal and a same-sex marriage bill has
been passed by parliament and is set to be signed into law.

Coinciding with the pope’s visit, hundreds of young people flocked
to distribution points in the capital to hand out free condoms, to
protest the Vatican’s refusal to endorse the use of condoms as a
method to fight HIV/AIDS.
Read the rest of this entry →

MEXICO CITY, (May 3, 2010) IPS/GIN – The Vatican’s decision to
appoint a special delegate to run the Legion of Christ and to set
up a commission to look into the order after more than a decade of
allegations of sexual abuse by its founder has shaken the powerful
ultraconservative Catholic order established in Mexico.

On Saturday, the Vatican issued a seven paragraph statement that
rewrote the epitaph for the late Mexican priest Marcial Maciel
(1920-2008), who founded the Legionaries, referring to his “serious
and objectively immoral behavior” and accusing him of leading a
life “devoid of any scruples and authentic sense of religion”. Read the rest of this entry →

ZARQA, Jordan, (May 4, 2010) IPS/GIN – From the white, rocky desert
expanding away from the capital Amman rests the city of Zarqa,
Jordan’s second-largest industrial city, where waves of concrete
blocks are crisscrossed by narrow streets that bustle with
activity.

Hometown of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the late al-Qaeda leader, Zarqa
is dominated by Islamic parties.

It is known to the outside world not only for its association with
Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh, aka Abu Musab al Zarqawi, but
also as the home of Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balaawi, the Jordanian
suicide bomber who in December 2009 killed seven employees of the
Central Intelligence Agency at a United States base in Afghanistan. Read the rest of this entry →

JERUSALEM, (May 4, 2010) IPS/GIN – There’s a Jerusalem saying that
the city wears too many hats — Jewish hats, Muslim hats, Christian
hats — so it’s difficult to get at its brain.

As Israelis and Palestinians wrestle for the right to wear the
prime Jerusalem hat, U.S. President Barack Obama is being made
aware that his special envoy Senator George Mitchell might be
required not just to get under the city’s hats to reach its brain,
but to find a way to its heart.

Blessed, but also cursed by its own holiness, this city could yet
scupper the President’s peace goals.

Back in March, Netanyahu’s government had approved the building of
1,600 new homes in a settlement in occupied East Jerusalem. In
consequence, Jerusalem has from the outset, in contrast to
Netanyahu’s will, been thrust to the forefront of the discussions. Read the rest of this entry →

JERUSALEM, (May 4, 2009) IPS/GIN – Pope Benedict XVI said his visit
to the Holy Land will be as a “pilgrim of peace.”

The pontiff’s pilgrimage starts in Jordan on Friday and continues
on to Palestine and Israel.

The Pope will discover a Holy Land greatly changed since his
predecessor visited in 2000; he will have to tread even more
gingerly than John Paul II to avoid becoming embroiled in the
region’s ever-more difficult political and inter-religious
minefields. Read the rest of this entry →

JERUSALEM, (May 14, 2009) IPS/GIN – Even as Pope Benedict XVI
during his current Holy Land visit pays reverence to all three
monotheistic faiths and their attachment to Jerusalem, a less lofty
imprint is furthering Israeli control over the Holy City in a way
that could threaten the claims of all but Jews to Jerusalem.

The Israeli government is quietly implementing a development plan
that aims at transforming the area known as the “Holy Basin” – land
both inside and just outside the walled Old City – into a major
“Biblical Kingdom”, the aim of which is to strengthen Israel’s hold
over the whole of the city. Read the rest of this entry →

BELGRADE, (May 11, 2009) IPS/GIN – Five-year-old Admir is getting
a painful lesson in religious intolerance at his school in
Sarajevo.

“The only lesson he learns now, unfortunately, is exclusion,
together with a Serb and a Croat boy who are excluded from those
(Muslim) classes,” observed Admir’s father Meho Adisovic
regretfully.

Despite sharp protests, Islamic religious teaching officially began
in pre-school institutions in Sarajevo in autumn 2008. Each faith
was invited to prepare a curriculum, but so far only Islamic
classes have been organized in Sarajevo, where the weekly 30-minute
lessons are funded by the city’s Muslim government. Read the rest of this entry →

JERUSALEM, (May 12, 2009) IPS/GIN – Before stepping into
Jerusalem’s interfaith and inter-political Middle East minefields,
Pope Benedict XVI had posited himself as a “pilgrim of peace”. But,
only hours into his spiritual mission, the Pope found himself
crashing up against the walls erected by pain – Jewish pain and
Muslim pain, the memory of the Holocaust, and Palestinian pain of
the continued Israeli occupation.

The Holy See had carefully crafted the five-day papal visit to
Israel and occupied Palestine as a balanced act of faith in which
the pontiff hoped to be able to be a bridge between the conflicting
pains, and so perhaps even pave the way for a universal peace that
begins in Jerusalem by prodding Jews and Muslims to understand each
other’s pain. Read the rest of this entry →