RNS Digest
c. 2010 Religion News Service

South African church leader defends noisy horns at World Cup

By Trevor Grundy

(RNS/ENInews) The captain of France’s national soccer team is said to have blamed noise from the “vuvuzela” for keeping his team awake at night and contributing to a poor match against Uruguay in the World Cup in Cape Town, South Africa.

But Tinyiko Maluleke, president of the South African Council of Churches, told Ecumenical News International that the three-foot noisy horns are forcing the world to wake up and acknowledge Africa’s past sufferings.
Nearly 85,000 people have logged on to a website, www.banvuvuzela.com, to silence the horns during the World Cup; a little more than 9,000 want to keep them.

Soccer fans and players say the constant noise from the horns can cause hearing loss and makes the matches unwatchable, even on TV. Coaches on the sidelines say the noise makes it difficult to communicate with players on the field.

“In the 19th century, white missionaries sided with colonials and gave blacks the Bible, while they took the land. Now, we have created the vuvuzela, which is one of the most obnoxious instruments: very noisy; very annoying. It will dominate the World Cup,” Maluleke said recently in Edinburgh, Scotland, during the 2010 World Missionary Conference.
“I see the vuvuzela as a symbol — as a symbol of Africa’s cry for acknowledgement.”

In an article published on his website, Maluleke said the horn resembles “in part, a modern trumpet and the ‘traditional’ animal horn used to announce and to summon.” South Africa’s Mail and Guardian newspaper reported that the vuvuzela is common in churches in neighbouring Botswana.

“The vuvuzela is a biblical instrument,” church member Jacqueline Chireshe told the newspaper. “It is a trumpet, and God expects us to blow the trumpet in offering praise to him.”

Maluleke noted the irony that white European audiences are now complaining about an instrument that’s popular in African culture, generations after some Christian missionaries had deprived blacks of their culture.

“We see it when Africans are embarrassed to be African in their own vernacular language, to relate to their culture positively: the schizophrenic relationship that Africans have to their traditions, their culture, and their religions,” he told Ecumenical News International.


Pope unlikely to grant bishop’s request to be reinstated

By Richard Allen

VATICAN CITY (RNS) — Pope Benedict XVI will meet a German bishop who resigned in April following allegations that he hit children, but is unlikely to consider the bishop’s request to be reinstated, the Vatican said June 16.

Bishop Walter Mixa, who admitted to striking children in the 1970s and ‘80s, told the German daily Die Welt he had been pressured into signing a resignation letter and now wants his old job back.

“I can confirm that the pope will have an audience with Monsignor Mixa,” Vatican spokesperson Rev. Federico Lombardi said, “but the acceptance of the resignation as Augsburg bishop is not expected to be up for discussion.”

Mixa, who is reported to have moved back into the bishop’s palace in Augsburg, says the pope has invited him for talks.

“Above all I want to discuss how the situation should further develop,” he said, adding he would consider submitting his case to the Vatican’s court of appeals.

Mixa had initially denied reports of abuse and misusing church money, only to add later that he may have given a few children “a clip around the ear.” After his resignation on April 22, prosecutors launched an investigation into an allegation of sexual abuse against the bishop but later dropped the case.

The 69-year-old prelate described the pressure to resign as being similar to “purgatory.” He claimed that Germany’s senior archbishop, Robert Zollitsch, and the head of Bavaria’s bishops, Archbishop Reinhard Marx, ran to the pope with a “so-called abuse case based on what amounts to no more than eight handwritten sentences on a highly dubious scribbled note.”

The German church responded with a statement saying “everything was done according to the rules.”

Presbyterian church in India to ‘discipline’ homosexuals

By Anto Akkara

KOCHI, India (RNS/ENInews) The Presbyterian church in the northeast Indian state of Mizoram has said it will “discipline” homosexuals by preventing them from taking part in important church rituals because their lifestyle is incompatible with Christianity.

The executive committee of the synod of the Mizoram Presbyterian Church, the largest church in the Christian-majority state, said the church will not condone homosexuality in any way, and may excommunicate some homosexuals.

“Our church will discipline such people, and they will not be allowed to take part in sacraments,” Rev. C. Rosiama, a leader of the Mizo church and former moderator of the Presbyterian Church of India, told Ecumenical News international from Aizwal, the capital of Mizoram.

The Presbyterian Church of India is made up of eight independent church synods all based in northeast India, a region sandwiched between Bangladesh, Bhutan, China and Myanmar.

Rosiama said the Mizo synod had decided that homosexuals living together as couples will not be excommunicated from the church.

Still, he added, since such behaviour is against the “tenets of Christianity,” the synod had decided such people should not be allowed to hold any posts or preach in the church, even if they are ordained.

“Homosexuality is a license for immorality, and we cannot approve it,” said Rosiama.

The synod discussed the issue in December 2009 because church delegates felt existing church policy was too lenient on homosexuals.

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