Religious Orders

An ultraconservative Muslim seminary in India issued a fatwa, or edict, against terrorism during a meeting attended by thousands of clerics and students. The Darul Uloom Deoband, a 150-year-old institute controlling thousands of smaller Islamic seminaries in India, pledged Saturday to wipe out terrorism, a senior rector said. "Islam rejects all kinds of unjust violence, breach of peace, bloodshed, murder and plunder and does not allow it in any form," rector Habibur Rehman said.

A radical Roman Catholic priest accused of being a "destabilizing" influence in Haiti has been expelled from his religious order because of his political activism, the head of the order here said Friday. Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide "should understand that the order is an institution, which has its rules and its punishments," Father Jacques Mesidor, Salesian superior in Haiti, said.

Jewish leaders on Friday canceled a meeting with Pope John Paul II at short notice to avoid stoking controversy over a Roman Catholic convent at the site of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in what was German-occupied Poland in World War II. "It was mutually understood that some items on the agenda had the potential for exacerbating tensions, and it was considered more productive to reschedule the meeting," the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai...

A soldier of Christian conscience in the Roman army had only two releases from military service: desertion or martyrdom. In Germany, 14,000 pacifists protested World War II, and all died in Nazi death camps. Gandhi was the mahatma of nonviolence. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was his disciple. Neither humanist believed peace or social change would come from the barrel of a gun. Both were shot to death. War and peace, clearly, have been brutal to the pacifists.

With eyes closed, Elizabeth Clare Prophet stood stylishly dressed in a white silky jacket and dress and white boots, intoning with drawn-out syllables, "Let the walls of doctrine come tumbling down. . . . I have come to make you whole, resist not your wholeness. . . . Truly, the Divine Mother does weep over the Middle East. . . ."

More men but fewer women are entering Roman Catholic orders, according to a new study by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. The study found that an average of 9.8 men were in initial formation in men's orders in 1992, compared to 8.9 men in 1989. In women's orders, an average 4 women were in initial formation in 1992, compared to 5.6 in 1989.

In Mea Sharim, the traditional home to ultra-Orthodox Jewry in Jerusalem, neighborhood posters take the place of television and newspapers from the irreligious outside world as sources of information.

Two Catholic newspapers published in Encino have been sold to a group said to have ties with a fast-growing but low-profile religious order whose traditionalist views are held in high esteem by the Vatican. The National Catholic Register and Catholic Twin Circle, owned for more than two decades by wealthy businessman Patrick J. Frawley Jr.

With almost no fanfare, the United States is experiencing its most dramatic religious transformation in this century. What has been a nation steeped in the Judeo-Christian tradition is fast becoming the most spiritually diverse country in the world. "More religions are being practiced in the United States than anyplace else," said Paul Griffiths, professor of philosophy of religions at the University of Chicago. At least 200 denominations coexist here, and the number continues to grow.

Actors struggling to pay the rent between jobs often feel that they have taken a vow of poverty in order to pursue a show business career. Not Bob Lussier. He's ending his career as a successful Hollywood character actor in order to pursue a vow of poverty. Lussier has turned his back on his lucrative career in feature films, television series and commercials to tackle his most challenging role: That of a Benedictine monk.