CA to mark Good Friday with tour of 'pain,' 'death' at U.

The ceremony will include stops at food trucks, the College Green peace sign and the FIJI house. Sometimes truth can be stranger than fiction. According to the Christian Association, the struggle of vendors against a controversial bill that would ban them from most parts of campus is akin to the condemnation of Jesus Christ. Christ's suffering and death are also similar to the plight of a College freshman who some say was beaten by police, as well as to the victims of the Palestra shootings, the CA says. The CA -- a 107-year-old group which is not affiliated with the University and defines itself as an all-inclusive Christian organization -- will equate these situations with Christ's in a Good Friday service designed to commemorate those who have experienced "pain, humiliation and death" over the past year. Good Friday is the observance of Jesus' death. During Friday's "Way of the Cross" service, participants will start walking from the CA building at 36th Street and Locust Walk at noon. Over the next hour, they will visit the food trucks in front of the Annenberg School for Communication, the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity house where police allegedly beat Sofield and the peace sign on College Green. CA Associate Minister Andrew Barasda, who proposed the service, said it will be a chance "to reflect upon [the events] in light of what Jesus experienced at the hands of the Romans." Barasda maintains that the service will be religious, rather than political. "Bill Sofield falling under the weight of the police attack is just like Jesus falling under the weight of the cross," Barasda said. The Sofield incident has long been the subject of campus controversy. Several FIJI brothers maintain that police unnecessarily beat Sofield when they tried to arrest him inside the Locust Walk house on October 30, but an internal police investigation concluded that police did not act improperly. In January, a judge acquitted Sofield on charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Sofield has until October 30, 1999, to decide whether to file a civil suit alleging police brutality. Barasda also compared the plight of the vendors to that of Christ. "The ongoing pain of the vendors certainly relates to Jesus being condemned to death," Barasda said. Vendor and consumer groups have battled University administrators since last May over a proposed city ordinance that would ban vending on most streets and sidewalks in the area. City Council will hold hearings on the ordinance Tuesday. Separately, the University plans to build five food plazas to hold a total of 45 displaced vendors. Scott Goldstein, the chairperson of the University City Vendors Alliance -- one of the two ad hoc groups formed in response to the ordinance -- said that while he appreciated the CA's ceremony, he was not sure it was appropriate to equate the vendors' situation to the shootings. "I take what's happening to us very seriously, but I take someone's life being in jeopardy even more seriously," Goldstein said. The service's final stop at the peace sign -- a move meant to commemorate the March 1 shootings outside the Palestra -- applies the most literally to Christ because "Jesus died on the cross, and the victim of the shooting also died," according to Barasda. North Philadelphia resident Anthony Davis, 22, was killed and three people, including a Penn student, were wounded in the shootings outside the Palestra that occurred after the Philadelphia Public League high school boys basketball championship. Kyle McLemore, 21, was arrested for the shootings and charged with murder. Police, who say the murder was the result of a long-running feud between the two men, just issued a warrant for a second suspect.

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