2
News From the Vatican
January 29, 2010
At Vatican, U.S. military chaplains study post-traumatic syndrome VATICAN CITY (CNS) — As chaplains in the U.S. military around the world are doing, a group of Catholic chaplains meeting at the Vatican spent a full day studying how to provide pastoral and spiritual care to people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, head of the U.S. Archdiocese for the Military Services, brought 40 U.S. Catholic chaplains, who are on active military duty, to the Vatican January 19-21 to discuss what’s going on in the archdiocese, learn more about responding to post-traumatic stress disorder and discuss preparations for using the new Mass translations. Archbishop Broglio said sessions of the annual archdiocesan priests’ convocation are always scheduled in five different cities around the world; this year, one was held at the Vatican. Unless he is deployed with troops on a military mission, each chaplain is expected to attend one of the sessions, the archbishop said. The chaplains attending the
Vatican meeting went to Pope Benedict XVI’s weekly general audience, and Archbishop Broglio spoke briefly with the pope. The archbishop said he told the pope that Auxiliary Bishop Richard B. Higgins had recently suffered a heart attack, and the pope promised his prayers. Archbishop Broglio said that even though the entire 2008 convocation was dedicated to posttraumatic stress disorder, it is such “a major problem for men and women in the armed services and for our own chaplains, who are deployed multiple times,” that he decided an entire day should be dedicated to the topic again. The key speaker at the Rome meeting was Jesuit Father Richard Curry, founder and artistic director of the National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped and founder of the Writers’ Program for Wounded Warriors. The program helps veterans write dramatic monologues in order tell their stories and help begin the healing process.
good horse sense — Cardinal Angelo Comastri offers rosaries to men on horses just outside St. Peter’s Square in Rome recently. The Italian cardinal blessed farm animals brought by an association of farmers and ranchers. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)
Christians must pray for unity while tackling new problems, pope says By Cindy Wooden Catholic News Service VATICAN CITY — The search for Christian unity “is not a linear process,” because as churches resolve their past differences, differing approaches to new questions create new difficulties, Pope Benedict XVI said. During his weekly general audience January 20 — in the middle of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity — the pope said the unity that Jesus wants for his disciples will require human effort and conversion, but ultimately it will be a gift of God for which people must pray. Discussing the ecumenical landscape, the pope said, “we must be aware, on the one hand, of how much real progress has been made in Christian collaboration and fraternity over the past 50 years, but at the same time, we know that ecumenical work is not a linear process. Old problems, born in the context of another age, lose their weight, while in our own context
new problems and difficulties are born.” Pope Benedict did not list the new problems, but in the past he has noted how the approach of different Christian communities to modern moral and social sensitivities has created new divisions, for instance when they have led some churches to ordain women or to recognize homosexual unions. The new divisions, he said, call on all Christians “to be always ready for a process of purification, through which the Lord will make us ready to be united.” Christians will never be able to give a united witness to the world until each of them is united to Christ, he said. Ecumenism does require intellectual effort and theological dialogue, but even more it requires Christians who know and experience the love of God through Jesus and are prepared to share the Gospel with the world, he said. The commitment to dialogue,
despite new problems and tensions, is a sign of Christians’ intense desire for unity, he said, but it is not enough. A new, united Church constructed with human hands and minds, the pope said, “would be something human, while we want the Church of God, made by God. God will create unity when he wills, when we are prepared.” Pope Benedict asked God to listen to all Christians, who plead especially intensely for unity during the January 18-25 Week of Prayer. Participating in the audience were members of the Continuation Committee of Ecumenism in the 21st Century, a body convoked by the World Council of Churches and made up of representatives of 15 Christian communities, including the Catholic Church. The committee is working to help the ecumenical movement evaluate its past achievements and identify paths forward in the search for unity.
Papal assailant Agca released from prison VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The man who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981 was released January 18 from a Turkish prison. Mehmet Ali Agca, 52, was taken from prison to a military hospital to be assessed for compulsory military service, which is obligatory for all Turkish men. Agca fled the military draft in the 1970s. In a statement released by his lawyer immediately after his release, Agca made the kind of wild declaration for which he has become known, proclaiming himself “the Christ eternal,” saying he in-
tended to write the perfect Gospel and predicting the end of the world in this century. Agca, who had connections to a Turkish ultra-nationalist group, shot and seriously wounded Pope John Paul in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981. He was apprehended immediately, tried in an Italian court and sentenced to life in prison. Agca at first said he had acted alone. He later claimed the Soviet KGB and Bulgarian agents were involved in the papal shooting, but his alleged accomplices were acquitted in a second trial in 1986.
Pope John Paul publicly forgave his assailant, and in 1983 he visited Agca in a Rome prison cell. In 2000, with the pope’s support, Italy pardoned Agca and returned him to his native Turkey, where he began serving a sentence for the 1979 murder of a Turkish journalist. In recent weeks, as his prison release date approached, Agca made several written statements, saying among other things that he wished to visit the tomb of Pope John Paul II at the Vatican and hoped to team up with writer Dan Brown on a “Vatican Code” project.