July 29, 1998

The founder of this magazine, Charles Clayton Morrison, was fiercely opposed to any form of government support for parochial schools. No doubt he would have been distressed by last month’s decision by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which ruled that tax money can be used to send poor children in Milwaukee to religious schools.

One cannot call the religious situation in contemporary Russia stable. There are divisions not only between different religions or Christian confessions, but within the Russian Orthodox Church. These intra-Orthodox divisions are even more serious and dangerous in their consequences than are interconfessional ones.

Roman Catholic Bishop John Joseph of Pakistan shot himself to death on May 6 to highlight the case of Ayub Massih, a Christian sentenced to death for supposedly making blasphemous remarks against the Prophet Muhammad and thus against Islam. Following the death of the 66-year-old bishop and the Christian community’s subsequent protest, the Lahore High Court ordered a stay of execution for Massih, pending an appeal. His fate remains undecided, as does the fate of more than 140 other people charged under the country’s law against blasphemy.