Library visits pay off for ‘Jeopardy’ champ
I can’t resist stories like this: The Catholic Voice in Oakland, Calif., profiles a local student who was this year’s winner of “Kids’ Week” on the popular TV game show “Jeopardy.” Ten-year-old Rachel Millena “devours American history the way some kids inhale fast foods and sodas,” the paper reports. Here’s the link.
Pro-life midwife takes ministry to Russian Far East
The Western Catholic Reporter in Edmonton, Alberta, tells the story of a midwife who is taking her ministry to the Russian Far East. Heather Holtslag’s goal is not just to help women through their pregnancies but also to be a pro-life presence in an society where abortion is said to be rampant. Click here for the full story.
Little Rock Scripture program offers new feature
Many Catholics have heard of or been involved in the Little Rock Scripture Study program. Now, according to the Arkansas Catholic, the program is offering a free online series called “What the Bible Says About …” for downloading and printing. First topic: “The Rapture.” Click here for the full story.
No cheers for Gore
The Vatican has a long memory, and that helps explain its less-than-enthusiastic response to Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize.
The day Gore was announced as a winner, the Vatican newspaper covered the story in a single sentence, buried on an inside page.
Then at a Catholic meeting in Pisa last Friday, Cardinal Renato Martino let slip a rather caustic remark. “Allow me to express well-founded puzzlement over how and to whom the Nobel Peace Prizes are assigned – even if they have gone to very worthy people in previous years.” Ouch. He never mentioned Gore by name, but the message was clear.
Why the antipathy? After all, Gore’s concern about global warming seems to be echoed in recent remarks by Pope Benedict and other Vatican officials, and Cardinal Martino’s own Justice and Peace council hosted a Vatican conference on climate change earlier this year.
The answer goes back to a Vatican-U.S. ice age under the Clinton administration. The year was 1994, the place was Cairo, and I was there covering the Vatican’s participation in the International Conference on Population and Development. The Vatican delegation was chiefly concerned over proposed language that would accept abortion as a method of family planning, and saw the U.S. administration as pushing that agenda at the Cairo conference.
At a key point in the debate, Gore, then-vice president and the head of the U.S. delegation to Cairo, sat down for a private meeting with Cardinal Martino, the head of the Vatican delegation. Few details were made public, but there was not a meeting of the minds.
The Vatican thought Gore was being duplicitous. He had insisted that the United States was not trying to have abortion recognized as an international right, and said assertions to the contrary were “outrageous allegations.” But the Vatican spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, suggested this was just a pose. “The draft document, which finds in this American administration one of its strongest sponsors, contradicts the words of Vice President Gore,” Navarro-Valls told reporters.
The clash was unusually public and left a bitter aftertaste … one that still lingers.
A hint about next spring’s U.S. papal trip?
It’s been five weeks now since our friend Rocco Palmo over at “Whispers in the Loggia” reported what he called a “rough sketch” of the schedule for Pope Benedict XVI’s trip next April to the United States. The New York Archdiocese said in July that the pope was coming to speak at the United Nations, but Rocco’s report that the pope would start in Washington and end in Boston was the first time a possible detailed itinerary had been laid out, even though there had been earlier reports, such as this one from our own John Thavis, that the pope “could easily add one or two other eastern U.S. cities, such as Philadelphia or Boston,” to the U.S. visit.
From our own experience, planning a trip like this is a huge undertaking with numerous draft plans going back and forth between the host country and the Vatican, so it’s understandable that a month later we would know little else about where the pope might stop while here.
But there was a little hint last week that the trip may not be the six-day, Tuesday-to-Sunday pilgrimage up and down the East Coast that previously might have been anticipated.
In a regularly scheduled meeting between top officials of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the pope, plans for the trip were discussed but “just in general,” according to Bishop William S. Skylstad of Spokane, Wash., conference president. The story by our Cindy Wooden added, “He did say, however, that he expected the trip to be brief, in keeping with Pope Benedict’s practice.”
Certainly no one anticipates this pontiff will match the grueling trips that a younger Pope John Paul II embarked on in the 1980s. After all, if the trip really takes place next April 15-20, as Rocco reported, Pope Benedict will turn 81 during the pilgrimage.
A Tuesday-Sunday U.S. papal trip would be even longer than last spring’s Wednesday-to-Sunday visit to Brazil to open the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean. Rocco’s report that the U.S. trip would end on Sunday, April 20, in Boston also raised eyebrows beyond the symbolism of a visit to the center of the sex abuse scandal — April 20 is also the day before Patriots’ Day, when thousands of runners descend on the city for the running of the famous Boston Marathon.
(I should also note here that even though CNS is a division of the USCCB, at this point we don’t know any more about the planning for this trip than any other news organization. That’s part of being financially self-sustaining — we’re not told what to cover, and our staff is not included in the top-level preparations for an event like this.)
So, only time will tell whether “brief” means that Pope Benedict only visits two or three U.S. cities or whether he’ll make several stops in a pilgrimage reminiscent of Pope John Paul’s first two trips to the U.S. mainland.
When routine is not
Getting a place on a Vatican reporting pool can be a mixed blessing for journalists. If often means a chance to see Pope Benedict and a world leader up close. But it consumes a morning, and there’s usually not much news to report.
When Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete showed up for a papal audience on Friday, I was one of two journalists who trekked up to the papal library, notebook in hand, hoping to hear a snatch of conversation or glean a stray bit of information that might go into a pool report.
The drill on these encounters seems pretty routine to me, but not to first-timers. We were accompanied by four Tanzanian reporters who were in awe from the moment we walked through the bronze doors of the Apostolic Palace.
In the San Damaso Courtyard, where arrival rituals are played out, a picket of Swiss Guards was lining up, the red carpet was being swept off and Vatican officials were taking their places in the October sunshine.
We rode an antique elevator four floors up and walked through a succession of ornate halls and frescoed rooms. In the Clementine Hall, still more Swiss Guards were assembled. The papal gentlemen adjusted their tuxedos and prepared to receive the honored guest.
The press pool was accompanied by Sister Giovanna Gentili, who works for the Vatican press office. Sister Giovanna, a stickler for rules, has taken some hits on reporters’ blogs over the years for her by-the-book approach. But today she was the Holy See’s friendship ambassador.
She explained to the Tanzanian reporters how the event would unfold, took out a map and showed them the names of all the rooms and the artwork they included, and made them understand that for the visit of a head of state, the Vatican pulled out all the stops.
Soon enough, here came the president and his entourage, accompanied by U.S. Archbishop James Harvey, the head of the pontifical household, and assorted other Vatican officials. They walked at a processional pace, and as soon as they passed the journalists were hustled through a door and along a narrow passageway — a hidden short cut to the papal library.
Here we watched the pope come out and greet Kikwete in English. Turning toward the photographers, the smiling pontiff remarked, “Some photos,” and then led his guest into his library. The doors were closed and we went around the corner into a kind of holding tank, hobnobbing with Msgr. Georg Ganswein, the pope’s personal secretary.
Msgr. Ganswein, taking his cue from Sister Giovanna, promised the African reporters something special — at the end of the audience, they could personally greet the pope. They reacted with stunned gratitude, amplified a minute later when a papal usher came round holding a silver tray of rosaries for each of them.
“Have they been blessed by the pope?” one of the Tanzanians asked. “Yes, of course,” Sister Giovanna assured him. “Can I take two?” he ventured, and soon another trayful was brought into the room, along with a stack of papal prayer cards. “Do you know how many people in Tanzania would like to have one of these?” one journalist said, as he reached into the pile.
A bell rang — a little earlier than anyone expected, it seemed. Presumably the pope has a button under his desk so he can signal to aides when to enter the room and wrap it up. In this case, the aides had to scurry a bit to assemble. We followed them through the door to watch President Kikwete introduce members of his entourage to the pope.
The pope and president next walked to a table for an exchange of gifts. I happened to be standing directly in front of the two, and I pricked up my ears for conversation. But although the Tanzanian gift was impressive — an ebony table with inlaid chessboard, decorated with carved giraffes, rhinos and other African fauna — the pope said very little. He looked tired, in fact. “A very beautiful gift,” he murmured. Then he gave the president a papal medallion.
When the delegation left and only reporters were left in the library, Msgr. Ganswein motioned for the Tanzanians to come forward. They were thrilled to meet the pope and have their photo taken. My Vatican colleague, a reporter on her first papal pool, was also introduced. And then, fearing lest I remain the only person in the room not to greet Pope Benedict, I went up and said hello, too.
On the way back to the press room, I realized we had precious little to put in a pool report for fellow Vaticanisti. But I felt pretty certain that the Tanzanian reporters would be writing about this in detail, and remember it for a long time to come.
The CNS News Hub is back!
After a three-month hiatus, the CNS News Hub is officially back in business. We hope you enjoy this new format, which is only an interim step until we get an entirely new Catholic News Service Web site early next year.
The CNS News Hub, originally launched in August 2006, is our way to showcase some of the interesting stories, columns and editorials published by our clients around the Catholic press — items that you’ll wish you knew about if you don’t check these pages often. There’s even an RSS feed if you know how to add the CNS News Hub to your RSS reader.
We’ll also use this area to highlight some of our activities here at CNS that you also may not be aware of. Examples may include stories we’ve written that give a unique perspective to an issue that’s dominating the secular news media, or news nuggets from our award-winning Rome bureau that you can’t find anywhere else!
So, sit back and check here often for another view of the life of the church. We don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
This week in Origins
Another edition of Origins, CNS Documentary Service, for more than 35 years the primary source for church texts, is in the mail and posted online. Here’s what’s in the edition dated Oct. 25:
- If Muslims and Christians are not at peace, the world cannot be at peace, an international group of Muslim leaders and scholars say in a letter to Christian leaders, including Pope Benedict XVI. Finding common ground between the world’s two largest religions is a demand of their shared belief in the unity of God and of the necessity of love for him and of one’s neighbor, they say. (Subscribers: Click here)
- Where there is acceptance of the direct killing of noncombatant civilians or justification of the use of torture in eliciting information from prisoners, there is no military chaplaincy worthy of its name, says the former head of the U.S. military archdiocese, Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien of Baltimore. (Subscribers: Click here)
- An earned path to citizenship for illegal immigrants constitutes neither amnesty nor a reward for lawbreaking because offenders pay a penalty proportionate to the intent and effect of their lawbreaking and remain accountable to the law, says Cardinal Roger M. Mahony. (Subscribers: Click here)