=== Falun Gong
1. China says Taiwan leader colluding with falungong
2. Falun Gong members speak out

=== Falun Gong - China's Government-Controlled Media
3. Reports from China's government-controlled media

=== Scientology
4. Scientology guilty of libel and enjoined in Germany
5. Protecting sources
6. Razzies Scorch the ''Earth''

=== Unification Church
7. News And Notes

=== Raelians
8. House Sets the Stage for Debate on the Cloning of Humans

=== Buddhism
9. Sect 'planned mass suicide'
10. Sri Lanka to 'build' Bamiyan Buddhas

=== Catholicism
11. Faith or folly?
12. Former believer turns his efforts toward exposure
13. More Catholics turning to Mary
14. Pope Makes Appeal for Catholic Zeal

=== Mormonism
15. Mormons in charm offensive

=== Paganism / Witchcraft
16. Battle brewing over Nessie hunt
17. Wizard curse? I've had spell of good luck, says Whelan

=== Hate Groups
18. Man Gets Life for Calif. Hate Crime
19. Saudi Arabia bans Pokemon

=== Rebirthing
20. Video a key piece in abuse trial

=== Other News
21. Teen-age monk confesses to killing nun, police say
22. 'This is the place for a village,' decides a rich sect (Bruderhof)
23. Procter & Gamble Suit Over Satan Rumor Resurrected
24. Southern Baptists ending talks with Catholic Church

=== Science
25. Enlisting Science to Find the Fingerprints of a Creator

=== Death Penalty & Other Human Rights Violations
26. Court will hear second mentally retarded case

=== Media
27. Why do we think Christ was white?
28. Purging Flame

=== The Investors Around The Corner
29. Four-year-old beats City expert


=== Catholicism

11. Faith or folly?
Birmingham Post-Herald, Mar. 26, 2001
http://www.postherald.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
Accusations of brainwashing and money laundering plague
an area religious group as some unhappy members leave
First of three parts

Terry Colafrancesco started Caritas in Shelby County in 1987 to promote the experience of Medjugorje, the Eastern European village where six youngsters reported seeing the Virgin Mary.

Today, Caritas has grown into a multimillion-dollar enterprise, complete with families who live there year-round, a travel agency that offers trips to Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a publishing arm and even a farm.

Caritas' mission of educating people about Medjugorje remains unchanged. But recently the organization has come under fire by longtime residents who have left the community and others interested in Medjugorje.

A lawsuit filed in California accuses Colafrancesco, the president of Caritas, of brainwashing residents and using funds raised from donors to purchase heavy equipment for himself.

The lawsuit, which describes Caritas as a cult, was filed by Phillip Kronzer, a businessman who has researched Medjugorje, and U.S.-based groups that promote the visions.

Whatever its critics may say, the Caritas group remains a leader in the Medjugorje movement throughout the United States, a movement that is itself controversial.

Medjugorje-related groups like Caritas represent a fundamentalist-like strain in the Roman Catholic world, although the church itself has yet to authenticate the visions.

In the past couple of years, several families who once lived at Caritas have moved away, questioning Colafrancesco's leadership and motives. In 1999 and 2000, about 30 longtime residents left the community, including about 18 children.
(...)

For his part, Colafrancesco refuses to discuss former residents' complaints or other allegations.
(...)

Caritas' success is evident. In little more than a decade, the organization has quietly blossomed into one of the wealthiest organizations in the nation that promotes devotion to the Virgin Mary. A source close to the community said Caritas is probably one of the top five Marian centers in the world.

Supported mainly by Roman Catholics throughout the United States, Caritas is nestled in a valley in Sterrett, a small, Shelby County town about 20 miles south of Birmingham on Shelby County 43.

The organization distributes information about Medjugorje by selling books and tapes, sponsoring pilgrimages to Medjugorje and printing a regular newsletter that reaches about 220,000 families, according to information reported on Caritas' annual tax form. In 1999, Caritas organized 11 trips to Medjugorje for 221 pilgrims, according to the IRS form.

Although the church has not authenticated the visions, the Vatican permits religious pilgrimages to Medjugorje.
(...)

As one of the first Medjugorje-promoting groups formed in the United States, Caritas helped link Medjugorje and the United States, said Michael Murphy, an anthropology professor at the University of Alabama who specializes in apparitions.

''Caritas was instrumental in providing the infrastructure for pilgrimages to Medjugorje from the U.S.,'' he said.
(...)

Religious pilgrims visiting Caritas of Birmingham in Sterrett pray before a Nativity scene and an altar containing a statue of the Virgin Mary.

But former residents believe Colafrancesco has succeeded in duping a lot of well-intentioned Catholics.

''There's no connection between Caritas and Medjugorje,'' said Mike O'Neill, 62, an Ohio native who lived at Caritas from 1991 to 1999. ''That's not happening. This guy is using Medjugorje to make money.''

Flynn, who now lives in Michigan with his wife and seven children, provided bank statements that show he wrote more than $45,000 in checks to Colafrancesco over the course of several years.

Flynn and Littiken said they and several other residents would occasionally receive checks written out to them from Caritas of Birmingham, which they would deposit in their checking accounts. Soon after the money was deposited, they said, they would be told by a high-ranking resident of Caritas to write a check, usually the same amount they had deposited, to Colafrancesco.

''The first couple times we did that we were told it was for the property tax that had to be paid on the land,'' said Flynn, 41. ''(We were told that) since Caritas used all of the land it was only right, so that Terry was not paying the property taxes out of his pocket.''

Eventually, Flynn said, no reason was given for why the checks to Colafrancesco were needed. They also were told the practice was legal, he said.
(...)

Caritas has a board of directors, but only Colafrancesco and Birmingham resident Sam Gagliano sit on the board. Gagliano declined to be quoted for this article.

Board decisions made by fewer than three people wouldn't meet the standards for nonprofit corporations laid out by the Philanthropic Advisory Service, a national charity watchdog, said Bennett Weiner, a vice president at the Philanthropy Advisory Service, based in Arlington, Va.
(...)

Former residents aren't the only people expressing concern about Caritas.
The Franciscan priests who live in Medjugorje and minister to religious pilgrims also have voiced concerns about Caritas.
(...)

''It appears that the organization does not follow good practice of Church discipline as well as the discipline of its members in regard to their ways in which they are organized within. We are afraid that there might be elements of a lack of respect for family relationships, mutual respect, respect for the church authority, respect for the families where the members came from, respect for property of family members who are there now and those who were there and left the community.''

The letter was a general response to complaints he had heard about Caritas, Svetozar said.

Svetozar's letter wasn't the first written by a Medjugorje priest to express concerns about Caritas. The young organization already was a matter of concern for the priests of Medjugorje by 1990, when Rev. Leonard Orec, a pastor in Medjugorje, wrote a letter to Raymond Boland, the bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Birmingham at the time.

In the letter, Orec told Boland that Colafrancesco and a friend, Cyril Auboyneau, a resident of France who has served as a translator for the visionaries, had been presenting themselves as representatives of Medjugorje in the Birmingham diocese.

Orec wrote, ''Regarding this I wish to inform you that we have nothing to do with them and we have notified them to cease their activities. If either is still doing this he is acting on his own.''

Also concerned about Caritas are parents and siblings of some of the young adults who continue to live there.
(...)

At Caritas, there are no televisions or newspapers. The workday begins before sunrise. Residents gather in the field to pray the rosary together at 5 a.m. The day is interspersed with several more prayer breaks, the last one usually ending between 8 and 9 p.m., according to former residents. An average night's sleep, they said, is about six hours.

''We were in a continuous state of people being overloaded with too much work,'' Flynn said. ''With the lack of sleep, it would take on a tone of insanity. Morale was low.''
(...)

In a letter written to a friend several months after he left Caritas, Littiken described the work conditions at Caritas. ''People literally worked till they dropped. Even the older kids were expected to work late into the night. One time Adam, my son, fell off a second-story wall landing on the ground beneath him. It was a miracle he wasn't hurt bad, he had landed on the hard clay and right beside him were two pieces of rebar sticking straight up out of the concrete footings.''
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


12. Former believer turns his efforts toward exposure
Birmingham Post-Herald, Mar. 26, 2001
http://www.postherald.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
Phillip Kronzer can remember a time when he and his ex-wife were active promoters of the visions of the Virgin Mary first reported in Eastern Europe.

In 1987, the Kronzers had returned from a trip to the Bosnian town of Medjugorje, the site of the reported visions, with a desire to educate others about the appearances of the Virgin Mary in the rural village.

For a while they were hosts of a prayer group devoted to the alleged apparitions, and were even visited by a couple of the original visionaries, who first claimed to see the Virgin Mary in 1981.

But now Kronzer, 66, has dedicated his life to exposing Medjugorje and several U.S.-based groups that distribute information about Medjugorje as frauds. He recently filed two Medjugorje-related lawsuits in California in the hopes of exposing the movement as a hoax.

One of the lawsuits, filed in February in Sacramento Superior Court, Calif., alleges that several U.S.-based Medjugorje groups have exploited an international phenomenon for personal gain. Caritas of Birmingham, based in Sterrett, is listed as a defendant.

Kronzer's other lawsuit was filed in November in Santa Clara County Superior Court in California against Kronzer's ex-wife, Ardath Talley, and Marcia Smith, a Medjugorje fund-raiser based in California.

Kronzer, who lives in Los Gatos, Calif., runs Autodisc Inc., once a company that manufactured floppy disks. Today, Autodisc is a ''shell of a company'' from which Kronzer researches Medjugorje and works on the lawsuits, he said.

Kronzer also has founded the Phillip Kronzer Foundation for Religious Research, an organization established to research Medjugorje groups and provide help for people who claim to have been abused by such groups.

Smith, Kronzer alleges in his suit, encouraged Talley to divorce him, knowing she would receive a large divorce settlement.

Kronzer first noticed a change in his ex-wife after she returned from a retreat she had attended with Smith in 1993.
(...)

Joe Russionello, Talley's attorney, said Kronzer has been harassing his ex-wife for a while.

''I've been dealing with Mr. Kronzer and his minions for some time,'' he said. ''It's difficult to reason to his motive.''

After Talley's disappearance, Kronzer began researching Medjugorje and some of the U.S.-based groups and individuals that promote Medjugorje. The deeper he dug, the more the names of certain groups, such as Caritas of Birmingham and Children of Medjugorje, in South Bend, Ind., kept coming up, he said.

The other two defendants named in the suit filed against Caritas are Children of Medjugorje and Children of War, an organization with a Web site registered to a New Jersey mail drop.
(...)

The lawsuit accuses Terry Colafrancesco, the founder and president of Caritas, of using funds raised from donors to purchase equipment for himself and his family and laundering money.

The suit states, ''Colafrancesco controls all aspects of his adherents lives, including what they eat, when they may pray, what they may read, when they may have sexual relations and what their children learn at the compound school. Former members of Caritas allege that Colafrancesco uses mind control or 'brainwashing' to maintain control over the community.''

''Adherents are kept under primitive conditions in communal trailers or cabins without adequate heating, running water or sanitation. Children often sleep on the floor because of lack of space. However, Colafrancesco and his family live in elegant surroundings and do not share the simple life required of cult members.''

Joseph Ritchey, a Birmingham attorney who represents Caritas, said in early March he had never heard of Kronzer or his lawsuit.

''I've never seen anything from Phillip Kronzer,'' he said, as he looked at a copy of the suit provided by the Birmingham Post-Herald. ''I've never gotten a letter of complaint from him. I've never heard his name.''

He would not represent Caritas if he thought they were doing anything wrong, Ritchey said.
(...)

Some of Caritas' former residents, who left the community because they were unhappy with Colafrancesco's leadership, said Kronzer's lawsuit isn't anything they want to be involved in.

''We're not going to participate in that in any way,'' said Pat Flynn, who now lives in Michigan and still believes strongly in the apparitions of Medjugorje. ''That man wants to destroy Medjugorje.''

The lawsuit accuses Children of Medjugorje of selling ''papal Jubilee indulgences'' without the consent of the pope. In the Catholic Church, an indulgence pardons a person from punishment for a forgiven sin. Papal Jubilee indulgences were awarded last year as part of the yearlong celebration honoring the 2000th anniversary of Christ's birth.

The Children of Medjugorje Web site states, ''Sending a 'significant' contribution to Children of Medjugorje for our Satellite Uplink Facility will fulfill a condition set by the Pope for gaining the Jubilee indulgence.''
(...)

In response to Kronzer's lawsuit, the attorneys for Talley and Smith filed motions claiming the lawsuit violates their First Amendment rights.
(...)

Kronzer remains convinced Medjugorje has created a vast network of cultic groups that play on the wealthy and well-meaning.

''Every time I've found a cult, they've gone to Medjugorje to get their training,'' he said.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


13. More Catholics turning to Mary
Birmingham Post-Herald, Mar. 24, 2001
http://www.postherald.com/religion.shtml
[Story no longer online? Read this]
All Christians recognize the Virgin Mary as the mother of Jesus Christ.

Most agree Mary conceived Jesus by the Holy Spirit, without losing her virginity.

But Catholics and Protestants disagree on the role of Mary in the church.

While the Catholic and Orthodox churches have granted Mary a special place of devotion, many Protestants believe such a relationship with the Virgin Mary detracts from dependence on Jesus Christ.

Because she is Jesus' mother, many Catholics have a special bond with Mary, whom they consider a maternal, comforting figure who is capable of interceding with God on their behalf.

''The appeal of mom is pretty strong,'' said Michael Murphy, a professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama who specializes in apparitions.

''There's great appeal in the notion that there's someone you can go to who can intercede on your behalf.''

Rev. Bob Crossmyer, a Catholic priest at Holy Family Church in Ensley, agreed. ''People have a need to have a sense that God loves them,'' he said. ''Mary represents the maternal aspect of God.''

There's even a Greek word, hyperdulia, that refers specifically to the honor paid the Virgin Mary. Another Greek word, dulia, refers to the reverence paid to saints.

Through the centuries, the role of Mary in the Catholic Church has continued to evolve, and today there are more religious organizations dedicated to promoting Marian devotion than ever before. Also popular are shrines such as Fatima, Portugal, and Lourdes, France, where visions of Mary found to be authentic by the Catholic Church were reported in 1917 and 1858, respectively.

One of the most popular pilgrimage destinations is Medjugorje, located in the Eastern European country of Bosnia-Herzegovina, although the Roman Catholic Church has not ruled whether the apparitions reported there are authentic.
(...)

Although devotion to Mary slumped a little bit after the Second Vatican Council, which ended in 1965, the later decades of the 1900s saw a resurgence in Marian devotion, Crossmyer said. ''She has become quite important again in the minds of many Catholics,'' Crossmyer said.

A lot of the renewed enthusiasm for Mary can be attributed to Medjugorje's rise in popularity, he said.

The position of the pope, who believes Mary intervened in an assassination attempt against him, also helps.
(...)

The disagreements about Mary stem from church teachings that became accepted long after her death, as early Christian theologians began to view Mary as a saint who possessed qualities that other saints lacked. ''Over time, Mary has acquired traits that make her more exceptional to Catholics, and Protestants don't like that,'' Murphy said.
(...)

Catholics believe Mary, like Jesus, was born without original sin, a concept called the Immaculate Conception that was declared by Pope Pius IX in 1854.
In 1950, the church declared Mary's body was taken up into heaven when she died, a concept called the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
(...)

The Nicene Creed, an expression of church doctrine approved in 381, outlines what Christians must accept about Mary, that she is the mother of Jesus and that she was a virgin when she gave birth to him, Crossmyer said. ''Any other beliefs about Mary are optional,'' he said.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


14. Pope Makes Appeal for Catholic Zeal
AP, Mar. 25, 2001
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/w-eur/2001/mar/25/032504274.html
[Story no longer online? Read this]
ROME (AP) - Pope John Paul II renewed his appeal to the faithful Sunday to combat competition from evangelical sects, part of an ongoing effort to revive flagging enthusiasm among many Roman Catholics.

In the past, the pontiff's warnings about the rise of sects have come mainly during pilgrimages to places like Latin America, where long-standing Catholic communities are seeing many of their faithful defect to such groups.

This time, John Paul took his battle cry to a parish on the outskirts of Rome, where at least one evangelical group has a base. ''In your neighborhood, in fact, the challenge of sects isn't absent,'' the pope told the parishioners.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


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