Polish Man Held for Threatening to Kill Pope

ASSOCIATED PRESS, Aug. 22 — Police in Warsaw said they had captured a man who posted a death threat against Pope John Paul II on the Internet before the Pope's recent visit to Poland.

The suspect, known as “Ryszard M.,” sent the e-mail threat to Gazeta Wyborcza, the nation's biggest paper. The message was laced with insults and called for the murder of the Pope.

According to Associated Press, “A Warsaw court charged the suspect with making illegal threats, calling for murder and slander, and ordered him detained for three months.”

More than 18,000 policemen and several hundred officers from the Government Protection Office, an elite security unit, were on hand in Krakow to provide security during the papal visit, Associated Press reported.

Pope and Protesters Prod Earth Summit

REUTERS, Aug. 25 — The Earth Summit that met last week in Johannesburg, South Africa, was mobbed with protesters, like other meetings that deal with globalization. But local authorities warned them that they would tolerate none of the chaos that surrounded previous “globalization” summits in Milan and Seattle.

According to Reuters news service, South African President Thabo Mbeki called for an end of what he called a “‘global apartheid’ between the planet's powerful rich minority and multitudes of poor.”

In a message from Rome, Pope John Paul led appeals for the conference to safeguard the planet. “Men have been assigned by God as administrators of the earth — to cultivate it and look after it,” the 82-year-old Pope said.

Russian Orthodox May Reopen Dialogue

ITAR-TASS, Aug. 26 — TASS News Agency reports that Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II, who cut off ecumenical talks with Rome this year, might resume such talks in the near future.

“The Russian Orthodox Church has once again stated to the Vatican its view on various aspects of bilateral relations. The time has come to make each other's positions clear,” Alexy told the Macedonian newspaper Utrinski Vesnik.

However, Alexy continues to hold that the establishment of four Latin-rite, Catholic dioceses in Russia “has practically eliminated the results of recent contacts with the Vatican.” He accused the Vatican of “showing hypocrisy when on the one hand it calls for dialogue, while on the other hand it makes important decisions that affect our interests without any dialogue … Catholics are conducting missionary activities across the entire CIS [former Soviet Union], secretly from Orthodox believers, usually disguised as charitable actions.”

According to Alexy, “If the dialogue is resumed, it should lead not to an exchange of ceremonial smiles against the background of remaining problems but to their real resolution for the benefit of both churches and Christianity in Europe.”

Rome denies that it proselytizes Eastern Orthodox in Russia.