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SAFRICA-LEADERS Aug-25-2009 (450 words) xxxi
Some South Africans say new group betrays Christian leaders' forum
By Bronwen Dachs
Catholic News Service
CAPE TOWN, South Africa (CNS) -- South African Christian leaders said a group claiming to represent the country's religious leaders in meetings with the government has betrayed the trust of the 12-year-old National Religious Leaders' Forum.
Cardinal Wilfrid Napier of Durban told Catholic News Service that Ray McCauley of Rhema Bible Church, who set up the parallel National Interfaith Leaders Council in July and met with President Jacob Zuma Aug. 11 to discuss issues of national concern, "has betrayed our trust by going behind our backs" to form the new structure.
In a telephone interview in mid-August, Cardinal Napier said the National Religious Leaders' Forum has not done "as much as we hoped we would do," with joint initiatives by government and faith communities for poverty relief and other social outreach projects fizzling out. But the country's religious leaders are working on ways of addressing this, and McCauley's move is "disappointing," he said.
Father Vincent Brennan, a member of the Society of African Missions and general secretary of the Southern African Catholic Bishops' Conference, told CNS in an e-mail, "It would appear that the new group is made up of individuals rather than of different churches and faith communities."
The bishops' conference remains a member of the National Religious Leaders' Forum "as the official interfaith organization in South Africa," Father Brennan said.
The South African Council of Churches, of which the bishops' conference is a member, urged its members to "put on hold or consider carefully the implications of their participation" in the National Interfaith Leaders Council, which "may replicate the work" of the forum.
The council was not "informed, invited or consulted in the setting up" of the new group, it said in an Aug. 17 statement. "Similarly, we were neither informed nor invited to the recent meeting with President Zuma."
The council said it would try to "resolve the matter amicably" with the new group's leaders and government officials. It said that while it does "not presume that our exclusion was malicious" it is "disappointed at not having been offered the courtesy of (an) invitation" to the Zuma meeting.
The council called on "all religious bodies in this country to seek the path of unity and mutual respect," noting that it is "committed to collaborating with various faith traditions and government in combating poverty, moral degeneration, crime and social disintegration."
While the South African Council of Churches was vocal in its opposition to apartheid and had good relations with the ruling African National Congress after the country's first all-race elections in 1994, one of the council's former presidents, Mvume Dandala, now leads the Congress of the People, a party formed last December in opposition to the ANC.
END
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