The Record Newspaper 16 October 2003

SCHOLARSHIPS TO THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME AUSTRALIA

The Trustee of the KSCEducation Foundation Inc (a project of the Knights of the Southern Cross) takes pleasure in again inviting applications from teachers of Religious Education in Catholic Schools in Western Australia to undertake further study for units in religious education or theology at the University of Notre Dame Australia in 2004.

Application forms and further information are available from:

The Secretary

KSC Education Foundation Inc POBox Y3128

Telephone (08) 9225 6011

Application close on 7 November 2003

Witness to Pope’s ‘youthful spirit’ INSIDE:

Archbishop’s Pastoral PUT THE CHILD FIRST Pages 6 & 14

What the Press Secretary’s sees: Navarro Valls talks about his boss

Page 2

They love him: Why young people flock to JPII

Page 3

Saints Galore: What lies behind the drive to canonise so many?

Page 4

Evangeliser for the 3rd millennium: John Paul’s focus on sanctity for all

Page 5

A pontiff in pictures: reportage

Page 7

Summing up Wojtyla

Pages 8&9

SPECIAL LIFTOUT BLESSED MOTHER TERESA see centre of paper

The Great Communicator

Page 10

A Quarter of a Century of Change

Page 11

Breaking the sound barrier of thinking: the theologian

Page 12

Naked Without Shame

How JPII set a theological timebomb ticking in the Church and the world on sex

Page 13

Papal press secretary Joaquin Navarro Valls reflects on watching the Pope reach inside people all over the world

By John Thavis

At the 25-year mark, Pope John Paul II is still preaching tough moral truths in a way that resonates with millions of people around the world, said one of his closest advisers.

Joaquin NavarroValls, papal spokesman, said that what sets the Pope apart from other world leaders is not just his communicating style or his spiritual demeanour, but his real interest in each of his listeners and their ultimate salvation. "Even in huge crowds, he's able to reach individuals. I've seen it happen many times. People say to themselves, 'This Pope is concerned about what's inside me,' and it makes them stop and think," Navarro-Valls said in an interview with Catholic News Service.

seen the Vatican from the inside and has many times discussed with the Pope the media impact of papal decisions.

Finding a single key to this papacy is not easy because it has been so multifaceted, NavarroValls said. But in the broadest sense, he said, Pope John Paul had to face the great question left by the Second Vatican Council:

Asian people. "There is no contradiction here. It is all one mission, that of presenting the richness of the Christian message in all its integrity to the world of today," Navarro-Valls said.

The papal spokesman said that for Pope John Paul dialogue has a strong cultural element. He said the Pope has shown a keen interest in learning about the

Those who think the Pope has run out of things to say after 25 years are missing the point, he said.

"The Pope's message is the Gospel, and it will never be exhausted. And I still see in him a freshness that allows him to keep preaching it," Navarro-Valls said.

Pope John Paul has been the most media-conscious pontiff in history, and in naming NavarroValls his spokesman in 1984 he chose a professional lay journalist, a Spaniard who was also a member of the influential Catholic organisation Opus Dei. Since then, Navarro-Valls has

St Aloysius Convent

School Reunion - Toodyay WA

In conjunction with the 100th Anniversary of the former Mercy Sisters’Convent in Toodyay,the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate are sponsoring a reunion of all former students of St Aloysius School on November 16,2003. Students who attended Bushie Camp or Bushie School are also invited. The day’s events begin at 11am with a Solemn Mass presided by Bishop Myles McKeon,followed by lunch (BBQ available),a guided tour of Convent and School and Concert by “Azure Trio”(piano,cello, violin). Scanned or photocopies of past school photos may be sent to: POBox 1028,Toodyay,WA 6566. RSVP:November 1. Contact:Ellen 9574 2242 (ellenferg@bigpond.com) or Franciscan Friars 9574 5204 (avemaria@avon.net.au)

How can the church dialogue with the world without losing its own identity? "With a great part of the Western world experiencing a crisis of values, there were two ways to go: either close the church off in a type of Catholic ghetto and build it up, or throw the church into dialogue at every level and risk losing its identity," he said.

"The incredible thing is that this papacy has done both things together. It has strengthened the church's identity precisely in order to conduct a dialogue without limits," he said.

Thus Pope John Paul can travel to Asia and defend the right of the Christian minority to preach the Gospel and the right of any believer to embrace it, NavarroValls said. But at the same time, the Pope expresses his deep respect for other religious traditions and their immense contributions to the spiritual life of

attitudes, customs and histories of peoples around the world.

In some places, that has led the Pope to ask God's forgiveness for the actions of the church or the participation of its members in events like the Crusades, religious wars and other forms of intolerance, Navarro-Valls said.

As for the Pope's increasing frailty and inability to walk, Navarro-Valls said the pontiff is fully able to govern the church even with his disabilities. In fact, the spokesman said, the Pope sometimes surprises his aides with his energy.

"Last summer, after a gruelling trip to Toronto, Guatemala and Mexico, you would think that he would return to Italy and rest. So what does he do? He sits down and writes a book of poetry," Navarro-Valls said.

"That's why I say that at age 83 he still has a youthful spirit," he said. - CNS

Always close to his heart: a boy presents the Pope with a figurine of Baby Jesus.

Photo:CNS/Reuters

Young people adore him

Young people return Pope John Paul II's love for them

By John Thavis

When he slurs a line in a speech or fails to stifle a yawn, Pope John Paul II shows his age. But put him among young people, and watch the years fall away. His eyes light up. His voice gets stronger and more emphatic. And he smiles.

At 83, the Pope has learned that young people are often the best medicine. But it's not only that they rejuvenate him:

"It's almost like a direct link to God, that goodness, and you feel connected to that. You can see that he thrives on young people and wants to bring them back," said Clair Sweeney, during World Youth Day 2000 in Rome.

As a bishop in Poland, he loved to lead groups of youths on hiking and canoe trips, discussing religious and moral questions around a campfire.

After his election in 1978, he made young people a priority. In 1984, he instituted World Youth Day, which brings hundreds of thousands of Catholic young people to a different city every two or three years.

At World Youth Day, Pope John Paul is definitely the star attraction, but the cheers and chants that erupt from the crowds are only part of the story. Perhaps more than any other audience, young people listen closely to his words. "We have a sense he is speaking the truth to us," said one girl at a recent youth day event.

In his message to young people at Toronto in 2002, he asked them to get to know Jesus and accept him as "the faithful friend who never lets us

down."

But he also explores the challenges that flow from the Gospel, asking young people to be more honest, more giving, less materialistic and more chaste than much of contemporary society.

Papal biographer George Weigel said the Pope has had a great impact on younger generations precisely because he holds "the bar of expectation high" when it comes to questions of faith and morals.

Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the Vatican spokesman, said he thinks the Pope strikes a chord of authenticity that appeals to young listeners.

“The Pope's message is that human identity is not formed from outside images but from within," Navarro-Valls said.

"He demands from young people what no one else has the courage to demand, some-

times even the parents. But he does more than make demands -- he gives them reasons for what he says," the spokesman said.

The Pope often appeals to young people's sense of justice and generosity, as well as their optimism. In Toronto, asking youths to build a better world,

he told them: "The future is in your hearts and hands." Coming from a self-described "old" Pope, those words had the ring of someone passing the baton to younger generations.

Over the years, the Pope also has recognised that gestures as well as speechmaking can have a huge impact on his young audiences. He has held hands and danced with them on stage, answered their questions in a classroom, invited them for lunch, listened to their personal testimonials and accepted their gift. It's not always easy to measure the impact of the Pope's personal appearances, but it seems to run deep in many cases. These young Catholics are the "John Paul II generation."

They grew up under this Pope, share his vision of the church and are determined to live it.

Over the years JPII 1978-1981

1978: Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krakow, Poland, is elected pope on October 16. Taking the name John Paul II, he is the first non-Italian pope since 1523. At 58, he is the youngest since Pope Pius IX, who was elected at age 54. At the October 22 Mass formally inaugurating his ministry, he sets a theme for his pontificate with the words, “Be not afraid. Open wide the doors for Christ."

1979: Pope John Paul starts mediating ChileanArgentine dispute over Beagle Channel islands. He issues his first encyclical, on Christ, the redeemer of mankind, and first major apostolic exhortation, on catechesis. He begins a recordbreaking pace of world travels with four trips abroad: the Dominican Republic and Mexico; Poland; Ireland and the United States with a visit to the United Nations; and Turkey, where he and the Patriarch of Constantinople inaugurate an official Catholic-Orthodox dialogue. Italian newspapers take to calling him “Cyclone Wojtyla." He convenes first plenary session of cardinals in 400-plus years to discuss Vatican finances, curial structure and Church and culture. In December a Dominican theologian, Father Edward Schillebeeckx, is asked to come to Rome for questioning, and Father Hans Kung is stripped of authorisation to teach as a Catholic theologian, clearly signaling the new pope's lower tolerance for those who dissent from essential Church teaching.

1980: The Polish pontiff calls Dutch bishops to Rome for special synod to restore unity and discipline in the Dutch church. He convenes synod of world's Ukrainian bishops, approving their choice of an eventual successor to their ailing leader, Cardinal Joseph Slipyj. In letter to world's bishops, Pope warns against abuses in liturgy. He approves doctrinal congregation declaration condemning euthanasia. He declares St Francis of Assisi patron saint of ecologists and St Catherine of Siena a Doctor of the Church. He beatifies Kateri Tekakwitha. Marking 450th anniversary of Lutheranism's Augsburg Confession, he urges theologians to intensify study of common foundations of Catholic and Lutheran faith. He travels to six African countries and to France, Brazil and West Germany. He presides over a world Synod of Bishops on the family and issues his second encyclical, on divine mercy.

1981: Pope John Paul supports workers' rights in a meeting with Lech Walesa and other leaders of Polish trade union Solidarity. He travels to Philippines, Guam and Japan with stopovers in Pakistan and Alaska. In three years he has matched the 15-year record of nine foreign trips by the “pilgrim pope," Pope Paul VI, and every new trip abroad sets another record. His beatification of 16 martyrs in Manila, Philippines, is first beatification outside Rome since the 14th-century Avignon papacy. He is severely wounded and hospitalised for 11 weeks in attempted assassination on May 13 by Mehmet Ali Agca. He reorganises the Vatican Committee for the Family, raising it to the status of a pontifical council, and issues an apostolic exhortation on the theology of the family. He forms a new Council of Cardinals to advise him on the Holy See's ailing finances and organisational problems. When the Jesuit superior general suffers a stroke, the Pope personally intervenes to name interim head of the order. He issues his first social encyclical, on human work. He names German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to head Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

A young woman listens mesmerised to the Pope as he speaks on World Youth Day. Photo:CNS/Reuters

Over the years JPII 1982-1984

1982: Making up for cancelled trips in 1981, Pope John Paul makes a record seven trips abroad in one year, including successive visits to England and Argentina, then at war over Falkland Islands. He meets in the Vatican with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. He canonises Polish World War II martyr St Maximilian Kolbe. He makes the religious organisation Opus Dei the world's first personal prelature, a canonical jurisdiction headed by a bishop. After meeting with Council of Cardinals and plenary assembly of cardinals on Vatican finances, he acknowledges need for public statements of Vatican finances.

1983: He promulgates a new Code of Canon Law, one of the major Church reform projects since the Second Vatican Council. He inaugurates a special holy year for the 1,950th anniversary of the Redemption. He issues a Charter of the Rights of the Family. He visits 12 countries in four foreign trips, starting with a marathon trip to seven Central American nations and Haiti. In Nicaragua he publicly scolds Jesuit Father Ernesto Cardenal, a priest who took leave from ministry to serve in the Marxist Cuban-backed Sandinista government. During his Poland visit the government reluctantly releases Lech Walesa from house arrest to meet with pontiff. The Pope warns US bishops to give no support to any group that advocates women's ordination. He presides over Synod of Bishops on theme of Penance and Reconciliation. His December visit to a Lutheran church in Rome marks the first time a pope has preached in a Protestant church. He visits prison to meet Mehmet Ali Agca, his would-be assassin.

1984: Pope John Paul establishes full diplomatic relations with United States. He forms a new commission for authentic interpretation of Church laws, issues an apostolic letter on redemptive suffering and another on religious life. In April he concludes 1983 Holy Year with series of events, including youth celebration. He visits 10 countries, including Canada, on four trips. In Korea he canonises 103 Korean martyrs. In Switzerland he calls the Church's ecumenical commitment irreversible during visit to World Council of Churches headquarters. A month before Pope's visit to Puerto Rico to meet with bishops of Latin America, doctrinal congregation issues an instruction on liberation theology rejecting the idea that Marxism can be made compatible with Christianity. He authorises bishops to allow Mass according to Tridentine rite under certain conditions. In five months of weekly audience talks on human love and sexuality, he reaffirms Church teaching against artificial contraception (see Naked Without Shamepage 13 this edition).

And the Saints keep marching in

Universal Call to Holiness: In October 2001 Luigi and Maria Beltrame Quattrocchi became the first couple in the history of the Church to be elevated together to the rank of ‘blessed,’ one of the major steps toward canonisation. John Paul II had urged Vatican officials to find examples of ordinary lay members of the Church who might be beatified in order to underscore one of the central messages of Vatican II: that holiness is not just for priests and religious but for everyone - nobody excepted.

By Cindy Wooden

Most Catholics have heard of Sts. Maximilian Kolbe, Edith Stein, Padre Pio, Faustina Kowalska and Juan Diego, but 25 years ago they were not officially recognised saints.

They are just a handful of the record 477 men and women Pope John Paul II has canonised.

Between 1588, and the 1978 end of the pontificate of Pope Paul VI, the total number of saints canonised was 296.

Critics have complained the Vatican has turned into a “saint factory” during Pope John Paul’s tenure, claiming that becoming a saint is not as special as it once was.

That is precisely the point of so many canonisations and beatifications, Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins told a conference last May looking at Pope John Paul’s quartercentury pontificate.

“Holiness is not the luxury of some, but a binding obligation for all,” said the cardinal, prefect of the Congregation for Saints’ Causes. “The church and the world today have a great need of saints.”

Pope John Paul’s record-making run did not begin immediately after his election in 1978; in fact, he did not celebrate his first canonisation Mass until June 1982. He then reformed the entire process in 1983.

The reforms streamlined the process, but one of the first causes to take advantage of the faster track to sainthood — that of St. Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, founder of Opus Dei — drew sharp criticism for its speed.

With even greater speed, Mother Teresa of Calcutta will be beatified on October 19, just six years and one month after her death. The beatification of the founder of the Missionaries of Charity is being described as part of the celebrations of Pope John Paul’s 25th anniversary.

The beatification of two martyrs in Slovakia in mid-September, and Mother Teresa will bring to 1,319 the number of men and women recognised as “blessed” during this pontificate.

The first saint he proclaimed was St. Crispin of Viterbo, an Italian Capuchin friar known for his charity and his infectious cheerfulness.

As he has done at every canonisation since, the Pope explained the ceremony as

martyrs in 1988. But the growing roll of saints officially recognised by the Catholic Church over the past 25 years also reflects Pope John Paul’s attention to offering Catholics in individual countries examples of how someone who lived and died in their own nations lived the call to holiness.

Most of the more than 100 trips Pope John Paul has made outside of Italy in the past 25 years have included a beatification or canonisation liturgy.

For centuries, canonisations were reserved mainly for holy men and women with a universal following and appeal.

By travelling the world and canonising local saints in the lands where they lived, Pope John Paul has recovered a taste of the earliest tradition of recognising saints.

In the first millennium of the church’s history, saints were proclaimed by the communities where they lived and died; the Pope, as bishop of Rome, canonised Roman saints. The saints’ feast days were celebrated in the local churches, but as the fame of an individual grew his or her feast was added to the calendars of neighbouring churches and eventually to the church’s universal calendar.

Pope John Paul slowly has chipped away at European dominance of the list of those officially canonised and beatified.

As Cardinal Saraiva Martins said in 2000, “holiness knows no geographical or cultural boundaries and has no racial prejudices.”

While proclaiming their holiness before the world, the Pope looked particularly to Catholics in the United States when canonising St. Katharine Drexel, to Catholics in Sudan when he canonised St. Josephine Bakhita, to Catholics in Canada when he canonised St. Marguerite d’Youville and to Catholics in Guatemala when he canonised St. Pedro de San Jose Betancur.

an opportunity to offer the world a specific model of holiness.

The Capuchin, who died in 1750, the Pope said, “offers our generation, which frequently is inebriated by success, a lesson of humble and trusting adherence to God and to his plan for salvation, as well as (a lesson) of love for poverty and for the poor.”

Holiness is a gift of God, he said at the end of the ceremony, but added “saints generate saints.”

Whether martyrs or mystics, founders of religious orders or lay catechists, Pope John Paul uses the ceremonies to highlight the ways in which the saints dedicated their lives to loving and serving God and others. In the Pope’s mind, and in the mind of the church, there are as many ways of living a holy life as there are individuals created by God and called to holiness.

The record number of saints canonised by Pope John Paul is due partially to the fact that the list includes large numbers of individual martyrs canonised as a group: for example, he canonised 103 Korean martyrs in 1984 and 117 Vietnamese

He also canonised martyrs from Japan, Paraguay, Spain, China and Mexico. The founders of religious orders still have a lion’s share of the inscriptions in the universal calendar of saints’ feasts, but Pope John Paul’s beatifications of lay people have set the stage for more variety in the future.

“Contemporary men and women need saints capable of translating into today’s language the life and words of Christ,” Cardinal Saraiva Martins said in May. - CNS

Right: Saint Maximilian Kolbe.

Spreading the good news

To millions worldwide,Pope John Paul II has been an evangeliser

By John Thavis

It was a warm summer evening in Casablanca, and at the local soccer stadium 80,000 young Moroccans were giving Pope John Paul II a rousing welcome.

Slovak Cardinal Jozef Tomko, who stood behind the pontiff in the tribute of honour, listened to the Pope’s French-language speech and watched the crowd. He noticed an amazing thing: These Muslim youths were not just clapping out of excitement or out of respect for the man dressed in white.

They were hanging on every word.

“This was not preordained applause. They were responding to what he said. As I witnessed this, I was struck by the Pope’s great talent for entering into the minds of his listeners,” Cardinal Tomko recalled in a recent interview.

In Cardinal Tomko’s view, the Morocco encounter in 1985 showed Pope John Paul doing what he does best: evangelising in a way that respects the sensibilities of others.

To his non-Christian audience, the Pope spoke not only about belief in God, but also about the Christian conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord and Saviour of all. He acknowledged that was a deep difference in their faiths and said, “God will enlighten us about it one day, I am sure.”

The Pope addressed the sensitive topic of religious freedom and highlighted the many beliefs and hopes shared by Muslims and Christians as they try to build a better world.

“It was very interesting. The Pope knew how to speak about all these things in a way that moved these young people to applaud,” Cardinal Tomko said.

Cardinal Tomko, a longtime papal confidante who headed the Vatican’s Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples from 1985 to 2001, said he’s witnessed similar scenes on other continents, as the Pope has taken the church’s message to people of every race and every belief.

With few exceptions, the Pope has made a positive impression, the cardinal said. Although crowds of more than a million people have cheered him, the Pope’s success as an evangeliser is not something that can always be measured by the size of his

Even where the crowds are huge, the Pope succeeds in touching individuals... The reason is that he speaks a “language of love,”

Over the years

JPII 1985

audience, he said. “The approval of the masses is not his main purpose. He doesn’t go about this like a politician in search of votes,” Cardinal Tomko said. “His purpose is to propose the message of Christ, in a spirit not of conquest but respect. If his listeners are a million people in Poland or a few hundred in Mongolia, that’s secondary to the Pope,” he said.

Even where the crowds are huge, the Pope succeeds in touching individuals, Cardinal Tomko said. The reason is that he speaks a “language of love,” he said.

“Not everyone may realise this, but the Pope pleases because he loves every single person he encounters — and people understand this,” Cardinal Tomko said. Pope John Paul has been a model evangeliser in many other ways, too, Cardinal Tomko said.

He cited the Pope’s parish visits in Rome, his weekly audience talks aimed at the church and the world, papal documents that reach out to specific groups and, above all, the 1991 encyclical on the church’s missionary mandate, Redemptoris Missio (“The Mission of the Redeemer”).

During much of Pope John Paul’s pontificate, the church has experienced a tension between proclaiming the Gospel and holding a dialogue with non-Christians. Some may see a conflict here, but Cardinal Tomko does not.

“Evangelisation is a rich and complex reality. It includes personal witness, dialogue, human promotion, inculturation and especially proclamation,” he said. - CNS

1985: Doctrinal congregation releases 1984 letter ordering Father Schillebeeckx to affirm only ordained priests can consecrate the Eucharist, issues warning against book by Brazilian liberation theologian, Franciscan Father Leonardo Boff, who has tried to fuse Marxism with the Gospel. In four trips abroad Pope John Paul visits 15 countries. He says belief in God and evolutionary theory can be compatible. His mediation of Beagle Channel dispute ends with signing of a new Argentine-Chilean accord. New Vatican document says how Jews and Judaism should be presented in Catholic preaching and catechesis. New concordat with Italy replaces Lateran Treaty, updating church-state relations in Italy. Pope issues encyclical on Sts Cyril and Methodius, “Apostles of the Slavs." He calls widespread abortion in Europe “demographic suicide." He presides over extraordinary Synod of Bishops called to review state of Church 20 years after Vatican II. He convenes Council of Cardinals and plenary assembly of Cardinals to discuss restructuring of Roman Curia.

Pope John Paul II is welcomed by locals during a visit to Casablanca in 1985.

Photo:CNS/Reuters

Morroccan dancers and musicians perform in honour of the papal visit.

Photo:CNS/Reuters

A great pair

The simultaneous celebration of the 25th anniversary of the election of Pope John Paul II and the beatification of Mother Teresa of Calcutta is a wonderful reminder of just how blessed we have been in these modern days.

They make a great pair, these two, a remarkable demonstration of the power of God’s presence in the human person.

In a world awash with war and the slaughter of babies, corrupted by false values incessantly peddled through the means of mass communication, these two have risen to the pinnacle of world consciousness for the sheer force of the goodness of God within them.

Each has challenged the modern world in all its errors and have proved themselves more powerful.

Separately and together they have demonstrated that sanctity is possible in all ages and all environments, and that it is a vastly better answer to human needs than any other.

Pope John Paul is widely known for his missionary journeys, but Mother Teresa is no less a world traveller, carrying miracles of grace and conversion with her wherever she went.

Personally called by Jesus to live among the poor and to live like the poor in the slums of Calcutta, the generosity of her response produced such outpourings of God’s grace that not only did she become a world figure, but her sisters have now circled the globe.

In contradiction of a wealthseeking world, Mother Teresa now has more than 4500 nuns dedicated to her way of life in 123 countries, and unknown thousands of volunteers.

Just as the Pope’s unwavering commitment to justice, peace and the truth of human freedom saw him acknowledged as the major force in the peaceful collapse of the Iron Curtain in Europe

and the Soviet Union, so the integrity of Mother Teresa’s life brought a remarkable break in the rigid caste system that has bedevilled India for millennia.

While she in her human way thought to start her work with European nuns, Jesus told her that he wanted Indian nuns to bring him Indian souls (see conversations published in The Record , December 26, 2002 and January 2, 2003).

She obeyed, and the caste system lost its grip as women from the highest caste to the lowest came to work with her in service of the most untouchable of all Untouchables.

The Missionaries of Charity, therefore, are a large-scale demonstration that the love of Jesus is more powerful than even the most entrenched social taboos.

Meanwhile, John Paul II and Mother Teresa have dedicated themselves to personal holiness as the foundation of their work, and have called all of us to the same path.

Mo ther Teresa repeatedly told her Sisters that they could not do the work Jesus wanted them to do unless they gave first priority to their personal relationship with him. The Eucharist and prayer remain the first priority of the Missionaries of Charity.

The Pope and Mother Teresa have shown us by their lives that grace floods into the world if only we turn to Jesus and Mary. There have been great popes and great saints, but these two have the immediacy of having shared in our lives.

They have lived in the whirlwind of our times and they have sanctified it. It is both joyous and portentous that this Pope should be the one to beatify his friend and collaborator.

Together, they have shown us that our king, the one who was crowned with thorns, has a power that no one else can match, the power of his love that he invites all of us to share in. - Editorial

Meeting the man

Meeting the Pope can

be just as awesome for a bishop as for a lay man or woman

By Archbishop Barry Hickey

One of the privileges of being a Bishop is that one must visit the Holy Father every five years.

It is called the "Ad Limina" (literally "To the Threshold") visit.

At that visit each Bishop sees the Pope personally for about 15 to 20 minutes and is able to discuss with him anything at all. The purpose of the visit is to present a report on the Diocese and to affirm the unity of all the Bishops with the Bishop of Rome.

As Bishop of Rome the Pope sees his Bishops as brothers, with himself as Peter. This is the unity Christ wanted among his Disciples and it is the unity he wants today

among their successors. I have seen the Pope not only on the Ad Limina visits but on other occasions as well. Perhaps the most contact I have ever had with him was during the Synod of Oceania in 1998 when the Pope attended sessions of the Synod every day for a number of hours. I was seated one up from him and often spoke to him between sessions.

There was and still is a sense of awe in me when speaking to the Pope because of what he represents and who he is. I become aware that the position he holds as Head of the Church on earth was given to us by Jesus himself when he gave St Peter "the power of the keys".

Nevertheless the Pope tries to put us at ease. He sees us as brother Bishops of the Bishop of Rome and always makes time to see us.

When I see him privately he

“ T h e r e w a s a n d s t i l l i s a s e n s e o f a w e i n

m e w h e n s p e a k i n g t o t h e P o p e b e c a u s e o f w h a t h e r e p r e s e n t s a n d w h o h e i s . . . N e v e r t h e l e s s t h e P o p e t r i e s t o p u t u s a t e a s e ”

speaks to me in English. He asks about the Diocese, and offers advice if I ask it. I spoke to him once about the youth and how to hold them in the Church, knowing that he has a particular affinity with young people. I can't use the excuse that I am too old to relate to young people because he has an extraordinary rapport with the young even though he is much older than me. Age doesn't matter apparently. He suggested I look at France where great numbers of young people are flocking to the Church, very loyal and joyful in their acceptance of

the Christian Way of life in a very materialistic and secular culture. There are signs, small at present but clearly discernible that we can expect such a revival here too.

The Pope comes across as completely authentic, full of faith, holy and uncompromising in his support of Catholic truth. His courage is evident in his writings, his speeches and in his call to world leaders to submit to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

This is my personal impression of this unique figure, a father, guide and spiritual tower of strength.

New pastoral urges policy makers to put the Child first

Archbishop Hickey has issued a pastoral letter for the Churches Year of the Child calling all politicians and policy makers to put children first when formulating laws which affect society

The Archbishop identified three main areas where children are being badly damaged.

Firstly, parental drug abuse, which affects the parents’ ability to care for their children.

Secondly, he identi-

fied family breakdown. He wrote of the need to treasure the family and place children’s needs first.

Finally, he wrote of the Refugee Detention Centres, which he stated were “no place for children.”

He concluded with a thank you to all parents for their love and self sacrifice.

The full text of the Archbishop’s pastoral letter can be found on Page 15

Archbishop Barry Hickey greets John Paul II at the 1998 Synod of Bishops of Oceania, held in Rome.

Photo:Vatican

25 years of memories

From left to right: Father Karol Wojtyla pictured reading in a kayak in 1955; Pope John Paul II prays at the Hill of Crosses in Siauliai, Lithuania, in September 1993; Pope John Paul II blesses a cheering crowd during an outdoor Mass in Bratislava, Slovakia, on September 14, 2003.

From left: Pope John Paul II prays the rosary on October 7, 2003 at the Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin Mary of the Holy Rosary, Pompeii, Italy; The Pope is silhouetted against a sunny background; The newly elected Pope greets onlookers at the Vatican in 1978.

From left: A koala clings to Pope John Paul II as the pontiff addresses journalists in Brisbane, Australia, in 1986; Pope John Paul II appears on the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica after being elected to the papacy on October 16, 1978.

From left: John Paul II prays at the Wailing Wall, the holy site of Judaism, in Jerusalem on March 26, 2000; A crowd gathers around the Pope near the Oaxaca cathedral in February, 1979.

Pictures from Catholic News Service

The great Christian

In 25 years, the Pope has shaped events - and inspired millions

By John Thavis

As Pope John Paul II celebrates 25 years in office, the world is taking stock of a pontificate that has helped shape political events, set new directions for the Catholic Church and offered spiritual inspiration to millions of people around the globe.

By any measure, this is a papacy for the ages.

Since his election on October 16, 1978, Pope John Paul has delivered more speeches, met with more world leaders, canonised more saints and kissed more babies than any previous pontiff.

Visiting 129 countries — from the steppes of Asia to the Rocky Mountains — he has implemented the church’s own form of globalisation.

And in more than 50 major documents, on themes ranging from economics to the rosary, he has brought the Gospel and Church teachings to bear on nearly every aspect of modern life.

Everyone agrees this pope already has left a moral legacy, inside and outside the church.

But the pope also has weathered his share of disappointments in recent years, including the US clerical sex abuse scandal, the ecumenical rupture with Russian Orthodox leaders, legislative defeats on pro-life issues in many countries and the frustration of not being able to visit Russia and China.

Vatican officials are focusing on the accomplishments, but are going out of their way to make sure the anniversary celebration does not take on the tone of a retirement party.

“The Pope still has an important message to deliver, and people are listening — perhaps more than ever,” Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said in an interview with Catholic News Service.

“He is the only global leader who is worried about the spiritual well-being of today’s men and women, as opposed to their material wellbeing. He asks, ‘Who are you?’ instead of ‘What

do you want to do?’ or ‘What do you want to buy?’ And people understand this and respond to it,” he said. For papal biographer George Weigel, the Pope has had tremendous impact on the world and the church precisely because “he’s been the great Christian witness of our time, the man who has most persuasively embodied the liberating power of Christian faith.”

“That had concrete, measurable political results in east central Europe in the revolution of 1989; but it has also had an immeasurable impact on innumerable lives throughout the world,” Weigel told CNS.

As the analyses and accolades rolled in ahead of the 25th anniversary celebration, the Pope was busy keeping a low profile. He purposely upstaged himself by scheduling the beatification of Mother Teresa of Calcutta for October 19 — a Sunday that falls between the anniversary of his election and his inaugural Mass.

So far, the Pope has avoided great retrospective speeches or documents. In fact, he has spoken more about Mary, to whom he’s dedicated this year in a special way, than about his own accomplishments.

At 83, he is frail and hobbled by Parkinson’s disease and other ailments. Buy many at the Vatican believe the Pope’s infirmities have added a new dimension to his message.

“When the Mass is celebrated by someone in his condition, the sacrifice of Christ becomes even more evident,” Cardinal Jozef Tomko, a longtime friend and retired Vatican official, said in an interview with CNS.

“What comes through is a deep spirituality and the acceptance of his limitations. I think in these conditions he is winning even more people to Christ than before,” Cardinal Tomko said.

The first non-Italian pontiff in 455 years, Pope John Paul II declared early on that the Second Vatican Council had set his agenda. In particular, his global ministry quickly focused on Vatican II’s engagement of modern culture.

At the teaching level, the Pope has penned three major encyclicals on economic and social justice issues and has addressed the rich-poor imbalance continent-by-continent in post-synodal documents.

Over the last 10 years, he also has authored

three other encyclicals that strongly challenge what he sees as a prevailing moral relativism in post-modern society. Veritatis Splendor spoke of the truth of the Church’s moral teachings, Evangelium Vitae defended the inviolability of human life against what the Pope calls a “culture of death,” and Fides et Ratio argued that human reason cannot be detached from faith in God.

Meanwhile, under his guidance, Vatican agencies have issued important instructions on such specific questions as foreign debt, in vitro fertilisation, the arms industry, the role of the mass media and the impact of the Internet.

Through all these pronouncements runs a central theme: that human freedom becomes destructive when people forget they are created in God’s image. Whether an unborn child,

an impoverished African or an elderly shut-in, the Pope says, every human being has a value that goes beyond earthly advantages and accomplishments.

While pushing Catholic teaching into virtually every area of modern life, the Pope also has taken the measure of the Church’s past mistakes. At his insistence, the Church acknowledged historical errors in condemning 16thcentury astronomer Galileo Galilei, in participating in European religious wars, and even in its missionary approach in some New World territories.

Against considerable resistance within his own Vatican hierarchy, the Pope commissioned critical studies on the Church’s role in the Inquisition and the Crusades and on the failings of Christians during the Holocaust.

witness of our time

On an interreligious level, Pope John Paul has reached out in ways that were once considered impossible or even heretical. In 1986 he visited a Jewish synagogue in Rome, then in 2000 prayed at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem — a gesture that won the hearts of many Jews worldwide.

In Syria, he became the first Pope to visit a mosque, and in Morocco he spoke to thousands of cheering Muslim youths.

mation,” said Navarro-Valls, the Vatican spokesman.

As a teacher of the faith, the Pope has been exhaustive, demanding and authoritative. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is his longest document and will no doubt be seen as one of the great accomplishments of this pontificate; a shorter compendium of Church teaching is also in the works.

The Pope brooks no dissent against essential

“ W h a t c o m e s t h r o u g h i s a d e e p s p i r i t u a l i t y a n d t h e a c c e p t a n c e o f h i s l i m i t a t i o n s I t h i n k i n t h e s e c o n d i t i o n s h e i s w i n n i n g e v e nm o r e p e o p l e t o C h r i s t t h a n b e f o r e , ” C a r d i n a l T o m k o s a i d .

Twice he convened leaders of other religions and other churches for prayer meetings in Assisi, where participants denounced all acts of war and terrorism carried out in the name of religion.

Within the church, the Pope has been no less dynamic. He has disciplined dissenting theologians and self-styled “traditionalists,” promulgated a new Code of Canon Law, issued new directives calling for clearer Catholic identity in church universities, and defended with the full weight of his authority the church’s all-male priesthood.

Some critics have said that in dealing with inthe-field church problems, the Pope’s management style is too detached. They cited the clerical sex abuse crisis as an example of where the pontiff should have called bishops and others to closer accountability.

Vatican officials reject that criticism, pointing out that the Pope has several times pronounced prophetically against sex abuse and other moral failings by church ministers. The Pope’s job is not to pore over dossiers but to set clear directions, they say.

“This is not a pontificate that acts in a crisis management style. He goes beyond crisis management, to the root of the problem. And in the case of sex abuse, the real problem is in for-

or ‘core’ Church teaching and the Gospel, and in a 1998 document he invoked penalties against Catholics who reject the Church’s wide range of “definitive” positions, including those on human sexuality.

That has prompted criticism by some groups of laity and theologians, especially in Europe and the United States, who are still racing to catch up with his Theology of the Body (see Page 17).

While supporting Vatican II’s promotion of the laity in the church, the Pope has warned against confusing the roles of lay Catholics and ordained priests. He has supported organisations which focus on the universal call to holiness like Opus Dei, which has grown in influence.

As opposed to analyses of the Church which interpret it based on models of power-sharing, Pope John Paul has proposed models of holiness to the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics. He has canonised more than 470 people from dozens of countries and beatified more than 1,300 — including the first lay couple.

At the 25-year mark, the Pope’s record on ecumenism contains a long list of agreements, joint declarations and mutual gestures of good will, especially with some ancient Eastern churches.

But as common ground has been staked out among the churches, the remaining obstacles have stood in even higher relief. The Vatican’s clear injunction against shared Eucharist with Protestant churches may seem arbitrary to some critics, but the Pope views it as a painful reminder of the distance yet to travel in ecumenical dialogue.

In recent years, relations with the Russian Orthodox Church have sharply deteriorated as a result of the Pope’s determination to rebuild Catholic communities in Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe. Surely one of the Pope’s biggest disappointments after 25 years has been the failure to visit Moscow, which he would undertake only with the Orthodox Church’s blessing.

Pope John Paul’s pontificate is the fourthlongest in history, and perhaps more than any of his predecessors he has shaped the hierarchy. He has named more than three-fourths of the world’s active bishops and 96 per cent of the cardinals who will elect his successor.

During his papacy, the Church has expanded greatly in Africa and made significant advances in Asia and Oceania. This distinctly Third World tilt has been spotlighted during the Pope’s more than 100 foreign trips, when he has used local customs in his liturgies, spoken the native language and praised indigenous writers and thinkers.

But the trips have enormous missionary objectives, as well. While respectful of the nonCatholic or non-Christian majorities along his itinerary, the Pope has always presented the figure of Christ and the Gospel message to any and all of his listeners.

That’s in keeping with the Pope’s conviction that while all people can be saved Christ is the unique Saviour for all people — a point made forcefully in the his document Dominus Jesus which emphasised proclamation of Christ over dialogue.

Visiting India in 1999, the Pope delineated the Church’s approach on the Asian continent, where he predicted “a great harvest of faith” in the years to come. He praised his hosts’ nonChristian spiritual traditions but also preached the Gospel, and said the best way for Christians to evangelise was by living the

Gospel values. As the Pope has aged, his rapport with young people has remained consistently — and sometimes amazingly — fresh and energetic. World Youth Day celebrations, like the last one in Toronto in 2002, seem to bring out the Pope’s good humour and vigour. He jokes more easily with the young, but there is a serious side to all this, too.

Papal biographer Weigel, who has attended the youth day celebrations and spoken extensively on Catholic college campuses, said it is striking how young people welcome the Pope’s challenge “not to settle for anything less than the religious and moral grandeur that they’re capable of, under grace.”

“He’s had a tremendous impact on the young, not by pandering to them, but by holding the bar of expectation high, all the time letting them know that he loves them and that Christ loves them,” Weigel said.

As the years of this pontificate roll by, the encyclicals and teaching documents have become fewer and the speeches shorter. Those close to him say the Pope has clearly not run out of things to say, however — he’s just saying them in different ways.

“At the start of the 21st century, the Pope continues to open people up to the transcendent, telling them that we’re more than genetics, we’re more than psychology, we’re more than DNA,” said Navarro-Valls, the Vatican spokesman.

This is a message that is resonating with Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, he said.

The Pope is also finding time for more reflective writing.

Earlier this year, he published a small book of poetry, meditations that were inspired by the Sistine Chapel frescoes.

As his 25th anniversary approached, the Pope was in the final phase of writing a book on his 20 years as a bishop in Poland. He authored a similar volume in 1996 on his life as a priest, an intensely personal review of the spiritual path that eventually led to the papacy. -CNS

Photos: Snapshots from the life of John Paul II

Photos:CNS/Reuters

Over the years JPII 1986-1988

1986: In four trips Pope John Paul visits nine countries; by end of year he has made 32 foreign trips in eight years as pope. He convenes a summit of Brazilian bishops to address pastoral issues there. He caps a recent series of denunciations of the “inhumanity" of apartheid by calling South Africa's policy a “deplorable system." He breaks major new ground in Catholic relations with Jews and world religions, becoming first pope since apostolic times to visit the Rome synagogue in April and convening a gathering of world religious leaders in October in Assisi to pray for peace. He warns theologians if they propagate dissent from Church moral teaching they violate the “fundamental right" of Catholics to learn Church doctrine. Vatican tells US Father Charles Curran, moral theologian, he can no longer teach as a Catholic theologian. Doctrinal congregation instruction condemns homosexual activity. Vatican limits authority of Seattle Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, assigning him an auxiliary with special powers. Pope issues his fifth encyclical, on the Holy Spirit. He forms a commission to write a universal Catholic catechism.

1987: Pope visits eight countries in four trips. He announces Marian Year starting in June and issues encyclical on Mary, mother of the Redeemer. Vatican justice and peace office issues document on ethical issues of international debt. Doctrinal congregation issues instruction on procreation and beginning-of-life issues. Pope meets with Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, sparking Jewish protests; that and other controversies lead to a top-level VaticanJewish meeting to seek solutions. Pope presides over world Synod of Bishops, on laity, setting the stage in preceding months with a series of talks on the role of the laity in the church and world.

1988: He writes his second social encyclical, “On Social Concerns." In an apostolic letter on women he defends women's equality but reaffirms that they cannot be ordained priests. He guides extraordinary Vatican efforts to reconcile dissident traditionalist Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre before the archbishop incurs excommunication in June by illegally ordaining other bishops; Pope then sets up a special commission to promote reconciliation with any Lefebvre followers who may seek a return to the Church. He issues new legislation restructuring the Roman Curia. Among his four trips abroad, visiting 11 countries, is a trip to Strasbourg, France, to meet with the European Parliament, Council of Europe and European Human Rights Commission and Court. Capping years of tough diplomacy, he names first new bishops for Czechoslovakia in more than a decade.

The great communicator

Pope John Paul II has seen the media’s importance - and used it.

By John Thavis

Pope John Paul II has been called a great communicator and, more than any previous pontiff, he's earned the reputation.

From the Internet to recorded prayers, this Pope has employed a variety of modern media to reach people in every corner of the globe.

A former actor, his TV presence was apparent even on the night of his election, when he gave a short but stirring speech that spelled out the overriding goals of his papacy and his own sense of inspiration.

In the months and years that followed, he has exploited other channels of communication to offer personal reflections, diplomatic counsel and doctrinal pronouncements.

He is the only Pope to have published a book of poetry, recorded his own rosary CD or sent an apostolic letter to bishops via e-mail.

"He's remarkable. He recognises that the Church has to be in the media. For example, he was the one who established

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the Vatican Television Centre in 1983," said Archbishop John Foley, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.

Archbishop Foley said it is clear from the Pope's personal encounters with journalists, actors and producers that "he likes communicators."

"I think a lot of that comes from his own work in theatre years ago," the Archbishop said.

By placing his pontificate on the world stage, the Pope has opened up the papacy and the Vatican in a way that probably will endure well beyond his pontificate, Archbishop Foley said.

"He is emphatic on desiring the Church to be credible, and he himself has said the church should be a house of glass. So I don't think you can roll back that particular policy," he said.

The Pope has given thousands of speeches and issued hundreds of documents ranging from book-length encyclicals to more personal letters addressed to the world's elderly, women, children and priests. His "complete teachings" to date fill 46 thick volumes, far more than any of his predecessors.

After 25 years, the Pope's major teaching and pastoral documents include 14 encyclicals, 13 apostolic exhortations,

11 apostolic constitutions, 42 apostolic letters and 28 documents issued "motu proprio" (on his own initiative).

The Pope has given myriad press conferences, most of them aboard the planes taking him and journalists on foreign trips, and he's also given several book-length interviews. The most popular, Crossing the Threshold of Hope , became a best seller in 1994.

He penned a volume of reflections on his vocation to the priesthood in 1995 and this year has been working on a similar autobiographical meditation on his years as a bishop.

He wrote plays in his younger years, and as pope has seen two of them, The Jeweller's Shop and Brother of Our God , transformed into feature-length films.

About a year ago he became the first Pope to agree to the publication of his private letters with a Polish friend, written over a 50-year period.

In the 1990s, CDs of the Pope reciting the rosary sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

The Pope followed those with another CD on the Sony label, featuring his prayers, chants and inspirational talks. His voice has been heard on dial-a-prayer services in the United States, and his quotes

“He's remarkable. He recognises that the Church has to be in the media.”

now pop up as cell-phone text messages to subscribers in Italy and Ireland. Once he called into an Italian radio talk show and offered a brief greeting.

At times he has composed prayers and spiritual messages- often on a Marian theme -and read them to the world. For years, his annual Christmas and Easter addresses "urbi et orbi" (to the city of Rome and to the world) have been written in poetic form. His book of poems, Roman Triptych published earlier this year, included more personal reflections on this world and the world to come.

The Pope does not have a great voice, especially these days, but every now and then he uses song to make connections to his audience.

When he starts singing Polish mountain songs during Vatican encounters with pilgrims, it's not long before his compatriots join in.

Although he's never really used a computer, Pope John Paul has presided over an Internet explosion at the Vatican. Today, the Pope reaches millions via the Vatican Web site, www.vatican.va, and earlier this year he was flooded with birthday wishes sent to his temporary e-mail address - another papal first. -CNS

Despite frailties, Pope closes in on third spot for longest papacies

Pope John Paul II's pontificate is the fourth-longest in church history and is closing in on No. 3. When he was elected in October 1978, the College of Cardinals was hoping for longevity after the 34-day papacy of Pope John Paul I. A quarter of a century later, the Polish-born pontiff is still at the church's helm and seems determined to stay there, despite increasing frailty and infirmity.

Next March, the pope will surpass the papacy of Pope Leo XIII, who ruled for 25 years and five months, 1878-1903.

Pope Pius IX's papacy was second-longest: 31 years, seven months and three weeks, from 1846 to 1878. Pope John Paul would surpass that in May 2010 - shortly after his 90th birthday.

By tradition, the church's longest pontificate was that of St Peter, the first Pope. Historians have established no official dates of his papacy, but he is believed to have reigned between 34 and 37 years.

The Pope's move up the list of longest pontificates has prompted long articles in the Italian press. The Pope seems less interested and has avoided public comment about such milestones. - CNS

Pope John Paul II prays during Mass in St Peter’s Basilica, Rome.

Photo:CNS/Reuters

The young pope was vibrant and energised by the crowds. But he was also a teacher, and as his pontificate entered its second year, he began to publish profound encyclicals on some of the great problems facing the Church. Here, Pope John Paul warned the world’s nations to halt the arms race and end violations of human rights around the world.

“ M a n c a n n o t l i v e w i t h o u t l o v e ” Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it. This, as has already been said, is why Christ the Redeemer “fully reveals man to himself.”

Redemptor Hominis

(On Redemption and the Dignity of Man)

Given at Rome, at St Peter’s, on the fourth of March, the first Sunday of Lent, in the Year 1979, the 1st year of my Pontificate.

Over the years

JPII 1989-1992

Work was the daily expression of love in the life of the Family of Nazareth. The Gospel specifies the kind of work Joseph did in order to support his family: he was a carpenter. This simple word sums up Joseph’s entire life. For Jesus, these were hidden years, the years to which Luke refers after recounting the episode in the Temple: “And he went down with them to Nazareth and was obedient to them” (Luke 2:51).

Redemptoris Custos

(On the Person and Mission of St Joseph in the Life of Christ and the Church)

Given at Rome, in St Peter’s, on August 15 – the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary – in the Year 1989, the 11th of my Pontificate.

“Duc in altum!” – “Put out into the deep”. Pope John Paul II has chosen these words of Jesus as the watchword of the Church as she advances with a firm and confident step into the third millennium. Now he has shed new light on the Holy Rosary for us too, and has entrusted it to us as a priceless means of help as we venture forth into the “vast ocean” of the new millennium. By adding the five Luminous Mysteries the Holy Father has enriched our prayer life. The Rosary booklet contains all 20 mysteries as well as excerpts from the Holy Father’s apostolic letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae, scripture readings, meditations and prayers.

This booklet is intended not only for those who have already enjoyed a Christian upbringing, but also for all those who were deprived of this and are therefore unfamiliar with the great treasure that is the Rosary. This beautifully illustrated little booklet is now available fora donation of $3.00 (includes postage). Also available are the Papal Rosary beads. To obtain the Rosary booklet and the Vatican Rosary beads we ask fora donation of $15.00 (includes postage). All proceeds will go towards the work of Aid to the Church in Need for the persecuted and threatened Church worldwide.

Touch of Heaven

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1989: Pope John Paul issues an apostolic exhortation on the laity, reflecting the 1987 synod discussions. His four foreign trips take him to 13 countries. Responding to a public declaration by 163 European theologians accusing the pope and Roman Curia of abusing their authority, the pope says the church cannot tolerate theological dissent that takes the form of a “parallel or alternative magisterium." The pontifical justice and peace council issues the first Vatican document devoted entirely to the issue of racism. As free elections in Poland produce the first noncommunist government in the Warsaw Pact and democratisation begins to sweep through Eastern Europe, commentators seek to assess what influence the pope had in bringing about those changes. In December Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, whose openness and reform policies have permitted and accelerated the changes, meets with the pope and declares communist persecution of religion a mistake.

1990: Pope John Paul issues Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, the first general codification of church law for all Eastern-rite Catholics. He issues an apostolic constitution on Catholic higher education that sets worldwide norms for Catholic colleges and universities. His doctrinal congregation issues an instruction on the role of theologians in the church. He takes five trips abroad, visiting 12 countries. Freed of former government restrictions, pope begins naming new bishops to fill long-vacant dioceses of Eastern Europe and establishes diplomatic relations with several countries there. Top-level Catholic-Russian Orthodox commission is formed to resolve property and other disputes arising from revival of Ukrainian Catholicism. Vatican and Soviet Union establish diplomatic relations. Pope presides over Synod of Bishops on seminary formation and priestly life and ministry, reaffirms mandatory celibacy for priests.

1991: As Yugoslavia disintegrates, Pope John Paul speaks out repeatedly against civil warfare and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. He tries in vain to prevent war in the Persian Gulf. He issues two encyclicals, one calling the church to renew its missionary spirit, the other marking the 100th anniversary of papal social encyclicals with a commentary on the application of Catholic teaching to world political and economic systems. His world travels continue with four more trips - to Portugal; Poland; Poland (again) and Hungary; and Brazil. With rapid changes in Eastern Europe occupying his attention, he convenes a special Synod of Bishops on Europe to assess the church's role following communism's collapse in the region.

1992 : In three trips Pope John Paul visits Dominican Republic and five African countries. He sends Cardinal Ratzinger to Czechoslovakia to regularise situation of married bishops and priests secretly ordained during years of church persecution. He issues a new pastoral instruction on social communications and an apostolic exhortation on priestly formation. In July, at age 72, he has a benign tumour removed from his colon and returns to work after his summer vacation. In June he approves, and in July formally issues, the first universal “Catechism of the Catholic Church" in more than 400 years.

Over the years JPII 1993-1995

1993: Pope John Paul convenes another interreligious meeting in Assisi to pray for peace. His five foreign trips in 1993 cover 11 countries, including the United States in August for World Youth Day in Denver. Responding to a flurry of reports of clergy sexual abuse of minors, the Pope addresses the issue several times and, in a letter to US bishops, invokes Christ's words of woe to those who scandalise children. He issues “The Splendor of Truth," the first papal encyclical ever on fundamentals of moral theology. In November he suffers a shoulder separation in a fall down some steps.

1994: Pope John Paul convenes in Rome the first-ever synod of African bishops, which denounces the hatred and lust for power tearing apart African societies. He establishes a Pontifical Academy for Life comprised of 70 scientists and scholars. A broken leg and partial hip-replacement surgery in April forces postponements of trips to Sicily and Belgium and delays a meeting of the world's cardinals in Rome from May until June. He visits Croatia in September. In May he formally declares to world's bishops that Church cannot ordain women and this teaching must be “definitively held" by Catholics. He leads global campaign to get UN Conference on Population and Development in Cairo to do more to promote marriage and family life and fight contraception and abortion. Despite reliance on a cane, he attends every session of world Synod of Bishops on religious and consecrated life in October and in November visits Sicily, where he denounces Mafia. His November apostolic letter, “Tertio Millennio Adveniente" ("As the Third Millennium Draws Near"), sets agenda for Church reflection and renewal as it prepares for 2000. Vatican establishes full diplomatic relations with Israel and exchanges representatives with Palestine Liberation Organisation.

1995: Pope John Paul removes French Bishop Jacques Gaillot from his diocese for opposing official Church positions on issues like celibacy, women priests and use of condoms to prevent AIDS. Pope issues encyclical on the sacredness of all human life and one on ecumenism, in which he asks how a renewed papacy might serve as a ministry of unity for all Christians. In an apostolic letter on Eastern Christianity he seeks deeper Catholic-Orthodox relations. He takes six trips abroad to 12 countries. At age 75, he has now travelled abroad 68 times in his first 17 years as Pope. In Africa he publishes an apostolic exhortation on church and social issues. In joint statement he and Ecumenical Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople urge greater Catholic-Orthodox collaboration. As Fourth World Conference on Women approaches in Beijing, Pope John Paul writes letter to women apologising for past injustices in church. Vatican supports most of the conference's final documents but takes strong exception to sections promoting abortion and contraception. Amid Catholic signature campaigns in Europe urging married and women priests, doctrinal congregation strongly reaffirms Pope's 1994 statement against ordaining women; Vatican reprimands Irish Bishop Brendan Comiskey for saying celibacy should be discussed. Vatican Web site, www.vatican.va, is inaugurated with Pope's Christmas message, starting Internet age at Vatican.

Setting the pace

Theologians give JPII credit for encouraging exploration

By John Thavis

Despite a popular perception that Pope John Paul II has set strict limits on what is appropriate theological debate, three theologians in Rome give him credit for encouraging exploration of new areas, particularly in Catholic social teaching, morality and relations with non-Catholics.

Theological debate during the first 25 years of Pope John Paul's leadership of the church often took place in fairly public forums, reaching the masses through the news media, popular books and the Internet.

The Vatican's reaction to those who dissented from church teaching usually made headlines in the same public way.

Dominican Father Georges Cottier, theologian of the papal household and secretary of the International Theological Commission, said it is "not a fair assessment" to say Pope John Paul has restricted theological investigation.

"It is true that after the Second Vatican Council there was a crisis in theology, or rather, a crisis among some theologians who opposed the authority of the magisterium," the church's teaching authority, he said.

"If the object of theology is divine revelation transmitted through the church, I cannot act as if the Word of God did not exist and as if the ministry of Peter did not exist," Father Cottier said.

Dominican Father Augustine Di Noia, undersecretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said the "phenomenon of dissent" that began gathering steam during the pontificate of Pope Paul VI "was up and running" when Pope John Paul was elected in 1978. "John Paul II encountered a situation that was unprecedented in the history of the church: A fair number of the-

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ologians had identified themselves as being in conflict with the church on significant issues and he -- and Cardinal (Joseph) Ratzinger -- over the last 20 years have tried to chart a course to address that new problem," he said.

The priests agreed that, while Pope John Paul has set clear limits on what are acceptable positions on some issues, his teaching also has pointed out new avenues for theological investigation as well as new approaches to old questions.

Both pointed to the Pope's 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor as one of the most important documents in the 25 years of his papacy and as an attempt to meet Vatican II's call to make moral theology more pastoral. "What he does is challenge the whole law-centred, legalistic approach to moral theology and focuses again on becoming good," explaining that if the church teaches something is forbidden it does so because it is harmful to the

Pope John Paul II received a standing ovation from Italian legislators in November last year after becoming the first Pope to address the Italian Parliament. In his speech he urged Italians to preserve the country's Christian identity, work for world peace, reverse the country's dangerously slumping birth rate and reach out to prisoners, the poor and immigrants.

“The crisis of the birth rate," he said, is a "serious threat that weighs on the future of the country."

Italy has one of the lowest birth rates in the world - about 8.9 births per 1,000 inhabitants - and one of the oldest populations.

He said the statistic foretells inevitable human, social and economic problems for Italy's future.

He called for political initiatives to give incentives and legal protections to families and the institution of marriage, as well as greater emphasis on the importance of children's moral education.

The pope also asked for clemency for prisoners.

“What he does is challenge the whole law-centred, legalistic approach to moral theology and focuses again on becoming good..."

person, Father Di Noia said.

Father Cottier said, "This is one of the great aspects of the teaching of Pope John Paul II, his morality is the morality of the Beatitudes, of what is necessary for happiness and goodness, a reaffirmation of the importance of virtue."

In the list of popes who have systematically applied Catholic ethical considerations to modern social problems, Pope John Paul probably will be listed second only to Pope Leo XIII, usually credited with being the founder of Catholic social teaching.

Pope John Paul's attempts to improve Catholic-Jewish relations have gone beyond condemning anti-Semitism and trying to foster respect, they said. "All of his important gestures and words, including his recognition of the Jews as 'our elder brothers and sisters in the faith,' have put a new emphasis on and given a new stimulus to a Catholic theology of Israel," Father Cottier said.

"Christian-Jewish dialogue is really just beginning," he said. "We have much to discover, not only about the Jewish people, but about the meaning of Judaism for the church, and we owe this pope much for opening the path."

Father Cottier said that despite what may appear in the mass media as a campaign against theological innovation Pope John Paul knows how much the church needs theologians, their research and their scholarly debate.

"The church needs theologians because it can make pronouncements only after a long, in-depth reflection," he said.

The challenges of biomedical technology, terrorism and modern warfare and the role of the world's great religions in God's plan for salvation are "real problems, not abstractions. The problems of humanity are the problems of the church, and theologians must address them," Father Cottier said. - CNS

Pope John Paul II offers a blessing to pilgrims. Photo:CNS/Reuters

Naked without shame

The disastrous way in which Humanae Vitae was received presented the Church with a new Galileo crisis.

Characteristically,JPII blindsided so-called progressives and conservatives alike.

*By

George Weigel

When he was elected to the papacy, Karol Wojtyla knew that the Church's last effort to address the sexual revolution and its relationship to the moral life, Pope Paul's 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae had been a pastoral and catechetical disaster - however correct he thought it was on the specific question of the morally appropriate means of regulating fertility. Humanae Vitae's teaching on that question had been rejected by many Catholics around world.

Many felt that their experience of sexual love had been ignored or demeaned by their religious leaders. That feeling of rejection led to the conclusion that the Church had nothing of consequence to say about human sexuality.

Paul VI had no intention of demeaning marriage. But a situation had been created in which anything the Church had to say about human sexuality after the "birth control encyclical" was viewed with suspicion and, in some cases with active hostility.

Since the Sexual Revolution the definition of "freedom" was most hotly contested in the developed world, this communications chasm was a crisis of major proportions for the Church. The Church had not found a voice with which to address the challenge of the sexual revolution. John Paul thought that he and his

colleagues in Lublin and Krakow had begun to do that, in the understanding of human sexuality expressed in Love and Responsibility and in the work of the archdiocesan family life ministry under his leadership. Now it was time to deepen that analysis biblically and bring it to a world audience. The results were the 130 general audience addresses, spread over four years, that make up John Paul II's Theology of the Body.

The audiences took place in four clusters. The first, entitled Original Unity of Man and Woman, began on September 5, 1979, and included 23 catecheses, concluding with the general audience of April 2, 1980. Drawing its theme from a phrase in Christ's dispute with the Pharisees about the permissibility of divorce"Have you not read that He who made them from the beginning made them male and female..?"

(Matthew 19.4) - Original Unity explored some of the most profoundly personal aspects of the human condition through the story of Adam and Eve..

The second cluster of addresses, Blessed Are the Pure of Heart , began on April 16, 1980 and concluded on May 6, 1981, after 41 catecheses. As the title indicates, its biblical inspiration was the Sermon on the Mount. The Pope undertook a lengthy analysis of Christ's saying that "everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matthew 5.28) — a crucial text for resisting the kind of sexual utilitarianism that turns another person into an object.

The third cluster of audiences in John Paul's Theology of the Body began on November 11, 1981, and included 50 catecheses under the title The Theology of Marriage and Celibacy . The biblical foundation for this series, which concluded on July 4, 1984, was the dispute between Christ and the Sadducees about the res-

urrection. What, John Paul asks, does the idea of the "resurrection of the body" to a heaven in which "they neither marry nor are given in marriage" (Mark 12.23) tell us about our sexual embodiedness as male and female, here and now? The fourth and final cluster of 16 addresses, Reflections on Humanae Vitae, began on July 11, 1984, and concluded on November 28, 1984.

These texts did not make easy listening or reading. However, these texts repay careful study. In them, John Paul II, so often dismissed as "rigidly conservative," proposed one of the boldest reconfigurations of Catholic theology in centuries.

The Church and the world will be well into the twenty-first century, and perhaps beyond, before Catholic theology has fully assimilated the contents of those addresses. The Theology of the Body may exorcise the Manichaean demon and its deprecation of human sexuality from Catholic moral theology. Few moral theologians have taken our embodiedness as male and female as seriously as John Paul II. Few have dared push the Catholic sacramental intuition — the invisible manifest through the visible — quite as far as John Paul does in teaching that the self-giving love of sexual communion is an icon of the interior life of God. Few have dared say so forthrightly to the world, “Human sexuality is far greater than you imagine.” Few have shown more persuasively how recovering the dramatic structure of the moral life revitalises the ethics of virtue. John Paul’s Theology of the Body has ramifications for all of theology. It challenges us to think of sexuality as a way to grasp the essence of the human — and through that, to discern something about the divine. In the Theology of the Body, our being embodied as male and female “in the beginning” is a window into

the nature and purposes of the Creator God. Angelo Scola, rector of the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome, goes so far as to suggest that virtually every thesis in theology — God, Christ, the Trinity, grace, the Church, the sacraments — could be seen in a new light if theologians explored in depth the rich personalism implied in John Paul II’s theology of the body.

Few contemporary theologians have taken up the challenge implicit in this dramatic proposal. Fewer priests preach these themes. A very small percentage of the world’s Catholics even know that a “theology of the body” exists. Why? The density of John Paul’s material is one factor; a secondary literature capable of “translating” it is badly needed. The “canon” of Church controversies as defined by the media — birth control, abortion, divorce, women in Holy Orders — is also an obstacle to a real engagement with lohn Paul’s thought. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body is emphatically not made for the age of the 20-second sound-bite, or for a media environment in which every idea must be labelled “liberal” or “conservative.”

These 130 catechetical addresses, taken together, constitute a kind of theological time bomb set to go off, with dramatic consequences, sometime in the third millennium of the Church.

When that happens, perhaps in the 21st century, the Theology of the Body may well be seen as a critical moment not only in Catholic theology, but in the history of modern thought for 350 years, By insisting that the human subject is always an embodied subject whose embodiedness is critical to his or her self-understanding and relationship to the world. From that embodiedness, he helped enrich the modern understanding of freedom, of sexual love, and of the relationship between them.

Over the years

JPII 1996-1998

1996: In his annual January address to world's ambassadors to Vatican, Pope John Paul urges total ban on nuclear testing. In apostolic exhortation on consecrated life, he calls for greater decision-making roles by women religious. He calls for global ban on land mines and decries global economic inequities that cause urban slum growth. He suffers several bouts of fever during the year, is hospitalised in October to remove his appendix and shows noticeable hand tremors, provoking increasing rumours about his health. New speculation is provoked when he issues new papal election rules in February. In six trips he visits nine countries. In message to his Pontifical Academy of Sciences he calls evolution "more than a hypothesis," provoking new debates across conservative Christian denominations. He meets with head of Anglican Communion, expressing commitment to ecumenism despite division over women's ordination. In broadcast to China he asks Catholics in government-organised separate church to unite with those loyal to Rome. He marks 50th year as priest with a book, “Gift and Mystery."

1997: Pope makes six trips to six nations. He names St Therese of Lisieux a Doctor of the Church. He convenes Synod of Bishops for America - the second, after Africa, in a series of regional meetings to give new vitality and direction to the church for the millennium. As key themes for the millennium he sets out evangelisation, Christian unity and restoration of justice, with a special focus on relief of Third World debt in the jubilee year. His support of debt relief helps spark wide religious backing for that effort. His work to promote Catholic-Orthodox relations is set back when plans for a first-ever meeting with the patriarch of Moscow are rebuffed. He takes more active stance in intervening against executions of criminals and a revision in the “Catechism of the Catholic Church" repudiates capital punishment in all but the most exceptional circumstances. New Vatican-Israeli treaty spells out Church's legal status in Israel for first time.

1998: In four trips, Pope John Paul visits four countries, including Cuba, where he confronts President Fidel Castro on religious freedom. He writes an encyclical on faith and reason and an apostolic letter on the religious observance of Sunday. Devoting increasing attention to the coming millennium, he presides over two more regional synods of bishops - Asia in May and Oceania in December. In a papal bull declaring 2000 a holy year, he urges that it be marked by global action for justice as well as prayer and pilgrimages. He revises canon law to impose penalties on Catholics who persistently dissent from definitive Church teachings, and Vatican issues warnings or launches investigations against several theologians. His canonisation of Edith Stein, who was born Jewish, provokes controversy. New Vatican document acknowledges inadequacies in response of Church and individual Catholics to the Nazi Holocaust. Vatican and Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, form first permanent Catholic-Muslim dialogue.

*By George Weigel: Excerpts on Theology of the Body first appeared in Weigel’s Biography; Witness To Hope, 1999, pub. Harper Collins.

The Theology of the Body in Perth. Christopher West unveils the Pope’s timebomb to a Perth audience in March. Photo:Peter Rosengren

Over the years JPII 1999-2001 1991

1999: Pope John Paul's visits to seven countries in five trips include a Mexico-U.S. visit to publish his apostolic exhortation, “The Church in America." He warns against giving in to a culture of death and, in the US, gains clemency for a man about to be executed. He also intercedes unsuccessfully for several other US death-row inmates during the year. His 13-day visit to Poland is his seventh and longest since he became pope. A flu bout forces him to cancel a short visit to Armenia to visit the dying head of the Armenian Apostolic Church. His visit to Romania is the first ever to a predominantly Orthodox nation. On his November trip to India he publishes “The Church in Asia." He completes the Church's premillennial regional synods in October, presiding over the Synod of Bishops for Europe. In the former Soviet republic of Georgia, TV cameras capture images of his whole body shaking - the clearest public symptom yet of the presumed Parkinson's disease that is also exhibited in his shuffling gait, trembling hand, loss of facial expression and frequent slurring of words. Now 79, he marks the UN Year of the Older Person with a pastoral reflection, “Letter to the Elderly." On Christmas Eve he breaks open the Holy Door in St Peter's Basilica, formally opening the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000.

2000: In a year filled with papal public appearances for jubilee events, three stand out: his visit in March to Jerusalem, where millions are moved by his prayer at the Western Wall; his prayer service on the Day of Forgiveness, asking forgiveness of all those ever harmed in the name of the Church; and his celebration of Mass for an estimated 2 million people gathered in Rome for World Youth Day. Besides his Israeli visit, which includes stops in Jordan and Palestinian territories, the Pope goes to Egypt to meet the head of the Coptic Orthodox Church and to Fatima, Portugal, to beatify Francisco and Jacinta Marta, two of the three children who saw visions of Mary there in 1917. At the end of the beatification Mass, the Vatican releases the third secret of Fatima, a vision of the gunning down of a “bishop clothed in white," which Vatican officials interpret as the 1981assassination attempt on Pope John Paul. His canonisations include an American, St Katharine Drexel, and 120 Chinese martyrs - drawing protests from the Chinese government because many were killed in the Boxer Rebellion. He condemns Dutch legislation allowing homosexuals to marry and calls the holding of World Gay Pride 2000 in Rome an affront to the Church and the Jubilee year. He also condemns British and US decisions to allow destruction of human embryos for use of their stem cells.

2001: Pope John Paul issues apostolic letter on the new millennium, formally closing Jubilee year 2000 and setting out a vision for the Church's future. In February he creates 44 new cardinals - setting records for most named at one time, most overall (184) and most eligible to vote for a new pope (135). He also convenes special consistory of cardinals, the first in seven years, to lay out pastoral priorities at the start of the new millennium. In three trips abroad he visits six countries. In Greece he apologises for historical wrongs to Orthodox Christians by Catholics. In Syria he becomes first pope to visit a mosque and urges Christian-Jewish-Muslim cooperation for a Middle Eastern peace. In Ukraine he honours all Christians who suffered under Communism. In Kazakstan, two weeks after Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in United States, he warns that “religions must never be used as a reason for conflict." He issues apostolic exhortation on the Church in Oceania and presides over another world Synod of Bishops, on the bishop's role in the Church.

“ T h e R i g h t t o L i f e ”

In 1991 the Soviet Union was dissolved – on Christmas Day. In 1991, the first gulf War was fought and in 1991 the Pope wrote his powerful encyclical Centesimus Annus , seeking to outline a way for the world’s peoples to develop a civilisation of “solidarity.”

Following the collapse of Communist totalitarianism… today we are witnessing a predominance… of the democratic ideal, together with lively attention to and concern for human rights. But for this very reason it is necessary for peoples in the process of reforming their systems to give democracy an authentic and solid foundation through the explicit recognition of those rights. Among the most important of these rights, mention must be made of the right to life, an integral part of which is the right of the child to develop in the mother’s womb from the moment of conception; the right to live in a united family and in a moral environment conducive to the growth of the child’s personality; the right to develop one’s intelligence and freedom in seeking and knowing the truth…

Centesimus Annus

(0n the 100th Anniversary of Rerum Novarum)

Given in Rome, at Saint Peter’s on May 1, the Memorial of Saint Joseph the Worker, in the year 1991, the 13th of my Pontificate.

1996

“ L i v e i n H a r m o n y ”

1992

“ G u a r d P r i e s t s i n Y o u r H e a r t ”

In her internal life, the Church from the 1960’s to the 1990’s had suffered numerical losses with the departure of thousands of priests and nuns from religious life. Feeling that priests needed to be shepherds during this rapidly secularising modern age, John Paul wrote Pastores Dabo Vobis (“I will give you shepherds”) on the priestly vocation.

OMother of Christ, to the Messiah-priest you gave a body of flesh through the anointing of the Holy Spirit for the salvation of the poor and the contrite of heart; guard priests in your heart and in the Church, O Mother of the Saviour.

Pastores Dabo Vobis

(On the Formation of Priests in the Circumstances of the Present Day). Given in Rome, at St. Peter’s on March 25, the Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord, in the year 1992, the 14th of my Pontificate.

In 1996, Pope John Paul celebrated the 50th Anniversary of his ordination as a priest(1946-1996). Later during a kayaking trip, he was called to Warsaw for the announcement that he was to be made a bishop. In 1978, then-Cardinal Wojtyla was elected Pope and took the name John Paul II.

I , John Paul, servus sevorum Dei, venture to make my own the words of the apostle Paul, whose martyrdom, together with that of the apostle Peter, has bequeathed to this See of Rome the splendor of its witness, and I say to you m the faithful of the Catholic Church, and to you my brothers and sisters of the other Churches and Ecclesial Communities:”Mend your ways, encourage one another; live in harmony, and the God of love and peace will be with you….The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all”(2 Cor 13:11,13).

Ut Unum Sint

(On Ecumenism) Given in Rome, at Saint Peter’s on May 25, the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord, in the year 1995, the 17th of my Pontificate.

During and following the Holy Year of 2000, John Paul made very clear that one of his priorities was reconciling Christians, fostering Christian unity. For this reason, he visited Greece in May, but was met by Greek Orthodox protests. In June he visited the Ukraine, angering the Russian Orthodox. So his ecumenical efforts were many, but the results seemed disappointing.

The Risen Jesus accompanies us on our way and enables us to recognise him, as the disciples of Emmaus did, “in the breaking of the bread” (Luke 24:35). May he find us watchful, ready to recognise his face and run to our brothers and sisters with the good news: “We have seen the Lord!” (John 20:25).

This will be the much desired fruit of the Jubilee of the Year 2000, the Jubilee which has vividly set before our eyes once more the mystery of Jesus of Nazareth, the son of God and the Redeemer of man.

Novo Millennio Ineunte

(At he Close of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000)

From the Vatican, on January 6, the Solemnity of the Epiphany, in the year 2001, the 23rd of my Pontificate.

The year 2001 also brought the tragic events of September 11. The promise of the 1990s – a world without “blocs” set intransigently against one another – seemed to be collapsing. The Pope cried out, “Evil shall not have the final word.” But the times seemed ominous.

Put the Child first

This year is the Churches Year of the Child. Agreement was reached among many Christian Churches around Australia to participate in this Year of the Child by promoting initiatives within their own communion for the spiritual and social welfare of children.

Many parishes have already highlighted this Year and made children especially welcome in their ranks.

On Wednesday October 22 Bishop Don Sproxton will celebrate Children's Mission Day Mass in Good Shepherd Church, Lockridge, at which representatives of Catholic schools from throughout the Archdiocese will be present.

The care of children is of paramount importance for the Church as it is also for society. We belong to both and must therefore take a keen interest in what the Church and society can do for children and their families.

Pope John Paul II said in Familiaris Consortio:

"By fostering and exercising a tender and strong concern for every child that comes into this world, the Church fulfills a fundamental mission: for she is called upon to reveal and put forward anew in history the example and the commandment of Christ the Lord, who placed the child at the heart of the Kingdom of God: Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven."

The Church's love for children is expressed in the delight of parishes in their young families, in its Sacred Liturgy where children are included and blessed, in the joy of First Holy Communion, in the vast system of Catholic schools that offer education to children of all ages, and in its special care for those children with special needs who radiate in a unique way the love of God.

We are told by Jesus to learn trust, simplicity and joy from children, because unless we become like them we will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

We want society too to show great love for children and to care for them and their families so that they may grow up healthy and happy.

Sadly this is not always the case. It is timely to raise a number of serious concerns in this Year of the Child and to make our voice heard.

The public needs to know what is happening to children today and demand action. We know now that if a child has an abusive or disturbed upbringing that child is likely to have psychological and behavioural problems that tend to be long lasting. This must be taken very seriously by our decision makers.

Jesus was angry at those who abused children, calling down terrible punishment on them. We too need to be vigilant about the welfare of children and protest loudly about their mistreatment.

On this celebration of the Churches' Year of the Child I would like to highlight three areas where children

are being badly damaged.

Parental Drug Abuse Over the past few years the numbers of children being placed in foster or residential care has risen by 40%. This puts enormous strain on the government and private agencies that have to deal with family problems and find suitable care for them. The main reason for this steep rise, according to the research, is parental drug abuse.

Because drugs badly affect parents' ability to care for their children, and put enormous financial and emotional strains on the family, children are neglected and families break down. Intervention by authorities often leads to the removal of the children for their own protection.

This problem needs to be highlighted and the problem of drug abuse given high priority. Once an addiction is established, it is extremely hard to break. Yet further action needs to be taken to get parents the help they need, spiritual as well as psychological.

The danger of drugs to family stability and child welfare needs as much publicity as the campaign against smoking - with even greater resources provided. We cannot stand by while children are damaged, probably for life.

Family Breakdown

Happily gone are the welfare theorists who used to attack family life as an unjust social system, a prison for women and an unhealthy place for children. People have come to their senses to realise that the family is the ideal place

and call for all young children in such detention centres to be released with their parents or carers and allowed to live in a normal suburban setting.

The Government's reluctant release of some children is welcome but is not enough. It is sad that such an obvious humanitarian action has to be made under pressure from the Family Court and is now in the High Court of Australia on appeal from the Government. Common humanity should have been reason enough to release them.

I welcome the response of the Bishops of South Australia to the release of some children from the Baxter Centre and for the willingness of their Catholic agencies to look after them. The Church around Australia is ready to respond in similar fashion if the children are released from other Centres.

R E A L P O L I C I E S

“ A

t r u e f a m i l y p o l i c y a f f e c t s h o u s i n g , e m p l o y m e n t , h e a l t h c a r e , n e i g hb o u r h o o d d e s i g n , e d uc a t i o n , p s y c h o l o g i c a l a d j u s t m e n t a n d s p i r i t ua l g r o w t h

for human satisfaction and the proper rearing of children, even though that ideal is, unfortunately, far from the reality of every family.

The family must be treasured by governments, society and the churches. All have a role to play in resourcing families to do their noble task well. A true family policy affects housing, employment, health care, neighbourhood design, education, psychological adjustment and spiritual growth.

Studies have shown that family breakdown has a powerful and detrimental impact on children of the marriage. The 1995 Western Australian Child Health Survey found a link between mental health problems in children and family structure, with children from single parent families at particular risk, especially when combined with depression and other emotional problems.

The current easy acceptance of unstable "de facto" unions does not make life easier for children who face insecurity, confusion and lack of consistent love. One gets the impression that adult rights of freedom come before the rights and needs of children.

Children in Detention

This Pastoral Letter provides an opportunity to affirm what the Bishops of Australia have frequently said, that Refugee Detention Centres, looking for all intents and purposes like high security prisons, are no place for children. I repeat what they have said

Why is the Federal Government appealing to the High Court to reverse the decision of the Family Court? Why cannot the welfare of children be paramount? Why do children have to be used to test the powers of Government in this way? It is beyond my understanding.

Thank you to Parents

I conclude this letter by thanking all parents for the self-sacrifice and love they give their children. I do this on behalf of all of us, the Church and the community. Theirs is a noble task and they will be assisted by the grace of our loving Lord who said "Let the little children come to me for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven".

We recall again the words of the Holy Father:

"I repeat once again what I said to the General Assembly of the United Nations: I wish to express the joy that we all find in children, the springtime of life, the anticipation of the future history of each of our present earthly homelands. Concern for the child, even before birth, from the first moment of conception and then throughout the years of infancy and youth, is the primary and fundamental test of the relationship of one human being to another. And so, what better wish can I express for every nation and for the whole of mankind, and for all the children of the world than a better future in which respect for human rights will become a complete reality throughout the third millennium".

C H I L D R E N I N

D E T E N T I O N

“

W h y i s t h e F e d e r a l G o v e r n m e n t a p p e a l i n g t o t h e H i g h C o u r t t o r e v e r s e t h e d e c i s i o n o f t h e F a m i l y C o u r t ? W h y c a n n o t t h e w e l f a r e o f c h i l d r e n b e p a r am o u n t ? W h y d o c h i ld r e n h a v e t o b e u s e d t o t e s t t h e p o w e r s o f G o v e r n m e n t i n t h i s w a y ? I t i s b e y o n d m y u n d e r s t a n d i n g D R U G S “

O v e r t h e p a s t f e w y e a r s t h e n u mb e r s o f c h i l d r e n b e i n g p l a c e d i n f o s t e r o r r e si d e n t i a l c a r e h a s r i s e n b y 4 0 p e r c e n t T h e m a i n r e a s o n , f o r t h i s s t e e p r i s e , a c c o r d i n g t o t h e r e s e a r c h , i s p a r e n t a l d r u g a b u s e T h e d a n g e r o f d r u g s t o f a m i l y s t a b i l i t y a n d c h i l d w e l f a r e n e e d s a s m u c h p u b l i c i t y a s t h e c a m p a i g n a g a i n s t s m o k i n g - w i t h e v e n g r e a t e r r e s o u r c e s p r ov i d e d W e c a n n o t s t a n d b y w h i l e c h i l d r e n a r e d a m a g e d , p r o b a b l y f o r l i f e

The care of children is of paramount importance for the Church, as it is also for society, says Archbishop Barry Hickey. Photo:CNS

Over the years JPII 2002-2003

2002: Pope convenes world religion leaders again for peace prayers in Assisi. In February he visits the 301st of 334 Rome parishes, but shortly after that a knee ailment forces him to stop such visits. In October a plan is announced to complete the few remaining visits by bringing the people to the Vatican for a Mass and series of meetings with the pope. In three trips abroad he visits six countries, including an eighth visit to his native Poland and a trip to Canada for World Youth Day. As U.S. crisis of clergy sexual abuse of minors burgeons, he calls an emergency meeting of U.S. cardinals in April to decide how to respond. He declares that no one who would harm children has a place in the priesthood or religious life. Over Orthodox objections he raises four Catholic jurisdictions in Russia to the status of dioceses. He declares a year of the rosary and proclaims five "luminous mysteries" of the rosary, adding to the traditional trio of joyful, sorrowful and glorious mysteries. In a first-ever visit to Italy's Parliament he speaks 50 minutes on challenges ranging from Italy's treatment of the poor and immigrants to the nation's dangerously low birth rate. Vatican excommunicates seven women who refuse to renounce their priestly ordinations by a former Catholic priest illegally ordained a bishop. Pope canonises St. Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, founder of Opus Dei. He approves new U.S. church laws to remove sexually abusive priests from ministry and from priesthood if warranted.

2003: Papal travels to Croatia, BosniaHerzegovina in June and Slovakia in September extend the record of Pope John Paul's foreign trips to 102 within his first 25 years as pope. Vatican becomes a hub of global diplomatic activity as the pope leads efforts to stave off U.S. war in Iraq. He initiates creation of short version of catechism. He pushes repeatedly for reference to Europe's Christian roots in new constitution of the European Union. He issues an encyclical on the Eucharist in the life of the church. He approves Vatican document that calls same-sex unions harmful to society and says Catholic lawmakers are obliged to oppose their legalisation. Capping a pontificate that has already seen more canonisations and beatifications than any other in history, he schedules the beatification of Mother Teresa of Calcutta October 19, three days after the 25th anniversary of his election as pope.

John Paul II:A Light for the World is a collection of texts and photos honouring the Pope’s 25th anniversary.The 256-page book,with pictures by official Vatican photographers,was edited by Sister Mary Ann Walsh,R.S.M.,for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and published this month by Sheed & Ward, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,Inc.in America.

The following are reflections from religious writers about John Paul II in the past 25 years.The book can be previewed at www.popebook.com

Calling on the Young

By Sister Mary Ann Walsh, R.S.M.

Leaders of all stripes emerged in the 20th century but only Pope John Paul II thought to convene young people and offer a vision to the leaders of tomorrow.

Beginning in Rome in 1985 and continuing through to Toronto in 2002, John Paul has invited young people to join him for a series of World Youth Days. By 2002, he had drawn millions of young people to international gatherings in Buenos Aires, Argentina (1987), Santiago de Compostela, Spain (1989), Czestochowa, Poland (1991), Denver, Colorado (1993), Manila, the Philippines (1995), Paris, France (1997), Rome, Italy (2000) and Toronto, Canada (2002).

The meetings showed the particular appeal of John Paul to young people. Speaking in the language of the country where each event took place, he tapped into their idealism with a message that they are the ones to bring peace to the world.

He bantered with them—to their chants of "John Paul II, we love you," he responded, "John Paul II, he loves you too." He called them to be holy, bringing tears to their eyes; his words touched their hearts and souls.

He reminded them that there are no limits to what they can do with God.

World Youth Day is for the hardy. It involves hiking for miles to a site for an all-night vigil marked by prayer with the Pope, Scripture, community and song. The following day the young people participate in a Mass celebrated by the Pope. Some years it has rained, leaving young people coated in mud. Other years it has been chilly. Other years, hot. Always, the event has inspired participants and observers.

The Pope's visit to Denver in 1993 amazed even the cynical. "It's like Woodstock, with all of the good and none of the bad," boasted a Washington Post page-one story. Viewers were amazed that hundreds of thousands of youth could gather for a lively five days of prayer and celebration of their faith. Even as the Pope grew older, World Youth Day energised him. In 1993, organisers coined a new verb, youthen, to describe a phenomenon they saw; as in, the Pope youthens when he meets young people. In Toronto, nine

When outside Rome

By Cindy Wooden

Watching Pope John Paul II in Rome and around the world, I realise that being pastor of the universal Church sometimes means being prepared for anything. Vatican officials have discussed, debated and tried to legislate the extent to which local cultural expressions, including dance and music, should be allowed at Mass.

Yet Pope John Paul seems to accept and, most times, delight in the differences.

While the Pope was prepared for a choreographed offertory dance at the opening Mass for the Synod of Bishops for Africa, the sounds of joy were not scripted: Ululations sprang from the

A Snub for the Pope

By John Thavis

The Pope has great affection for children, who receive special attention in papal audiences and during pastoral visits. It was the end of a long day in Mexico City. The Pope was running late; and when he trudged into a crowded hospital, he seemed exhausted. Then a little baby caught his eye and he lit up. I've seen it so many times over the years, but it's always amazing how small children and John Paul II connect in a special way. In this rundown clinic, he reached out and caressed the soft cheek, then traced a cross on the child's forehead. A blissful moment.

In Rome, I've watched over the Pope's shoulder as babies are passed up to him for a blessing. He lifts each one with extra care and a watchful eye. But not all kids react the same way to a papal embrace. Some smile, some coo and a few burst into tears.

On a summer's day many years ago at his villa outside Rome, the Pope reached out for our own baby daughter. It's all captured in our family photo album: the white-robed pontiff approaching,

years later, a visibly aging Pope gathered energy from his first glimpse of youth from the plane.

Given his increasing difficulty in walking, organisers prepared a device to lift the Pope down when he disembarked from the Alitalia plane. To everyone's surprise, the Pope walked down the steps and headed for the microphones. Young people were calling him and he responded, as always, with the affection he feels especially for them.

Sister Mary Ann Walsh, R.S.M., serves as the deputy director for media relations at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, D.C. She worked for Catholic News Service from 1983 through 1993.

throats of African women, bouncing off the walls of St. Peter's Basilica, providing a totally natural "surround sound" effect. Native American pipe-smokers and incense smoke rising from clay pots rather than thuribles bring attentive looks, not scowls, from the Pope.

He places Communion on the outstretched hands of the faithful with the same reverently serious gaze as he has when he places Communion on someone's tongue. He did not hesitate leaving street shoes behind when visiting a mosque in Syria or a Hindu's tomb in India.

Even before physical limitations led Pope John Paul to shorten his speeches and hold fewer public meetings, what often attracted young and old, believers and nonbelievers, to him was not just what the Pope said, but what he did.

Cindy Wooden is the senior Rome correspondent for Catholic News Service, where she has worked since 1989. She has covered some of the Pope's travels.

ready to plant a kiss on her cheek. The proud parents beaming. Then our three-year-old bailed out with a stiff-armed refusal. The Pope took the snub in stride, still smiling.

John Thavis has worked in Rome for Catholic News Service since 1983, heading the office since 1996.

A teenage girl talks to a nun at a June 7 youth vigil in Lednica, Poland, in preparation for the Pope’s anniversary. Photo:CNS/Reuters

Pope John Paul II kisses a baby in this photo taken in 2001.

Photo:CNS/Reuters

A selfless life

Love others as God loves you. Remember works of love are works of peace.

God bless you.

- Mother Teresa M.C.

A saint in our time

Mother Teresa’s beatification comes just six years after her death

By Cindy Wooden

to India at the beginning of 1929 to study at their novitiate in Darjeeling.

Teaching at a fashionable Catholic girls’ school in Calcutta, she could not ignore the poverty around her, especially the suffering endured by the dying and destitute on the city’s streets.

Just over six years and six weeks after her death, Mother Teresa of Calcutta will be beatified by Pope John Paul II on October 19 in St Peter’s Square.

The founder of the Missionaries of Charity died of cardiac arrest on September 5, 1997, in Calcutta, India.

A mere 15 months later, Pope John Paul gave permission for her beatification process to begin, even though church rules require a waiting period of five years.

Small of stature and full of energy, she was acclaimed as a living saint during her lifetime.

She won the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize and, just three months before her death, was awarded the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal.

Wearing a white and blue sari, she travelled the world delivering a single message: that love and caring are the most important things in the world.

“The biggest disease today,” she once said, “is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for and deserted by everybody. The greatest evil is the lack of

love and charity, the terrible indifference toward one’s neighbour who lives at the roadside, assaulted by exploitation, corruption, poverty and disease.”

Born on August 26, 1910, in Skopje, Macedonia, to parents of Albanian origin, Agnes Ganxhe Bojaxhiu attended public schools and participated in a Catholic sodality with an interest in foreign missions. She later said that she knew at age 12 that she wanted to be a missionary.

She left home in 1928 to join the Loreto Sisters in Dublin, Ireland. The sisters sent her

Riding on an Indian train on September 10, 1946, she received what she described as a “call within a call.”

“The message was clear,” she later said. “I was to leave the convent and help the poor, while living among them.”

Two years later, the Vatican gave her permission to leave the Loretto Sisters and follow her new calling under the jurisdiction of the archbishop of Calcutta.

After three months of medical training with the American Medical Missionary Sisters in Patna, India, Mother Teresa went into the Calcutta slums, opening a school for children who had had no access to education.

Soon volunteers, many of them her former students, came to join her.

In 1950 the Missionaries of Charity became a diocesan religious community, and 15 years later the Vatican recognised it as a pontifical congregation, directly under Vatican jurisdiction.

In 1952 the city of Calcutta gave Mother

Teresa a former Hindu hostel, which she and her sisters turned into the Nirmal Hriday (Pure Heart) Home for Dying Destitutes.

Although most Missionaries of Charity are sisters working with the poor, orphans, the aged, the handicapped and the dying, Mother Teresa also founded a branch of contemplative sisters, contemplative brothers and an order of priests. The missionaries work in more than 120 countries.

The Pope greets Mother Teresa at St Peter’s Basilica during her 1997 trip to Rome.

Photo:CNS

Mother’s special guests

Missionaries of Charity to focus attention on poor at beatification

By Cindy Wooden

Many nations will have official delegations at the October 19 beatification of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, but members of the Missionaries of Charity are focusing their attention on a less formal group of special guests.

Seats at the ceremony in St. Peter’s Square already have been reserved for 3,000 men, women and children who eat or sleep at the soup kitchens and shelters in Rome run by members of the order founded by Mother Teresa.

Immediately after the October 19 Mass, the guests will be served lunch in the Vatican’s audience hall.

The beatification is “a celebration to give glory to God for what he has done through Mother Teresa,” said Missionaries of Charity Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, promoter of her cause. “Mother Teresa does not need our applause on October 19.”

Working in temporary offices set up in the Missionaries’ Rome shelter for homeless men, the priest said the Missionaries of Charity hope the beatification will cause a “ripple effect,” reminding the world of the call to serve God in the poor.

And while the tiny nun in her blue-trimmed sari would have had to force herself to smile in the midst of such attention when she was alive, “she has a different perspective now,” the priest said.

“She just wanted to be a pencil in God’s hands,” he said. “She used to say, ‘God uses nothingness to show his greatness,’” and the October 19 ceremony should be focused on faith in him.

The beatification will take place on World Mission Sunday, a day Pope John Paul II usually dedicates to highlighting the Christian obligation to explicitly proclaim salvation in Christ.

While there is no doubt Mother Teresa was a “missionary” of charity and never hid her Catholic faith, winning converts to Catholicism was not the first focus of her work, Father Kolodiejchuk said.

“She wanted to proclaim the Gospel not with words, but by being a light, a radiance of God’s presence,” he said.

A month before the beatification, the Vatican and the Missionaries already had received 120,000 requests for the free tickets to the Mass.

The ceremony, Father Kolodiejchuk said, is not the result of a popularity contest or the universal Catholic Church’s posthumous recognition of Mother Teresa’s work — a Catholic version of her 1979 Nobel Peace Prize.

“People really had a sense that she was holy,” he said. “They saw Jesus in her. It was not just because of the work she did, because others do that work, too.”

Father Kolodiejchuk met Mother Teresa in 1977 and became associated with the Missionaries of Charity shortly afterward, even though the Missionaries of Charity Fathers was not founded until 1984.

As the postulator of her cause, he has spent the past four years poring over thousands of letters and speeches that she wrote and the transcripts of hours of interviews with people who knew her.

The investigation has convinced him that she not only engaged in hard, holy work, but she was a saint whose faith was heroic.

“The darkness she experienced and the private side of her faith” were what struck the priest most as he read and listened, he said.

Letters Mother Teresa had written to her spiritual directors described her sense of “interior darkness” and a feeling that after she had been so close to God and answered his call to serve the poor, God had abandoned her.

Yet, Father Kolodiejchuk said, she always affirmed her faith in God and his continuing care for her, even when she did not experience the consolation of feeling God’s presence.

Mother Teresa kept her feelings private, telling only her spiritual director.

“We did not know how profound her faith was” until the letters were examined, the postulator said. “Her simplicity of faith and of expression also hid that.

She would say, ‘Accept whatever God gives and accept whatever God takes with a smile.’ That sounds simple, but it was painful for her and profound. She was focused on her beloved and on pleasing him,” the priest said.

Father Kolodiejchuk said he believes it was no coincidence that Pope John Paul decided to preside over the beatification as part of the celebration of his 25th anniversary as Pope. “The ceremony could have been in the spring, but he chose to wait,” the priest said.

Father Kolodiejchuk agreed with those who described Mother Teresa as “the saint of this pontificate.”

“There was more than friendship between them,” he said. “There was love and esteem and trust.”

Mother Teresa’s international renown was sealed when she won the Nobel Peace Prize one year after Pope John Paul’s election.

Their very public activities around the world coincided in time, but also in the messages they conveyed, he said.

The Pope’s preaching on the dignity of the human person, the value of every human life, the Christian obligation of solidarity and the central role of Christian activity nourished by prayer and the Eucharist were echoed in Mother Teresa’s life, Father Kolodiejchuk said.

In addition, he said, “She never made any important decision without consulting the Pope first,” including the founding of the Missionaries of Charity Fathers.

In the end, he said, “People are fulfiled and happy when they love God and are focused outward like Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul.”

A sister with the Missionaries of Charity cares for two orphaned children at the Shishu Bhavan home in Calcutta founded by Mother Teresa. More than 300 children, many with handicaps, are cared for by the order at the facility. Below right: An MC sister cares for a destitute man at the Nirmal Hriday Home for Dying Destitutes in Calcutta. Mother Teresa and her sisters opened the facility in 1952 after the well-publicised case of a young man dying alone in a gutter on the street. Below left: The Nobel Peace Prize laureate and founder of the Missionaries of Charity is pictured comforting an ailing man in this undated photo.

Photo:CNS/Reuters

IMPORTANT DATES IN LIFE OF MOTHER TERESA OF CALCUTTA

August 26, 1910: Agnes Ganxhe Bojaxhiu is born in Skopje, Macedonia, to parents of Albanian origin.

October 12, 1928: She is accepted as a postulant of the Sisters of Loreto at their convent near Dublin, Ireland, and is given the name Teresa.

January 6, 1929: She arrives in India to join the Loreto novitiate in Darjeeling.

May 24, 1937: She makes her final profession as a Loreto sister.

September 10, 1946: During a train journey in India, she experiences a call from God to serve the poorest of the poor, eventually leading her to found the Missionaries of Charity.

October 7, 1950: The Missionaries of Charity is erected officially as a religious institute of the Archdiocese of Calcutta, India.

1952: Mother Teresa opens Nirmal Hriday (Pure Heart) Home for Dying Destitutes in Calcutta.

February 1, 1965: The Missionaries of Charity is recognised as a religious institute of pontifical right.

The many faces of a saint

Mid-1920s

December 10, 1979: Mother Teresa accepts the Nobel Peace Prize.

June 5, 1997: Mother Teresa accepts the Congressional Gold Medal at the U.S. Capitol in Washington.

September 5, 1997: Mother Teresa dies at the Missionaries of Charity motherhouse in Calcutta.

October 23, 1997: Archbishop Henry D’Souza of Calcutta petitions the Vatican for a dispensation from the norm requiring a five-year waiting period before he may open the diocesan inquiry into the life and holiness of Mother Teresa.

December 12, 1998: The Congregation for Saints’ Causes grants the dispensation with the permission of Pope John Paul II. The Vatican announces the decision the following March.

July 26, 1999: The diocesan inquiry formally opens at St. Mary’s Church in Calcutta.

August 15, 2001: The closing session of the diocesan inquiry is held. Over the course of two years, 80 volumes of 450 pages each are collected, including letters, speeches and documents written by Mother Teresa and transcripts of interviews with people who knew her.

April 26, 2002: The formal “positio” or report on the results of the diocesan phase is completed and given to the congregation for study.

December 20, 2002: In the presence of Pope John Paul, the Congregation for Saints’ Causes publishes the decrees recognising Mother Teresa lived a life of “heroic virtues” and accepting the 1998 healing of an Indian woman as the miracle needed for her beatification.

Extracts from Mother Teresa’s Nobel prize acceptance speech 1979 Oslo, Norway

Iwill never forget an opportunity I had in visiting a home where they had all these old parents of sons and daughters who had just put them in an institution and forgotten, maybe. And I went there, and I saw in that home they had everything, beautiful things, but everybody was looking towards the door. And I did not see a single one with a smile on their face. And I turned to the sister and I asked: How is that? How is it that these people who have everything here, why are they all looking towards the door? Why are they not smiling?

I am so used to see the smiles on our people, even the dying ones smile. And she said: “This is nearly every day. They are expecting, they are hoping that a son or daughter will come to visit them. They are hurt because they are forgotten." And see - this is where love comes. That poverty comes right there in our own home, even neglect to love. Maybe in our own family we have somebody who is feeling lonely, who is feeling sick, who is feeling worried, and there are difficult days for everybody. Are we there? Are we there to Receive them? Is the mother there to receive the child?

I was surprised in the West to see so many young boys and girls given into drugs. And I tried to find out why. Why is it like that? And the answer was: “Because there is no one in the family to receive them." Father and mother are so busy they have no time. Young parents are in some institution and the child goes back to the street and gets involved in something. We are talking of peace. These are things that break peace.

But I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing, direct murder by the mother herself. And we read in the scripture, for God says very clearly: “Even if a mother could forget her child, I will not forget you. I have carved you in the palm of my hand." We are carved in the palm of his hand; so close to him, that unborn child has been curved in the hand of God. And that is what strikes me most, the beginning of that sentence, that even if a mother could forget, something impossible - but even if she could forget - I will not forget you.

And today the greatest means, the greatest destroyer of peace is abortion. And we who are standing here - our parents wanted us. We would not be here if our parents would do that to us.

Our children, we want them, we love them. But what of the other millions. Many people are very, very concerned with the children of India, with the children of Africa where quite a number die, maybe of malnutrition, of hunger and so on, but millions are dying deliberately by the will of the mother. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today. Because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.

And this I appeal in India, I appeal everywhere - “Let us bring the child back" - and this year being the child's year: What have we done for the child? At the beginning of the year I told, I spoke everywhere and I said: let us ensure this year that we make every single child born, and unborn, wanted. And today is the end of the year. Have we really made the children wanted?

I will tell you something terrifying. We are fighting abortion by adoption. We have saved thousands of lives. We have sent word to all the clinics, to the hospitals, police stations: "Please don't destroy the child; we will take

the child". So every hour of the day and night there is always somebody - we have quite a number of unwedded mothers - tell them: “Come, we will take care of you, we will take care of the child from you, and we will get a home for the child". And we have a tremendous demand for families who have no children, that is the blessing of God for us. And also, we are doing another thing which is very beautiful. We are teaching our beggars, our leprosy patients, our slum dwellers, our people of the street, natural family planning.

And in Calcutta alone in six years - it is all in Calcutta - we have had 61 273 babies less from the families who would have had them because they practice this natural way of abstaining, of self-control, out of love for each

“Even if a mother could forget her child, I will not forget you. I have carved you in the palm of my hand."

other. We teach them the temperature method which is very beautiful, very simple. And our poor people understand. And you know what they have told me? “Our family is healthy, our family is united, and we can have a baby whenever we want". So clear - those people in the street, those beggars - and I think that if our people can do like that how much more you and all the others who can know the ways and means without destroying the life that God has created in us.

The poor people are very great people. They can teach us so many beautiful things. The other day one of them came to thank us and said: “You people who have evolved chastity; you are the best people to teach us family planning because it is nothing more than selfcontrol out of love for each other." And I think they said a beautiful sentence. And these are people who maybe have nothing to eat, maybe they have not a home where to live, but they are great people.

The poor are very wonderful people. One evening we went out and we picked up four people from the street. And one of them was in a most terrible condition. And I told the sisters: “You take care of the other three; I will take care of this one that looks worse." So I did for her all that my love can do. I put her in bed, and there was such a beautiful smile on her face. She took hold of my hand, as she said one word only: "thank you" - and she died.

I could not help but examine my conscience before her. And I asked: “What would I say if I was in her place?" And my answer was very simple. I would have tried to draw a little attention to myself. I would have said: "I am hungry, I am dying, I am cold, I am in pain", or something. But she gave me much more - she gave me her grateful love. And she died with a smile on her face - like that man who we picked up from the drain, half eaten with worms, and we brought him to the home - “I have lived like an animal in the street, but I am going to die like an angel, loved and cared for." And it was so wonderful to see the greatness of that man who could speak like that, who could die like that without blaming, without cursing anybody, without comparing anything. Like an angel - this is the greatness of our people.

Saint of the slums

Monica Besra holds a portrait of Mother Teresa at her home in Dnograrma, India, on September 26. The woman says her recovery from stomach cancer is due to the intercession of Mother Teresa, who is to be beatified by Pope John Paul II on October 19. The Vatican accepted Besra's cure as the miracle needed for the beatification.

Photo:CNS/Reuters