Christmas hailed around the world

Press, 26 December 1984, Page 3

Christmas hailed around the world

NZPA-AP New York From bitterly cold Peking, where thousands gathered for Midnight Mass, to Bethlehem, where Israel’s Jewish Prime Minister made an unprecedented Yuletime visit, people joined worldwide on Christmas Eve to celebrate the birth of Christ. In India, Christmas cakes were imprinted with political symbols as Indians voted for a new Parliament in the world’s largest election. In famine-stricken Ethiopia, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mother Teresa, of Calcutta, arrived on Christmas Day and plans to tour relief camps for two weeks. Pope John Paul 11, spiritual leader of the world’s Catholics, visited hospital patients in Rome before celebrating Midnight Mass. At the Vatican, he told fellow Poles that he was concerned by the atheistic programme of the Government in their native land. Thousands of pilgrims and tourists packed St Peter’s Basilica for Midnight Mass, which was televised in 36 countries. In his homily, the Pope, hailed the birth of Jesus and Jesus’s message of hope to a world, the pontiff said,troubled by atheistic trends and faced with a permanent nuclear threat. He also lamented “the scourge of famine which is tragically afflicting certain regions of the world.” Along the southern edge of the demilitarised zone dividing the Korean Penin-

sula into Communist north and capitalist. pro-West south. Christmas lights provided by religious groups twinkled on evergreen trees, some 15 metres tall. To observe the Christmas holiday, pickets in Britain's coal strike left their posts for the first time since the walk-out began in March. In El Salvador, a threeday Christmas truce declared by the rebels apparently was holding on its first day, with only one minor skirmish reported between guerrillas and Government troops. But a week-end Christmas fair in Thailand ended in tragedy, with three students and a police officer killed and 11 people wounded, when a student tampered with a grenade on display, said the police. In Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, Israeli soldiers stood guard on rooftops overlooking Manger Square outside the Church of the Nativity. Bethlehem is on the Jordan River’s West Bank, which Israel captured in the 1967 war. Israeli’s Prime Minister, Shimon Peres, a Jew, went to Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, saying he brought “a greeting of peace from those who seek peace.” It was the first such Christmas Eve visit by a Prime Minister of the Jewish State.

Bethlehem's Christian Palestinian Mayor, Elias Freij, welcomed' Mr Peres at a reception where a table of kosher food was set out for Jewish guests. Freij called for a new peace initiative based on the proposal of Peres’ Labour Party to return some occupied territory in exchange for a peace settlement with Jordan. In Tripoli, as Libyan guards kept watch, four Britons held by Libya for the last seven months sang “O Come All Ye Faithful" at a service conducted by an envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Kev. Robert Runcie. British reporters quoted the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, as saying the four could be exchanged for five Libyans held in Britain on bombing charges. Rickety coal stoves inside Peking’s Catholic cathedral fended off the cold Monday evening as thousands of worshippers attended Midnight Mass, some travelling many kilometres for the service. “Many people will stay all night and then cycle home in the morning,” said Maria Zheng, a regular worshipper at St Mary of the Immaculate Conception Cathedral, one of four Christian churches in Peking.