Archbishop Patrick Flores, 70, spoke at a news conference about two hours after being released from the hospital where he spent the night under observation. He said Nelson Antonio Escolero threatened to kill the archbishop and his secretary with a hand grenade which later turned out to be a fake. He said the man was upset over being deported in December.

Escolero told Archbishop Flores that although he has lived in the United States for 25 years and is married to a US citizen, he was deported for a 15-year-old marijuana possession charge. Police have said the man was facing deportation for driving with a suspended license.

The man said he decided to take the archbishop hostage to make a statement “because he knew that I was very important and because he wanted to use me as bait,” the archbishop said. He added that Escolero has been unable to find work after re-entering the US illegally to support his three children.

Police were called to the chancery offices about 10 am and about 100 people were evacuated from the building. The police were told a man with a hand grenade was holding the archbishop and his secretary in the archbishop’s third-floor office.

Carmen Iruegas, who worked in the archbishop’s office, said the archbishop went into his office with a man. She and the other secretary heard a thud, and they went inside to investigate. “I just walked in and saw the archbishop on the floor,” she said. She rushed out and summoned help. She went downstairs, she said, and couldn’t get back up again.

Just before 7 pm, police hostage negotiators faxed Escolero the immigration documents he demanded. And Archbishop Flores guaranteed him that if he were freed, he would help the man find a lawyer and provide his family with food. “I repeated three or four times, ‘In the name of God, in the name of Jesus, I ask you not to use that weapon,’” Flores said. “All of a sudden, he said, ‘OK.’”

Escolero has been charged with two counts of aggravated kidnapping and was held in lieu of $2 million bond. Police said they were at a loss to explain why Escolero singled out Archbishop Flores, a Mexican-American who has been known as a friend to immigrants and the poor. “I don’t think he really knew what he wanted,” Police Chief Al Philippus said.

The international commission of Catholic and Orthodox theologians, which has not met since 1993, gathered in Baltimore on July 9 for 10 days of deliberations. The commission, which was established in 1979 by Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Dimitrios I of Constantinople, had held seven previous meetings: in Patmos, Greece, in 1980; in Munich in 1982; in Govia, Crete in 1984; in Bari, Italy in 1986; in Uusi, Finland, in 1988; in Freiseg, Germany, in 1990; and in Balamund, Lebanon, in 1993. But after the Balamund meeting, the Catholic-Orthodox dialogue broke down over disagreements about the status of the Eastern Catholic churches, and, later, the war in the Balkans.

At his public audience on Sunday, July 9, however, Pope John Paul signaled that the Baltimore meeting could produce important and positive results. The Holy Father has repeatedly indicated his intense interest in drawing together the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.

The Baltimore sessions were chaired by the Greek Orthodox Archbishop Stylianos of Australia and Cardinal Edward Cassidy, the president of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity. Before his departure for the United States, Cardinal Cassidy told the I Media news agency that the meetings would handle “very delicate” issues. The most delicate topic on the agenda, he said, was the question of the Eastern Catholic churches, and particularly the Ukrainian Catholic Church, whose very existence has been a sensitive topic for the Russian Orthodox Church, the largest of the Eastern church bodies.

The Baltimore session will certainly take up anew the statement issued after the Balamund meeting of the same commission in 1993. At Balamund, the participants agreed that the piecemeal attachment of particular Eastern churches to Rome is not the best way to bring about Christian unity. At the same time, however, the Balamund statement affirmed that the existing Eastern Catholic churches have a right to maintain their own religious identity.

The participants in the Baltimore dialogue are keenly aware that the prospects for a summit meeting between Pope John Paul and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexei II depend heavily on the results of their meeting. The Russian Orthodox leader has twice cancelled plans for previous meetings, citing the tensions between the Ukrainian Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox churches.

At the same time, some Ukrainian Catholics are nervous that their interests might be sacrificed to the cause of ecumenical progress. That concern, too, is a familiar one. On May 7, when Pope John Paul led an ecumenical service commemorating the Christian witnesses who died for the faith during the 20th century, Ukrainian Catholics were dismayed that the recognition of the Ukrainian martyrs was led by a Ukrainian Orthodox priest. In part as a response to such fears, and in response to a direct request from Cardinal Myroslav Lubachivsky, the Pope assigned a personal delegate—Cardinal Vinko Puljic of Sarajevo—to represent him at a pilgrimage of the Ukrainian Catholic church to the Marian sanctuary in Zarvanycia on July 22-23.

The Judicial Watch group said it had obtained hundreds of pages from the Justice Department project called VAAPCON, or Violence Against Abortion Providers Conspiracy. They said the documents lay out justification for “intrusive investigative activity” by the FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, US Postal Inspectors, and US Marshals. Among the groups named in the report are the US bishops’ conference, Women’s Coalition for Life, Americans United for Life, Feminists for Life, the Christian Coalition, and the National Rifle Association.

According to government documents obtained by the magazine, the database used “intrusive investigative” techniques to determine whether pro-life groups, such as the bishops’ conference, the Christian Coalition, National Right to Life Committee, and others, were opposed to Clinton administration policies on health care, homosexuals, and abortion or other political positions.

Larry Klayman, general counsel of Judicial Watch, whose group obtained the documents under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, told the magazine: “What in the world are Janet Reno, Hillary, Bill, and their VAAPCON task force doing using law-enforcement personnel to infiltrate, collect, and assemble database information of this type? We were told by one source that some in the FBI objected to the monitoring of these groups on legal and ethical grounds but were overruled by upper levels at Justice.”

The bishops responded with criticism of the project. David Early, a spokesman for the bishops’ conference, told Insight that they knew nothing of the database’s existence. “If such a database does exist, the attorney general and the FBI have some explaining to do,” Early said. “We were under the impression that the FBI had ended its surveillance of religious organizations in the 1960s. So obviously we were not aware of it and are anxious to learn more,” he added.

The groups and persons, such as the late Cardinal John O’Connor of New York, included in the database were not necessarily suspected of criminal activity, prompting some FBI officials to object to the whole project. “It wasn’t the inclusion of suspected criminals or the inclusion of old files on such activities that we objected to,” a senior FBI agent told Insight. “It was the collection of political and personal information on people such as the cardinal that many of us found objectionable. It should not be in the database or passed over to Justice for general reading—this is obviously political in nature and something we work hard to avoid.”

The FBI reportedly told US Rep. Charles Taylor earlier this year that the database only contained information on groups known to be or suspected of being involved in criminal activities. Taylor said he plans to pursue the latest revelations, in light of what he was originally told by the agency.

The statement, issued by the Archdiocese of Boston and signed by the sixteen New England bishops, said: “We act not to deprive any group of their rights, but to protect the existing rights of men and women to join in a sacred union. . . . We should be doing everything possible to strengthen the family as the basic unit of any society and the primary building block of the whole Christian community.”

The bishops also warned that civil unions are on the slippery slope toward same-sex marriage. “The legislature of the State of Vermont, by passing the civil unions bill, has attacked centuries of cultural and religious esteem for marriage between a man and a woman and has prepared the way for an attack on the well-being of society itself,” they said.

They also criticized supporters of same-sex unions for “trying to impose their values on the rest of the population” and urged Vermonters to reverse the law, perhaps even amending their constitution to block any further attempts to impose the idea.

On Sunday, June 18, the new archbishop received the pallium—the symbol of an archbishop’s authority—in a colorful ceremony at St. Patrick’s cathedral. The following day saw the installation ceremony, attended by such political celebrities as New York Governor George Pataki, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and the two leading candidates for the New York Senate seat, Hillary Clinton and Rick Lazio.

The second of two days of installation ceremonies continued with a Mass celebrated by Archbishop Egan.

With a cadre of politicians and dignitaries present, many of them high-profile Catholic politicians who support legalized abortion, the archbishop did not shy away from addressing controversial topics in his homily. Archbishop Egan condemned the ongoing plagues of poverty, discrimination, euthanasia, and abortion afflicting the US.

“May we stand idly by while the being within the mother is killed, even though no one has ever been able to prove it has anything but an inalienable right to live?” he asked. While his remark was greeted with sustained applause, the pro-abortion politicians present—including Clinton, Lazio, Pataki, Guiliani, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-New York, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Connecticut —remained impassive and immobile.

The ceremony began with a 40-minute procession into St. Patrick’s Cathedral of nearly 1,000 clergy, including eight cardinals and several archbishops and bishops. Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo, the papal nuncio to the United States, read a letter from Pope John Paul II. “Even as we mourn the sad passing of our venerable brother John Joseph O’Connor . . . we naturally and spontaneously choose you . . . whom we know to be an experienced herald of the Gospel and administrator well-versed in the affairs of the Church, to fill the vacant See of New York,” the letter said. Cardinal O’Connor died of cancer on May 3.