Pope's cyprus visit scheduled
Rome, Italy, Oct 2, 2009 - The government of Cyprus announced on Thursday that Pope Benedict XVI has accepted an invitation to visit the country made by President Demetris Christofias during an audience with the Holy Father at the Vatican on March 27.
The papal trip could take place in June of 2010, according to a story published by Vatican Radio.
According to the report, Maronite Archbishop Josef Souaef of Cyprus, Latin Patriarch Fouad Twal of Jerusalem, and Father Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Custodian of the Holy Land, have expressed their joy at the announcement of the Pope’s visit.
Pope takes wary approach to medias explosion
Vatican City, August 21, 2009 - Toward the end of his encyclical "Charity in Truth," Pope Benedict XVI included a brief but strongly worded analysis about the "increasingly pervasive presence" of modern media and their power to serve good or immoral interests.
The two pages on communications were barely noticed in an encyclical that focused on economic issues, but they underscored the pope's cautionary and critical approach to today's media revolution.
In particular, the pope zeroed in on the popular assumption in the West that the penetration of contemporary media in the developing world will inevitably bring enlightenment and progress.
"Just because social communications increase the possibilities of interconnection and the dissemination of ideas, it does not follow that they promote freedom or internationalize development and democracy for all," the pope wrote.
The pope's critique made several important points:
-- The mass media are not morally "neutral." They are often subordinated to "economic interests intent on dominating the market" and to attempts to "impose cultural models that serve ideological and political agendas," he said.
-- The media have a huge role in shaping attitudes, a role that has been amplified by globalization. That requires careful reflection on their influence, especially when it comes to questions of ethics and the "solidarity" dimension of development, he said.
-- Media have a civilizing effect when they are "geared toward a vision of the person and the common good that reflects truly universal values." That means they need to focus on promoting human dignity, be "inspired by charity and placed at the service of truth," he said.
Inspired by charity? That may sound overly idealistic to those familiar with some of the more popular talk-radio shows or blogs these days.
Archbishop Claudio Celli, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, said recently that the pope is not naive about what's out there.
"He knows perfectly well what's circulating on the great networks of information. That's why he says we need to reflect on the distribution of words and images that are degrading to the human person, and put a halt to whatever fuels hatred and intolerance, or whatever wounds the beauty and intimacy of human sexuality," the archbishop said.
Archbishop Celli, who has pioneered some of the Vatican's new media initiatives, said that while the pope wants to affirm the opportunities of the media explosion he will voice concern when needed. One example is the concept of friendship: The pope believes it's an important element of the digital age, but risks being trivialized.
"It would be sad if our desire to sustain and develop online friendships were to be at the cost of our availability to engage with our families, our neighbors and those we meet in the daily reality of our places of work, education and recreation," the pope wrote in his annual message to communicators earlier this year.
Pope Benedict faces a challenging task when it comes to communications. The 82-year-old pontiff is definitely old school, preferring books to videos and expressing his most important ideas in documents that he writes out longhand.
At the same time, his aides have gone to great lengths to portray the pope as a friend of new media, featuring him in text messages, YouTube videos and podcasts. Yet Pope Benedict 's teaching style is not easily reduced to sound bites or video clips. Even his off-the-cuff remarks come across as carefully reasoned.
Moreover, the pope has found that his core message -- the importance of faith in God and the power of the Gospel to change lives -- often fails to make the news ticker. Media interest perks up when there's a Vatican controversy, but not when the pope talks about the need for saints in modern society.
Even the pope's long-awaited encyclical on economic justice, timed for release as the world's leaders were meeting to tackle the global financial crisis, was bumped off network newscasts and relegated to the inside pages of newspapers by an event too big to ignore: the massive memorial service the same day for Michael Jackson.
It's doubtful any of this surprises Pope Benedict . Several years ago, he commented on the church's relationship with the media in his book "Salt of the Earth."
"The convictions and modes of behavior that hold the church together are located at a deeper level than the forms of expression and behavioral patterns that are imposed on us by the mass media," he said.
That's no sound bite, either, but it reflects the pope's caution against presuming that today's media culture is on the church's wavelength. It also implies that the media themselves should be a major target of modern evangelization.
-CNS
Pope Benedict XVI : Vatican and Italian police like guardian angels
LES COMBES, Italy, Aug 1, 2009 - Pope Benedict XVI said the Vatican and Italian police who watched over him while he was on vacation in the Italian Alps were like "guardian angels, discreet and efficient."
But he was not quite so sure what his own guardian angel was up to.
"Unfortunately, my guardian angel -- certainly following orders from above -- did not prevent my accident," he said, referring to the fact that he tripped in the dark July 17 and broke his wrist.
Before leaving Les Combes to fly to the papal summer villa in Castel Gandolfo south of Rome July 29, the pope met with the police, firefighters and other officials who were involved in maintaining public order and security while he vacationed in northern Italy.
Still referring to his broken right wrist, the right-handed pope told them, "Perhaps the Lord wanted to teach me greater patience and humility, and give me more time for prayer and meditation."
The pope said he had spent the past 16 days immersed in a "heavenly peace," with the silence interrupted only by the songs of birds, rain falling on the grass and the wind blowing through the trees.
He told the dozens of security officers, "Angels are invisible, but efficient at the same time. And you were the same -- invisible, but efficient."
"I enjoyed a heavenly peace here. No disturbance could enter. But many good things -- both material and immaterial -- got in. Many cakes, cheeses, wines," he said.
Pope Benedict posed for a separate group photograph with each of the public security agencies responsible for patrolling the Salesian-owned chalet where he was staying and with the journalists who followed him to the Alps.
-CNS
Pope Benedict XVI to visit the Shroud of Turin
VATICAN CITY, July 30, 2009 - Pope Benedict XVI confirmed his intention to visit the Shroud of Turin when it goes on public display in Turin's cathedral April 10-May 23, 2010.
Cardinal Severino Poletto of Turin, papal custodian of the Shroud of Turin, visited the pope July 26 in Les Combes, Italy, where the pope was spending part of his vacation. The Alpine village is about 85 miles from Turin.
The cardinal gave the pope the latest news concerning preparations for next year's public exposition of the shroud and the pope "confirmed his intention to go to Turin for the occasion," said the Vatican spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, in a written statement July 27.
The specific date of the papal visit has yet to be determined, the priest added.
The last time the Shroud of Turin was displayed to the public was in 2000 for the jubilee year. The shroud is removed from a specially designed protective case only for very special spiritual occasions, and its removal for study or display to the public must be approved by the pope.
The shroud underwent major cleaning and restoration in 2002.
According to tradition, the 14-foot-by-4-foot linen cloth is the burial shroud of Jesus. The shroud has a full-length photonegative image of a man, front and back, bearing signs of wounds that correspond to the Gospel accounts of the torture Jesus endured in his passion and death.
The church has never officially ruled on the shroud's authenticity, saying judgments about its age and origin belonged to scientific investigation. Scientists have debated its authenticity for decades, and studies have led to conflicting results.
A recent study by French scientist Thierry Castex has revealed that on the shroud are traces of words in Aramaic spelled with Hebrew letters.
A Vatican researcher, Barbara Frale, told Vatican Radio July 26 that her own studies suggest the letters on the shroud were written more than 1,800 years ago.
She said that in 1978 a Latin professor in Milan noticed Aramaic writing on the shroud and in 1989 scholars discovered Hebrew characters that probably were portions of the phrase "The king of the Jews."
Castex's recent discovery of the word "found" with another word next to it, which still has to be deciphered, "together may mean 'because found' or 'we found,'" she said.
What is interesting, she said, is that it recalls a passage in the Gospel of St. Luke, "We found this man misleading our people," which was what several Jewish leaders told Pontius Pilate when they asked him to condemn Jesus.
She said it would not be unusual for something to be written on a burial cloth in order to indicate the identity of the deceased.
Frale, who is a researcher at the Vatican Secret Archives, has written a new book on the shroud and the Knights Templar, the medieval crusading order which, she says, may have held secret custody of the Shroud of Turin during the 13th and 14th centuries.
She told Vatican Radio that she has studied the writings on the shroud in an effort to find out if the Knights had written them.
"When I analyzed these writings, I saw that they had nothing to do with the Templars because they were written at least 1,000 years before the Order of the Temple was founded" in the 12th century, she said.
-CNS
Pope gave a Vatican document on bioethics to Obama
Vatican City, July 10, 2009 - When Pope Benedict XVI gave President Barack Obama a Vatican document on bioethics, he was trying to be clear with him about church teaching and open a path to further dialogue, the Vatican spokesman said.
Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, the spokesman, told reporters after the meeting between the pope and the president that, in giving Obama the document July 10, "the intention was not to be divisive or political, but for clarity and objectivity; to say that, for us, this is extremely important."
Pope Benedict gave Obama the document "Dignitas Personae" ("The Dignity of a Person"), which was published in December by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
In discussing issues such as abortion, artificial fertilization and stem-cell research, the document started with two fundamental church teachings: that the human being is to be respected and treated as a person from the moment of conception and that responsible human procreation occurs in an act of love between a man and a woman in marriage.
"There was no intention to be polemical," Father Lombardi said. "I do not agree with the idea that the pope was trying to point out their differences."
"It is important to talk about these things and to find a path to dialogue," he said.
The spokesman said Pope Benedict told him after the meeting that he felt Obama listened carefully, and the pope said that "the president explicitly expressed his commitment to reducing the number of abortions" and demonstrated his attentiveness to the church's concerns on a variety of moral issues.
In a briefing aboard Air Force One for reporters accompanying Obama to Accra, Ghana, Denis McDonough, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, said the president and the pope had an extensive conversation about bioethics and abortion.
McDonough said the president emphasized his interest in finding common ground on reducing abortion and that Obama said he was looking forward to reading "Dignitas Personae."
Father Lombardi said the Vatican is very well aware of and supports the U.S. bishops in their efforts to try to convince the Obama administration to respect human life.
But, he said, the Vatican did not consult with the bishops in preparing for the visit, which the pope had been looking forward to for months.
"The election of Obama had an impact of global importance" and his policies have been known and followed "by everyone, including the pope and the (Vatican) secretary of state," Father Lombardi said.
"I think here we are talking about a level of attention and knowledge that I would say is very broad," he said.
-CNS