Dead Sea Scroll now on display

A 24-foot scroll displaying the text of the book of Isaiah is to be displayed in Jerusalem this week for the first time in 41 years. Written by a Judean scribe in approximately 120 BC, the text features the only complete book of the Bible discovered mong the Dead Sea Scrolls. It will be on display in the Israel Museum for three months to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel. President Bush, who is visiting the country this week, will be one of the first to view it.

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Catholic priest's memoir of Nazi imprisonment

The memoir of a Catholic priest detailing his inter n ment in Nazi Germany has just been published for the first time in English. “Priestblock 25487: A Memoir of Dachau” by Fr Jean Bernard, a Luxembourgois priest deported for denouncing the Nazis was originally published in Germany in 1963. In 2004, it was made into the film “The Ninth Day.”

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Vatican Christian Unity leader to visit Russian Orthodox Church

Cardinal Kasper, the head of the Vatican’s Council for Promoting Christian Unity, will visit Moscow this month to learn more about Russian Orthodoxy. Igor Vyzhanov, the secretary of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations (DECR), said: "It will be a private visit, which Cardinal Kasper himself has initiated to become better acquainted with the life of the Russian Orthodox Church and its spiritual reality." Cardinal Kasper is expected to meet with the head of the DECR Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, and, possibly, with Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow and All Russia.

Full report on Cardinal Kasper's visit

The Rev Io M. Smith, a pioneer of the Black Church movement in Britain has died aged 70. Author of “The Ebony Cross: Being Black in Britain Today,” Rev Smith was for 25 years General Secretary of the New Testament Assembly, one of Britain’s leading black churches.