Media Watch

Abortion Proponents Pressure Poland

KAISERNETWORK.COM, Feb. 14 — International activists are pressuring Poland to pare back its recently adopted legal protection for the unborn, according to Kaisernetwork.com, a health news service.

Some 150 “international reproductive rights, human rights, religious and women's groups” spanning 46 countries have colluded in a letter, sent on St. Valentine's Day to Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski. It called on him to repeal Poland's 1997 law, which prohibits abortion except in cases of rape, incest, fetal deformity or health risk to the mother.

The law in question cut the number of legal abortions in Poland from 11,700 in 1992 to 124 in 2001. Pro-abortion groups allege the law has resulted in up to 200,000 illegal abortions each year — far more than the number of legal abortions previously performed.

The groups offered no explanation for this strange disparity in their numbers.

Jesuit Web Site Starts Novena for Peace

INDEPENDENT CATHOLIC NEWS, Feb. 24 — As war looms in the Middle East and threatens on the Korean peninsula, Sacred Space, an Irish Jesuit online prayer site (www.sacredspace.ie), launched a nine-day cycle of prayers for peace.

Independent Catholic News reported that the initiative was inspired by the 40th anniversary of Pope John XXIII's 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth), which he promulgated at the height of the Cold War.

“Many thousands of people pray at Sacred Space each day and the feedback from all over the world says that they want to be part of a worldwide prayer for peace,” said Jesuit Father Alan McGuckian, Sacred Space organizer.

The nine days of prayer started Feb. 23, and on each day Sacred Space highlighted a different reflection on a theme from Pacem in Terris and a prayer from one of the major world religions. Day 4 had a prayer from Jainism, a Buddhist religion.

Religious Freedom Group Closes

RELIGION NEWS SERVICE, Feb. 21 — Media Watch has frequently cited reports on religious freedom — and threats to it — from the small but influential Keston News Service, a project of the Oxford-based Keston Institute.

The news service focused on the post-Soviet world of Eastern Europe and Russia, regularly highlighting threats to minority religions by the governments of majority-Orthodox Belarus and Russia.

Now, after a policy dispute among its reporters and funders, the Keston Institute has ceased to publish the report, according to Religion News Service.

Religious freedom advocates have mourned its passing: “They were the ones reporting on the front lines,” said John Burns, a religious freedom lawyer in Canada.

Burns pointed to the powerful effect of a Keston reporter's presence at the recent trial of a Jehovah's Witness who faced 18 years in prison in Uzbekistan: “[The reporter] brought the human rights dimension into the court. The judge took notice.”

Disputes continue between pro-Orthodox Russian authorities and religious minorities — including Catholics — throughout former Soviet territory; Keston frequently reported on them.

Malkhaz Songulashvili, a Baptist leader in the Republic of Georgia, said: “After Keston was closed down I can't see any other agency taking on [its] role.”