BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

See preceding page for earlier entries today, 12/28/10.




Thanks to Lella for calling attention on her blog to Bruno Mastroianni's pre-Christmas column, which I must admit, I failed to check out last week...


The sign of greatness is
knowing how to be humble
Translated from

December 23, 2010


I wish to go back to the recent interview-book of Benedict XVI, Light of the World.

There is an aspect of it that must not be overlooked. Beyond its contents - the words of the Pope are always interesting and never to be taken for granted. Beyond the fact that he did not have any reservations - he did not refuse to answer any question nor did he 'tweak' the transcript of his answers afterwards.

There is another element that must be considered: the profound kindness that emerges from the pages, bringing us a Pope who is devoid of the least shadow of rancour towards anyone nor of smugness about his own words (even if these are always wise and full of reason).

It isn't just a reflection of his character. That kindness and peace which emanate from the interview are also found in his discourses, his encyclicals, his public statements and in all of his tremendous literary production, before and after becoming Pope.

It is the sign of a true and proper style of behavior - of that which we would call virtue, to use a term that has become outmoded.

This virtue has a deep source. In his first Christmas homily as Pope, Benedict XVI noted that "God is so great that he could make himself small. God is so powerful that he could make himself helpless. God is so good that he renounced his divine splendor to come down to that stall in Bethlehem so we could find him..."

The fact that in the book, we do not hear from him any triumphal proclamations about the Church that many may have wished to hear is not a sign of crisis, but rather the confirmation that now is a propitious time for us to listen to and heed the things that are most true.




Another take on Benedict XVI comes from Aldo Maria Valli, Vatican anchor for Italian state TV's premier channel RAI-1, who recently wrote a book entitled LA VERITA DEL PAPA: Perche lo attaccano, perché va ascoltato (The Pope's truthL Why he is attacked, why he must be heeded, Lindau, 2010) - which analyzes the vicious attacks, personal and institutional, directed against Benedict XVI earlier this year (in connection with the 10-year-delayed second wave of hypocritical media indignation over sex abuses committed by a relatively few Catholic priests against a few thousand victims - even one victim is too many, obviously - mostly before 2000). Valli's article is his contribution to a special section called 'The Vatican in the Crosshairs' in the December issue of the monthly Italian journal of ideas, FORMICHE... I have published four of those articles on this thread as they became available online through Lella's blog

and she has now posted all of them.


Benedict XVI: The chronicles
of an 'inconvenient' Pope
by Aldo Maria Valli
Translated from the December 2010 issue of



To confirm his brothers in the faith, to contribute to Christian unity, to clean up the Church, to enlarge the space of reason to include the transcendent, to demonstrate that freedom without truth is bad for man, to ask everyone to live not according to the Enlightenment precept etsi Deus non daretur (as if God does not exist), but veluti si Deus daretur (as if God does exist) in order to give a common moral foundation to society.

Thus might one summarize the great ideas at the center of Benedict XVI's Magisterium in the first five and half years of his Pontificate.

He has made 20 foreign visits - Germany (twice), Poland, Spain (twice), Turkey, Brazil, Austria, the United States, Australia, France, Cameroon and Angola, the Holy Land, the Czech Republic, Malta, Portugal, Cyprus and the United Kingdom.

The geography has centered on Europe and the Middle East but that does not mean that the Pope has ignored Asia and South America, as he has shown his constant concern in many texts and in the attention that he gives to their bishops when they visit him in Rome ad limina.

He has written encyclicals every two years since his first, Deus caritas est in 2005; then Spe salvi in 2007, and Caritas in veritate in 2009. they have focused on the heart of the evangelical message - love, hope, truth.

When he was elected Pope, Benedict XVI presented himself as 'a humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord'. Worker Ratzinger has been reinforcing the Catholic 'home', appropriately, from its foundations.

It is in this context that one can also see his commitment to Christian unity. Ten years ago, when he was the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he elaborated the declaration Dominus Iesus on the Catholic Church being the one true Church of Christ - a document that was received with harsh criticism by many in the non-Catholic Christian churches and ecclesial communities.

Because of that, he was considered by many to be lukewarm to ecumenism. In fact, he has reiterated many times - from his first homily as Pope the day after his election - that the ecumenical commitment is irrenunciable and an integral part of the mission of Peter's Successor.

But his ecumenism does not consist of empty proclamations. For him, what is more important is reciprocal knowledge of one another, based on personal relationships and a firm awareness by each side of its own identity. It is impossible to dialog with each other if one does not first know one's own faith well.

Having now authorized a normative and organizational framework for welcoming disaffected Anglicans who desire full communion with Rome into the Catholic Church, Papa Ratzinger has shown he is capable of making concrete arrangements once the prerequisite conditions are present.

Relations with the Orthodox Churches are more difficult. [Not necessarily. There may be no mass Orthodox conversions to Catholicism in the foreseeable future, but the theological dialog between Rome and the Orthodox Churches have now reached a point where they are discussing the main stumbling block between them, namely, the role of the Pope in a unified Church - whereas the gap between Rome and the Anglican Church has inevitably widened as the latter codifies its acceptance of women priests, gay priests and bishops, and same-sex marriage.]

Nonetheless, Benedict XVI's 2006 visit to Istanbul and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, marked an important stage, and positive signals have been coming from the patriarchate of Moscow [Yes, but they march to a different drumbeat - their own!]

A stumbling block for Benedict XVI has arisen from having revoked the excommunication of four traditionalist bishops illegally consecrated by the late Mons. Marcel Lefebvre in 1988, including English Mons. Richard Williamson who turns out to have negationist views about the Holocaust.

In an unprecedented act, Benedict XVI wrote a letter to all the bishops of the world to explain that lifting the excommunications was in the interest of promoting unity within the Catholic Church itself. In it, he also apologized for the communications fiasco that the night before the revocation was announced, Williamson was shown in a TV interview taped months earlier expressing theories denying the Holocaust.

Having explained that lifting the excommunications did not mean legitimizing the Lefebvrian FSSPX [only a charitable response to their request asking for the revocation, inasmuch as the act of asking the Pope to revoke the excommunication was an acknowledgment of the Pope's authority], he expressed his sorrow at the fact that in the Church, to use the words St. Paul once used, there are those who do not miss the chance to 'bite and devour each other'.

And so we come to another great Ratzinger theme: the need to clean up the Church. He already anticipated this before he became Pope, in his meditations for the Via Crucis of 2005, when he specifically denounced the 'filth' in the Church.

It is a task he has pursued in his own way: without any dramatic announcements, but with constant action, exemplified by the investigation he ordered into the Legionaries of Christ and the condemnation of their founder.

In the midst of such an action, and certainly not by chance, Benedict XVI found himself in the center of the new storm over priestly pedophilia, in which a large part of the worldwide media took the opportunity to attack him personally.

An operation that was objectively unfair, because while it was true that some bishops had covered up, ignored or otherwise committed sins of omission in dealing with priest offenders, it was equally true that Joseph Ratzinger, as a cardinal and now as Pope, had always been at the frontlines in seeking to expose iniquity and to punish the guilty, whom he firmly believes have proven themselves unworthy of the service to which they were called.

Calling the terrible faithlessness of the offending priests as an 'internal persecution' within the Church, and judging such to be more serious and devastating than any external attacks, Benedict XVI did not look for excuses.

It would have been easy to blame everything on the enemies of the Church, but instead, he has called for purification within the Church, for conversion and for cooperation with civilian authorities in prosecuting those accused.

But if thw pedophile scandal unleashed the most extremist sectors of secular and atheist culture against the Pope, his decision to allow the celebration of the traditional liturgy without special permission from the local bishops provoked equally serious and vicious attacks against the Pope from pregressivist elements within the Church.

Their favorite charge is that Papa Ratzinger wishes to negate Vatican II which had decreed liturgical reform [but certainly not in the form eventually devised by the commission tasked to implement the reform].

The issue is controversial and sensitive. On the one hand, it is pointed out that legitimizing the traditional liturgy was not a priority for the life of the Church. [Only if one starts from the erroneous assumption that liturgy is not a priority in the life of the Church!]

On the other, one can say that by doing so, the Pope, as universal pastor, is simply trying to keep his flock as united as possible, Of course, his love for the most authentic expressions of traditional faith is well known, and he has made many statements about the importance of beauty as a way to reach God (consider his recent visit to Barcelona).

Even more important, the Catholic Church has always harboured a multiplicity of rites - think of the Eastern Churches and the Ambrosian rite in Lombardy, which have been autonomously followed for centuries - and the Pope has simply applied this general rule to the traditional Roman rite.

Probably the first crisis for Benedict XVI's Pontificate came after the academic lecture he delivered at the University of Regensburg in 2006. He cited a passage spoken by the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologue to a Muslim interlocutor, an erudite Persian, accusing Mohammed of having spread Islam with the sword. [It obviously did not offend the Persian because he did not have the emperor killed outright for saying what he did, or killed him himself; instead, the two carried on their conversations long enough to make up a book recounted by the emperor - a demonstration in itself of civilized reason on the part of an educated Muslim!]

The passage was integral to the central theme of the lectio magistralis, which was the relationship between faith and reason, with the consequent rejection of violence by any authentic religion.

But the media isolated only the words critical of Mohammed, citing them out of context, thus transforming it into an apparent attack by the Pope on the Islamic world, arousing the rage of Muslim extremists against the Pope and the Church.

It has been described since then as a communications error on the part of the Pope. Actually, it was, once again, yet another unjust maneuver on the part of the mass media. In any case, something positive did come out of the episode: a request for direct and sincere dialog came for the first time from representatives of Islamic culture (38 at first, then 138 in a subsequent letter), which has already been concretized in a number of bilateral meetings.

Another major controversy arose form Benedict's decision to clear the way for the beatification process of Pope Pius XII, whom many sectors of the Jewish world accuse of having kept silent about Nazi persecution of the Jews during World War II.

The Vatican has explained again and again that the Pope's 'silence' was not out of hostility to the Jews, and that recognition of his heroic virtues as a candidate for sainthood is not limited to a historical evaluation of his person. [This is necessarily am abridged and inadequate rationale for disputing the good faith of Jewish objections to Pius XII, since they ignore all the documented evidence of the thousands of Jews he saved, in Rome alone, from Nazi persecution.]

The Pope has now entrusted to the Pontifical Council for Culture, under Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, a wide-ranging task to involve agnostics and atheists in a dialog with believers as in a contemporary 'courtyard of the Gentiles', the space adjoining the ancient Jewish temples to accommodate pagans who wished to approach the 'unknown God'.

This initiative, together with the new Pontifical Council for New Evangelization of the de-Christianized Western world, led by Mons. Rino Fisichella, make Benedict XVI's vision of the future quite clear.

The Pope's lunch with
Mother Teresa's missionaries
and their homeless wards
by Gianluca Biccini
Translated from the 12/27-12/28 issue of


They are called tramps, vagabonds, vagrants, or simply homeless. But for those who carry on the work of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, they are men and women in whom one must see the face of Christ.

And that is why her Missionaries of Charity, both female and male, continue to care for them humbly, discreetly and without publicity, even in the Eternal City.



As a sign of gratitude for their work, on the centenary of Mother Teresa's birth, Benedict XVI had lunch at the Vatican with them and their wards on the Feast of the Holy Family after the Sunday Angelus on Dec. 26.

With some 350 men and women now housed temporarily in the seven centers of the Missionaries of Charity in Rome, along with 150 sisters, brothers, priests, novices and postulants of the order, led by Sr. Mary Prema, their superior-general; Fr. Sebastian Vashakala, co-founder of the MC and superior-general of the contemplative brothers; and Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, superior of the male branch of the MC and postulator of Mother Teresa's cause for canonization.

Novices and postulants numbering about 60 also served the meal as they would have done in their own centers - Dono diMaria, located in the Vatican itself, San Gregorio al Celio, Nomentana, Tor Bella Monaca, Primavalle, Casilina, and Acilia.

The Pope, accompanied by Archbishop James Harvey, prefect of the Pontifical Household, and his regent, Mons. De Niccolo; his secretaries Mons. Georg Gaenswein adn Alfred Xuereb; and by his personal physician, Dr. Patrizio Polisca, was welcomed to the atrium of Aula Paolo VI by Christmas carols sung by the guests, and with gifts from the three MC superiors.

In the Indian tradition, Sr. Mary Prema welcomed him with a garland in the Vatican colors. Some of the wards, in appropriate costumes, then enacted a Nativity tableau for the Pope.

Before getting to his table, the Pope passed among the other tables and stopped to greet many of the guests.

Seated at his table with him were the three superiors and 10 wards. To his left was Gerard, a Swiss man, and to his right, Maria Efesia, an Italian. The superiors sat across the table from the Pope.

During the meal, the Pope asked about their individual stories - their hardships as well as how they came to be rescued, and their hopes today.

Steve is a disabled Haitian who must use a wheelchair and is now housed at the Celia center. Italians Nicoletta and Francesca, along with Corinne from the Ivory Coast, are housed at the Dono di Maria inside the Vatican, while Abdullah from Ethiopia regularly eats at the soup kitchen of the same house. From the dormitory in Via Rattazzi, Francois from Gabon who is preparing for baptism. From Primavalle, Soumyamai, a young Indian woman who is awaiting the birth of her first child. From Tor Bella Monaca, the septagenarian Anna, and from Casa Serena, which is run by contemplative MC, thre male wards including a Chinese, Qing Ho.

At the end of the luncheon, Sr, Mary Prema and one of the wards spoke in behalf of the rest to express their joy for the experience gifted to them by the Holy Father.

Said Sr. Mary Prema (who is German): "For us this is is a specially beautiful occasion. To be here today in the heart of the church, with our wards and with you, Holy Father, fills us with joy. Recently, uou spoke of Mother Teresa and how she had given light to so many people. We ask your special blessing so that we, too, can bring light to those who live in shadows. And we wish to say Thank you, for being the transparent symbol of God's love in today's world. We love you and assure you of our daily prayers for you and your intentions".

Giuseppe Fiora, who comes from Milan, spoke for his fellow homeless. "It is a great joy for us to be able to share this occasion of celebration with you. We thank you from our hearts for your hospitality. We feel truly welcome into your paternal embrace".


Avvenire spoke to Nicoletta and Corinne, who were at the Holy Father's table:

'A great privilege and enormous joy'
by GIULIA ROCCHI
Translated from




For each one, a kind word, a smile, an affectionate gesture - and all felt truly welcome - these poor homeless people, many of them immigrants, who had lunch on Sunday with Benedict XVI in the atrium of the Aula Paolo VI, where the Pope has hosted lunches for bishops and other guests during the assemblies of the Bishops' Synod.

There were more than 350 of them, coming from the centers in Rome run by the Missionaries of Charity, the order founded by Mother Terssa of Calcutta, and ten of them had the honor to be seated at the same table as the Pope.

One of them is Nicoletta, 35, who has been housed since February at the Dono di Maria center in the Vatican, right across the street from the Palazzo del Sant'Uffizio, the CDF headquarters.

"My sister and me escaped an ugly family situation where we were often victims of violence," she said. "Here in Rome, we knocked at many doors to find temporary assistance until we got to a diocesan Caritas office who directed us to the Missionaries of Charity."

"The sisters welcomed us, and now, I help them out with the domestic chores and with taking care of new guests. I have also found a side job which gives me a little income". And she hopes to be independent soon. {Strange that the writer does not ask what became of Nicoletta's sister!]

Corinne came from the Ivory Coast five years ago, and like Nicoletta, has lived in the Dono di Maria center since February.

"I was married to an Italian who later abandoned me," she says, " and I ended up without a home, sleeping wherever I could. One day, I entered a church near the Rome train terminal and found myself weeping while I prayed. A sister saw me, approached and listened to my story, then brought me here."

About sitting at the same table as the Pope, she said, "It was such a great emotion. The Pope showed himself to be a simple and humble man. He asked each of us about our stories and asked about our specific problems".

Fr. Vazhakala, who heads the MC's contemplative brothers, said: "it was an experience of true Christmas for our guests. An expression of the concern of the Church not just for those who are in need but also for those who devote themselves to helping them".

Sr. Maria Pia, provincial superior for Rome, said, "For us, it was a hreat privilege and joy because the Holy Father has once more shown his great affection for our Mother Teresa".

Wednesday, December 29, Octave of Christmas

ST. THOMAS BECKET (England, 1118-1170), Lord Chancellor of England, Archbishop of Canterbury, Martyr
Modern literature, theater and cinema have made Becket's story familiar to the general public, and his dramatic 'murder in the cathedral' of Canterbury was long a subject for painters, and famously, T.S. Eliot's play. He was a gifted man whom Henry II chose to his Lord Chancellor, and to whom he sent his son and heir to live with and be raised, in the custom of the day. But the King and his Chancellor soon came into conflict over the rights and privileges of the Church, and Becket was assassinated by followers of the king. He was canonized barely three years after he died. After Henry VIII set up his own Church in the early 16th century, Becket's tomb in Canterbury Cathedral was among those desecrated in the anti-Catholic frenzy that ensured, and even his bones were destroyed.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/nab/readings/122910.shtml



OR today.
No papal photos in the issue, and the only papal story is the Pope's letter to Cardinal Ivan Dias, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, naming him his personal envoy to the concluding ceremonies of Vietnam's Jubilee Year on January 4-11 at the Shrine of Our Lady of LaVang. The letter is in Latin, and no Italian translation has been provided. Page 1 international news: China tightens internal credit to prevent inflation, and appears ready to revalue the yuan upward as the United States has been demanding; a UN report says that despite a recent US report claiming that NATO forces have weakened the Taliban in recent months, almost all of southern Afghanistan remains a very high-risk zone, with a high incidence of terrorist bombings and attacks against NATO forces; and the African Union hopes to establish an African Monetary fund in 2011. In the inside pages, Christmas homilies by two recent martyrs of the Church, the Cistercian prior of Tibbhirine, Algeria, who was among the seven monks kidnapped and killed by Algerians in 1994; and one by Mons. Luigi Padovese, the president of the Turkish bishops conference slain last year by his driver in what many think was a ritual Muslim murder, but which Turkish authorities have ruled was the act of a madman. Also, an interview with Cardinal Tauran, president of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialog, on the current of anti-Christian persecutions around the world.


THE POPE'S DAY
General Audience today - The Holy Father's catechesis was on St. Caterina di Bologna (1413-1463), Poor Clare mystic, painter and writer.





- Israeli archeologists believe they have found remains of Homo sapiens from 400,000 years ago - twice as old as the oldest known specimen so far. See the AP article on
www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2010/12/27/researchers_ancient_human_remains_found_in...

- Today's shocker from Belgium: A Vatican-II theological expert who helped draft Gaudium et Spes has admitted to sexually abusing a child counsin in 1970.

---

Father François Houtart, an 85-year-old Belgian activist priest who served as a peritus at the Second Vatican Council, has admitted twice abusing his cousin in 1970. His cousin was then an eight-year-old boy.
...
Ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Malines-Brussels in 1949, Houtart taught at the Catholic University of Louvain from 1958 to 1990. As a peritus at Vatican II, he assisted Cardinal Leo Jozef Suenens and served as secretary of the subcommission that drafted the introduction to Gaudium et Spes, the pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world.
...
An international petition drive calling upon the Nobel Prize committee to award Houtart the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 has attracted thousands of signatures from 74 nations. In the midst of this effort, the sister of the abuse victim lodged a complaint with Church officials in Belgium, and the priest admitted the abuse.

---

Thank you so much for your magnificent posts. I just posted a link to it at thisburningfire.blogspot.com/.

I hope you don't mind. I'd like that most people read it. The comments you made are very good.





Dear Lavender,

What a beautiful holiday surprise! And that includes discovering your blog. What an impressive range of links you have, and the feature of highlighting the specific posts you link to in chronological order is most useful.

Thank you for posting the link to this Forum, and for your kind comments. It is very gratifying to be part of a community of faithful who are particularly dedicated to the work of our beloved Pope in promoting the message of Christ.

Thank you, God bless, and all the best for the coming year... Keep the burning fire alive and roaring! I hope we hear from you more.

TERESA

IOR headquarters is in the semi-circular Torrione Niccolo V to the right of the Apostolic Palace.


I was just about to translate a story by Andrea Tornielli from today's Il Giornale about this, but dpa has the story, which it says it took from the OR, but is not among the stories posted by OR online today... Tornielli says the papal document will be in the form of a motu proprio.


Pope reportedly set to decree
anti-laundering banking reforms for IOR



Vatican City, Dec. 29 (dpa) - Pope Benedict XVI is set to introduce reforms to the Vatican's banking system to bring it in line with international measures aimed at curbing money laundering and fraud, reports said Wednesday.

The pontiff will issue a document on Thursday for the creation of a centralised banking system that will govern the Vatican's financial affairs, the Holy See's newspaper L'Osservatore Romano said.

The initiative stems from agreements between the Vatican and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).

It will allow the OSCE to monitor money transactions involving the Vatican's bank, the Institute for Religious Works (IOR), according to Italian newspaper reports.

The IOR is currently involved in a legal tussle with Italian authorities over the confiscation of some 23 million euros (30.3 million dollars) deposited from one of its accounts into that of an of an Italian bank.

The deposit allegedly contravenes anti-money laundering provisions introduced by Italy in 2007 that require banks to notify authorities of transactions involving non-European Union financial institutions such as the IOR.

Two top managers of the IOR are also being investigated in connection with the money.

The Vatican has said the seizing of the money was probably the result of a "misunderstanding" and that the IOR would easily be able to clear up the matter with Italian authorities. It has also defended the conduct of its managers.

The IOR handles accounts of religious orders and other Catholic associations using the offshore status of the Holy See.

In 1982 the IOR was embroiled in the collapse of an Italian bank, Banco Ambrosiano, of which it was the major shareholder.

The IOR's then head, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, was under consideration for indictment in 1982 in Italy as an accessory to the bankruptcy, but was protected by his diplomatic immunity as a Vatican prelate.

NB: Since the so-called IOR scandal broke out last summer, IOR president Ettore Gotti Tedeschi has always maintained that the IOR was in the process of completing negotiations to to be part of the European system of banks governed by common anti-fraud laws, and that the complaint filed against IOR by an Italian bank against the IOR - with seizure of its funds - was the result of a misunderstanding and not a deliberate violation of anti-laundering regulations, that in fact, the funds in question belonged to IOR itself and was not to any private account. Nonetheless, in view of the huge scandal in which the IOR played a major role in the 1980s, the MSM seized on the story as a new pretext to denigrate the Vatican bank. There was a flurry of new 'Vatican mired in banking scandal' stories just before Christmas, which I did not post because they merely recycled the reports from last September.


Paolo Rodari's story in Il Foglio today...

'Habemus bancam':
Motu proprio will establish
a Vatican central bank
Translated from

December 29, 2010



The Holy Father meets with Gotti Tedeschi and his wife after a General Audience last September, shortly afterit became known that the bank president and his direcotr-general were being investigated for alleged violation of banking regulations.

Really big and unprecedented news from the Vatican: In the next few days, Pope Benedict XVI will issue a Motu Proprio that will institute a Vatican central bank to supervise all financial offices in the city state, including that of IOR, the Vatican bank originally established centuries ago to fund religious activities.

By doing so, the Pope will be updating the Vatican financial structure to international standards in terms of regulating bank activities, particularly against money laundering and bank fraud.

The European office for Security and Economic Coopration can then evaluate whether to include the Vatican in the so-called 'white list' of European banks who are bound by these standards.

The Pope's decision comes many weeks after the Rome prosecutor's office started an investigation of IOR's president and director general for alleged violation of anti-laundering regulations, for which 23 million euros of IOR funds have been sequestered by an Italian bank.

Expected to direct the new institution is Cardinal Attilio Nicora, who is already the administrator of the Holy See Patrimony. One of his first tasks will be to reduce or eliminate the so-called anonymous current accounts existing in the IOR belonging to non-religious individuals or corporations.


If I understand these reports correctly, the IOR is not yet a signatory to the OCSE regulations - nor has it been accepted to become part of the signatory list - so how can the Italian government investigate the bank for 'violating' regulations to which is not yet a signatory????


And early this afternoon, an official announcement...

Documents pubished tomorrow
regarding control of financial
activities within the Vatican
Translated from

Dec. 29, 2010

---

Journalists are hereby informed that tomorrow, Thursday, December 30, the Vatican Press Office will issue the following documents:

- Apostolic Letter Motu Proprio by the Holy Father regarding measures to prevent and oppose illegal financial and monetary activities

- Statute establishing the Autorità di Informazione Finanziaria (AIF, Financial Information Authority)

- Law on measures to prevent and oppose money laundering by criminal elements and against funding terrorism activities.

The documents will be introduced by an appropriate and ample communique in Italian and in English which will describe the content of the documents and their significance, in order to facilitate correct reading and interpretation of these documents.

All these amterials will be available at 10 a.m. tomorrow, but with an embargo until 12 noon.

---

Pope to publish decree
against money laundering



ROME, Dec. 29 (AFP_ - Pope Benedict XVI will publish a decree on Thursday to fight money laundering in the Vatican, the Holy See said in a press release.

The Wednesday announcement comes three months after an investigation was launched into two senior figures at the Vatican bank, the Institute for Religious Works (IOR).

Benedict's 'Moto Proprio' document 'regarding the prevention and opposition to illegal financial activity,' will set up a new financial authority in the Vatican, the statement said.

It will also lay down a law on 'the prevention and the fight against money laundering and the financing of terrorism,' it said.

According to the agency i.media, which specialises in religious information, the arrangements should eventually allow the Vatican onto the 'White list,' the list of states that have strict anti-money laundering controls.

In September, Italy's financial police seized 23 million euros (S$39.1 million) from IOR as part of an investigation into the bank on suspicion of violating the country's money-laundering rules.



Consider this yet another signal achievement of this Pontificate. Despite the disastrous fallout from the IOR's involvement in the massive Banco Ambrosiano scandal of the 1980s, no real reforms were really carried out at the IOR until last year when Benedict XVI authorized replacement of all the old guard at IOR and ordered the new president Ettore Gotti Tedeschi to clean up and streamline internal operations.

Now, with these new measures, the internal operations of the Vatican bank, will for the first time ever, be subject to inspection by European banking authorities.


Italy's leading financial newspaper calls these developments a revolution, no less:

A new transparency for IOR:
Papa Ratzinger's revolution
Translated from

Dec. 29, 2010

In the past two years, we have come a long way from the dark years of IOR, but a certain opacity still surrounded the Rorrione Niccolo V, the historic seat of IOR beside the Apostolic Palace.

Now, a historic turn - and about time. frankly. Tomorrow, with a papal Motu Proprio, one of the strongest legal intruments at the Vatican, new rules will be adopted to prevent and fight money laundering, fraud and falsifications in Vatican banking operations.

The Vatican has been working for over a year with the European Union on adopting these international regulations which will guarantee discreet efficiency in achieving their objectives.

This pursues the hard line begun in 2009 under Cardinal Bertone who heads the commission of cardinals overseeing IOR operations, with the appointment of Ettore Gotti Tedeschi as IOR president.

More regulations will follow when the Vatican is formally accepted into the 'white list' of banks sueprvised by the EU's Organization for Security and Economic Cooperation.

Meanwhile, the Vatican euro with the Pope's image on the coins will be entering into general ciruclation, and the Vatican will have teh equivalent of a central bank which will be able to dialog with the European Central Bank and with Italian bank authorities.

In short, with a gesture that is revolutionary - given the millenary caution typical of the Vatican - Pope Benedict XVI is taking away the protective screens on Vatican financial operations that had always seemed impervious to any assaults.

GENERAL AUDIENCE TODAY
Catechesis on St. Catherine of Bologna







Pope resumes catecheses on
great women in the Church


29 DEC 2010 (RV) - In the Paul VI Hall on Wednesday, with thousands of pilgrim faithful on hand during the Octave of Christmas, Pope Benedict XVI held his weekly General Audience, during which he reflected on the life and legacy of St. Catherine of Bologna, a 15th-century Poor Clare abbess, whom the Holy Father described as a woman of great wisdom and culture.

Born of noble stock, Catherine spent her childhood at the court of Ferrara. At fourteen she joined a group of other devout young women in a community eventually became a Poor Clare. In her spiritual journey, Catherine endured her own dark night of the soul, experiencing doubts and temptation, but also great consolations. In her treatise The Seven Spiritual Weapons, she writes of the many graces she received and lists the most effective means of resisting the temptations of the devil.

Pope Benedict went on to discuss how Catherine tells of the visions which led her to understand both the severity of the Last Judgment and, at the same time, God’s infinite mercy.

Catherine’s entire life was a model of humility and obedience; indeed, she saw all disobedience as a sign of that spiritual pride which destroys all virtue.

The Holy Father concluded his reflection by praying that the example and prayers of Saint Catherine of Bologna inspire humble obedience to God’s will in our daily efforts to remain faithful to his plan for our lives.

Following the reflection, which continued Pope Benedict’s series of catecheses on great women in Church history, the Holy Father greeted pilgrims in many languages, including English, during which he had a special word of welcome for the students of the American College at Louvain, Belgium.

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I greet the seminarians of the American College of Louvain and I offer prayerful good wishes for your studies. May this pilgrimage to Rome be a source of spiritual enrichment as you prepare for priestly ministry in the United States. I thank the choirs for their praise of God in song. Upon all the English-speaking visitors present at today’s Audience I cordially invoke the joy and peace of Christ our newborn Saviour.

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Founded by the bishops of the United States in 1857 as a seminary to train European men called to serve the Church as missionary priests in North America, the American College at Louvain has been for more than a century and a half in the service of the Church in the New World, in recent years forming men from the US for the missionary priesthood and preparing priests with missionary spirit in the sacred sciences.

Earlier this year, it was announced that the American College in Louvain will close its doors in June of 2011. [Louvain, which was once one of the most prestigious Catholic universities in the world, has become increasingly secular. However, the reason for closing the American College, as the USCCB announced last November, was " the small number of seminarians and available priest faculty".]

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CATERINA DA BOLOGNA: Fourth from left, the saint's incorrupt body, seated on a golden chair, Monastery of Corpus Christi, Bologna; extreme right, a Madonna painting by the saint.

Dear brothers and sisters,

In a recent catechesis, I spoke of St. Catherine of Siena. Today, I would like to present another less-known saint who carries the same name, St. Catherine of Bologna - a lady of great culture but very humble; dedicated to prayer but always ready to serve; generous in sacrifice, but full of joy in accepting the Cross with Jesus.

She was born in Bologna on Sept, 8, 1413, the first child of Benvenuta Mammolini and Giovanni de’ Vigri, a rich and educated patrician from Ferrara, who was a doctor of laws and public notary in Padua, where he carried out diplomatic tasks for Niccolo II of Este, the Marquis of Ferrara.

Information about the childhood of Caterina are scarce and uncertain. As a girl, she lived in her grandparents' home in Bologna, where she was educated by her parents, especially by her mother, a woman of great faith.

When she was about 10, she moved with her to Ferrara and joined the court of Niccolo II as a damsel of honour to Margherita, natural daughter of Niccolo. The marquis was transforming Ferrara into a splendid city, attracting artists and literary figures from various countries. He promoted culture, and although his private life was not exemplary, he took good care of his subjects' spiritual welfare, moral conduct and education.

In Ferrara, Caterina did not experience any of the negative aspects usually associated with court life. She enjoyed Margherita's friendship and became her confidante; she enriched her own culture, studying music, painting and dance; she learned to write poetry and other literary compositions, and to play the viola. She became an expert in painting miniatures and in calligraphy. She also perfected her Latin.

In her later monastic life, she would value highly the cultural and artistic patrimony that she acquired in those years in court. She learned easily, with passion and tenacity. She showed great prudence, singular modesty, as well as graceful and kind behavior.

But one thing always distinguished her in an absolutely clear manner: a spirit that was constantly directed towards heavenly things.

In 1427, at age 14, after some family events, she decided to leave the court in order to live with a group of young women from good families who lived together and consecrated themselves to God. Her mother accepted her decision even if she had other plans for her.

We do not know Caterina's spiritual path before this choice. Speaking of herself in the third person, she would write that she entered the service of God "illumined by divine grace... with upright conscience and great fervor", spent day and night in prayer, committed to conquering all the virtues that she saw in others "not from envy but to please God more, in whom she had reposed all her love" (Le sette armi spirituali, VII, 8, Bologna 1998, p. 12).

Her spiritual progress in this new phase of her life was remarkable, but her trials, interior suffering, and above all, the devil's temptations, were also great. She underwent a profound spiritual crisis that brought her to the threshold of despair (cfr ibid., VII, p. 12-29).

She lived a dark night of the soul, shaken by the temptation of disbelief in the Eucharist. After much suffering, the Lord comforted her: in a vision, he gave her the clear knowledge of his real presence in the Eucharist, a knowledge that was so luminous that Caterina would be unable to express it in words (cfr ibid., VIII, 2, p. 42-46).

At the same time, the community underwent a sorrowful trial: tensions arose between those who wished to follow Augustinian spirituality and those who were more inclined to the Franciscan model.

Between 1429-1430, the community leader, Lucia Mascheroni decided to establish an Augustinian convent. Caterina and others chose to profess the rule of St. Clare of Assisi. It was providential because the community lived near the Church of the Holy Spirit that was annexed to a convent of the Friars Minor who had chosen to follow the Observant movement.

Thus, Caterina and her companions were able to participate regularly in their liturgical celebrations and receive adequate spiritual assistance. They also had the joy of listening to the preaching of the future St. Bernardine of Siena (cfr ibid., VII, 62, p. 26).

Caterina narrates that in 1429 - the third year of her conversion - she went to confess to a Friar Minor whom she esteemed, made a good confession, and prayed intensely that the Lord would forgive all her sins and the penalties associated with them. It was a very strong experience of divine mercy that marked her for always, giving her new impulse to respond generously to God's immense love (cfr ibid., IX, 2, p. 46-48).

In 1431, she had a vision of the Last Judgment. The terrifying scene of the damned urged her to intensify her prayers and penances for the salvation of all sinners. The devil continued to assail her, and she entrusted herself ever more totally to the Lord and the Virgin Mary (cfr. ibid., X, 3, p. 53-54).

In her writings, Caterina leaves us some essential notes about this mysterious combat from which she emerges victorious with the grace of God. She did this to instruct her sisters and those who intend to pursue the way of perfection. She wanted to warn them against the temptations of the devil who often hides himself in deceptive appearances, in order to insinuate doubts about the faith, uncertainties about vocation, sensuality.

In her autobiographical and instructive work, Le sette armi spirituali (The seven spiritual weapons), Caterina offers, in this respect, teachings of great wisdom and profound discernment.

She speaks in the third person to report the extraordinary graces that the Lord gave her, and in the first person to confess her sins. Her writing shows the purity of her faith in God, profound humility, simplicity of heart, missionary ardor, passion for the salvation of souls.

She identifies the seven weapons in the battle against evil, against the devil:
1. Take every care and concern to always do good.
2. Believe that by ourselves, we can never do something really good.
3. Trust in God, and with his love, and never fear to fight evil, either in the world or in ourselves.
4. Meditate often on the events and words in the life of Jesus, especially his Passion and death.
5. Remember that we all must die.
6. Always keep in mind everything good about Paradise.
7. Be familiar with Sacred Scripture, always carrying it in your heart so that it may orient all your thoughts and all your actions.

It's a beautiful program for spiritual life, even today, for each of us!

In the convent, although Caterina was used to life in the Ferrara court, she worked in the laundry, she sewed, she cooked, and she became an expert in the care of animals. She did everything, even the humblest tasks, with love and ready obedience, offering luminous testimony to her sisters.

Indeed, she saw in disobedience a spiritual arrogance that destroys every other virtue. Obediently, she accepted to be the mistress of novices, even if she thought she was not capable of the responsibility. God continued to inspire her with his presence and his gifts: in fact, she turned out to be a wise and much-appreciated teacher.

Later, she was entrusted with serving in the parlor. It cost her much to interrupt her prayers often in order to answer persons who came knocking at the monastery grating, but even in this, the Lord did not fail to visit her and be near to her.

For her, the convent increasingly became a place of prayer, offering, silence, work and joy. When the abbess died, the superiors immediately thought of her to replace her, but Caterina refused and chose to go to the Poor Clares in Mantua, who were well-versed in the constitutions of the order and in their religious observances.

A few years later, however, in 1456, her convent was asked to establish a new one in Bologna. Caterina would have preferred to end her days in Ferrara, but the Lord appeared to her and exhorted her to fulfill his will and go to Bologna as the abbess of the new convent.

She prepared for the new assignment by fasting, discipline and penitence. She went to Bologna with 15 sisters. As superior, she was always first in prayer and in service. She lived in profound humility and poverty.

When her first three-year term as abbess expired, she was happy to be replaced, but after a year, she had to resume the position because the new abbess had become blind. Although she herself was suffering with a grave illness that tormented her, she carried out her service with generosity and dedication.

For another year, she exhorted her sisters to the evangelical life, to patience and perseverance through trials, to fraternal love, to union with the Divine Spouse, Jesus, and thus to prepare each one's own dowry for the eternal marriage. A dowry that Caterina saw as knowing how to share the sufferings of Christ, facing all discomforts, anguish, rejection and incomprehension with serenity. (cfr Le sette armi spirituali, X, 20, p. 57-58).

At the start of 1463, her infirmities grew worse. She gathered her sisters for the last time in a Chapter meeting to announce to them that she was dying and to urge them to follow the Rule.

Towards the end of February, she was caught in the grip of strong pains that would no longer go away, but it was she who comforted her sisters, assuring them that Heaven would help. After receiving the last Sacraments, she turned over the manuscript of Le sette armi spirituali to her confessor and went into agony. Her face became luminously beautiful. She looked with love on those who were around her, and she died peacefully, saying the name of Jesus three times. It was March 9, 1463 (cfr I. Bembo, Specchio di illuminazione. Vita di S. Caterina a Bologna, Firenze 2001, cap. III).

Caterina would be canonized by Pope Clement XI on May 22, 1712. The city of Bologna has custody of her incorrupt body in the chapel of the Convent of Corpus Domini.

Dear friends, St. Caterina of Bologna, with her words and with her life, is a strong invitation to let ourselves be guided always by God, to do his will daily, even if often, it may not correspond to our own plans, and to trust in his Providence which will never leave us by ourselves.

In this perspective, St. Caterina talks to us. From a distance of centuries, she is nonetheless very modern and speaks to our time. Like us, she suffered temptation - she suffered the temptations of disbelief, of sensuality; she suffered difficult spiritual struggle.

She felt abandoned by God, she found herself in the dark night of faith. But in all these situations, she always had the hand of the Lord, he never left her, he never abandoned her. Walking with her hand in God's, she followed the right way and found the way of light.

And so she tells us: Have courage. Even in the dark night of faith, even amid so many doubts one may have, do not let go of the Lord's hand, walk on with your hand in his, believe in the goodness of God - that is the right way to go.

I wish to underscore one other aspect - that of her great humility. She was a person who did not want to be someone or something. She did not wish to govern, nor to make an impression. She wanted to serve, to do the will of God, to be in the service of others. And because of this, Caterina was credible in her authority, because it was clear that for her, authority meant to serve others.

Let us ask God, through the intercession of our saint, for the gift of realizing the plan that he has for us, with courage and generosity, because only he is the firm rock on whom to build our life. Thank you.

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Thursday, December 30, Octave of Christmas

Left 2 photos: The only image I've found online for St. Egwin, from a lectern in Evesham; the Bell Tower surviving from teh great Benedictine Abbey Egwin built in Evesham; and images of Our Lady of Evesham (the right photos from a church facade).
ST. EGWIN (Ecgwine) (England, d 717), Bishop
Our Lady of Evesham is co-patron of the present church of St. Mary and St. Egwin in Evesham, where Egwin had founded Evesham Abbey in the 8th century on the spot where Our Lady, in a vision, had told him to build a church. Born of royal blood, Egwin became a Benedictine monk, then Bishop of Worcester, where he was popular with the people for his charity and fairness, but unpopular with the clergy from whom he demanded strict discipline. He had to go to Rome to argue his case with Pope Constantine, and founded Evesham Abbey on his return. It became one of the great medieval Benedictine abbeys. He died there, and it became a popular pilgrimage spot renowned for many miracles. But it was one of the Catholic properties destroyed during the Dissolution era following the establishment of the Church of England, and only its bell tower survives today.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/nab/saints/todaysaint.shtml


OR today:

At the General Audience, the Pope cites the example of St. Catherine of Bologna:
'Authority means service to others'
Half of Page 1 is devoted to the official announcement of Curial assignments (membership in the various
Curial Congregations) given by the Holy Father to the new cardinals created last November. It also
announces the appointments of Mons. Marcello Bartolucci from Undersecretary to Secretary of the
Congregation for the Causes of Sainthood, and Mons. Celso Morga Iruzubieta from Undersecretary to
Secretary of the Congregation for the Clergy, both to be elevated to the rank of Archbishop. Page 1
international news: New bond acquisitions by the European central bank to relieve Greece's financial
crisis more instability in the Euro currency zone for 2011; and thousands continue to flee the Ivory Coast
for neighboring Liberia to avoid an impending civil war.


THE POPE'S DAY

The Holy Father met with

- Participants in the XXXVI Congress of the International Federation of Pueri Cantores (Children's Choirs)
held in Rome from Dec. 28-Jan. 1. Plurilingual address.


As announced, the Vatican today released three documents formalizing the participation of the city-state
in the European conventions against bank fraud, money laundering, and funding of terrorist activities:
- Benedict XVI's Apostolic Letter Motu Proprio to prevent and counter illegal activities in the financial and monetary sectors
- Statute establishing the Vatican Autorita di Informazione Finanziaria (AIF) (Authority on Financial Information)
- The Vatican law on the prevention and countering of money laundering and funding of terrorist activities
Accompanying the documents is a communique from the Secretariat of State as a guide to reading and interpreting them.


The Vatican euros now in general circulation. Not shown are the 2-cent and 1-cent coins.

IOR headquarters is in the semi-circular Torrione Niccolo V to the right of the Apostolic Palace.

Communiqué of the Secretariat of State
regarding new Vatican legislation
to prevent and counter illegal activities
in the financial and monetary sectors

December 30, 2010

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1. Today, in implementation of the Monetary Convention of 17 December 2009 (2010/C 28/05) between Vatican City State and the European Union, four new Laws were adopted:

- the "Law concerning the prevention and countering of the laundering of proceeds from criminal activities and of the financing of terrorism";

- the "Law on fraud and counterfeiting of Euro banknotes and coins";

- the "Law concerning the size, specifications, reproductions, substitutions of and withdrawals from use of Euro banknotes and concerning the implementation of measures to be taken against the irregular reproduction of Euro banknotes and the substitution of and withdrawal from use of Euro banknotes"; and the "Law regarding the face, unitary value and technical specifications, as well as the copyright of the designs of the national faces of the Euro coins destined for circulation".

The process of drafting the above-mentioned Laws was conducted with the assistance of the Mixed Committee, established in Art.11 of the Monetary Convention, composed of representatives of Vatican City State and of the European Union. The European Union delegation is composed of representatives of the Commission and of the Republic of Italy as well as representatives of the Central European Bank.

The Law concerning the prevention and countering of money laundering and of the financing of terrorism is published together with this Communiqué, while the others will be published on the website of Vatican City State, at www.vaticanstate.va

2. The Law concerning the prevention of money laundering and of the financing of terrorism contains the following in a single piece of legislation:

- specification of criminal activities which comprise the laundering of money, self money-laundering, and the so-called "predicate crimes" (that is, the criminal activities which generate incomes, that are subsequently laundered), for which penal fines are foreseen;

- specification of activities with a more administrative content related to international cooperation, but also to prevention, for which pecuniary administrative fines are foreseen.

The above Law is based on the following main obligations:

- "adequate verification" of the counterpart;

- registration and conservation of data concerning ongoing relations and operations;

- reporting of suspicious transactions.

The structure of this Law, while taking into account the specificity of the Vatican legal system into which it is inserted, conforms to the principles and rules in force throughout the European Union and is therefore in conformity with the norms of other nations which have more developed rules in this regard.

This is seen in the provisions concerning, among other things, self money-laundering, the controls on cash entering or leaving Vatican City State, the obligations regarding the transfer of funds, and the heavy administrative sanctions that are applicable not only to legal persons and entities but also to the physical persons who act on their behalf, by means of the binding recourse action.

3. In conformity with what is found in the most recent norms of the European Union, the Law on fraud and counterfeiting responds to the need to adopt a solid network of legal protection of Euro banknotes and coins from counterfeiting. This requires procedures of withdrawal from circulation of counterfeited banknotes and coins, the reinforcing of penal sanctions, as well as various forms of European and international cooperation.

4. The Laws concerning the Euro banknotes and coins contain the following for those Banknotes and coins:

- norms for the protection of the copyright of the designs;

- rules regarding size, technical characteristics, circulation and substitution;

- the prospective application of administrative pecuniary fines for violation of any of these Laws.

5. The drafting of the Laws that are adopted today does not involve Vatican City State alone. The Holy See, which is legally distinct from Vatican City State and which directs entities and institutions active in various areas, has adopted as its own the "Law concerning the prevention and countering of the laundering of proceeds from criminal activities and of the financing of terrorism".

The adoption of this Law was accomplished by means of the "Apostolic Letter in the form of a Motu Proprio for the prevention and countering of illegal activities in the area of monetary and financial dealings".

With that Apostolic Letter, which is also published today and signed by the Supreme Pontiff Pope Benedict XVI:

- it is also established that the Law of Vatican City State and its future modifications apply as well to the "Dicasteries of the Roman Curia and for each and every institution or entity dependent on the Holy See", among which the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (IOR) is included, so as to confirm the latter’s firm intention to operate according to principles and criteria which are internationally recognized;

- the Autorità di Informazione Finanziaria (AIF) is established, an autonomous and independent body with the specific task of preventing and countering the laundering of money and the financing of terrorism with respect to each subject, both legal and physical, entity and institution of whatever nature, of Vatican City State, of the Dicasteries of the Roman Curia and of all the other institutions and entities dependent on the Holy See;

- the competent judicial authorities of Vatican City State are henceforth delegated to exercise penal jurisdiction in regard to the above-mentioned institutions, in the case of crimes related to money-laundering and the financing of terrorism.

The Apostolic Letter is published on the Holy See’s website, at www.vatican.va

6. The AIF, whose President and members of the Governing Council are appointed by the Pope, is charged with the task of adopting the complex and delicate norms of implementation which are indispensable in ensuring that the subjects of the Holy See and of Vatican City State – from 1 April 2011 – will respect these new and important obligations aimed at countering the laundering of money and the financing of terrorism. On 1 April 2011, the "Law concerning the prevention and countering of the laundering of proceeds from criminal activities and of the financing of terrorism" will enter into force.

7. Experience will help to refine and integrate the new norms concerning the prevention and countering of money-laundering and the financing of terrorism in accordance with the principles and the standards in force in the international community; such need might derive from the Holy See’s and Vatican City State’s openness to deal with competent international instances in countering both money-laundering and the financing of terrorism.

8. These new Laws are part of the Apostolic See’s efforts to build a just and honest social order. At no time may the great principles of social ethics like transparency, honesty and responsibility be neglected or weakened (cf. BENEDICT XVI, Caritas in Veritate, 36).

30 December 2010

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Here is a translation of the Holy Father's Motu Proprio:

BENEDICT XVI'S APOSTOLIC LETTER
in the form of a Motu Proprio
on the prevention and counteraction
of illegal activities in
the financial and monetary sectors

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The Apostolic See has always lifted its voice to exhort all men of good will, and above all, responsible national authorities, through a just and lasting peace in every part of the world, to build the universal City of God which is the goal of the community of peoples and nations. [Benedict XVI, Caritas in veritate, 7: AAS 101 /2009), 645].

Unfortunately, peace in our time, in a society that is increasingly globalized, is threatened by various causes, among them the improper use of the market and the economy, and the terrible and destructive threat of violence perpetrated by terrorism, causing death, suffering, hatred and social instability.

Very opportunely, the international community is increasingly adopting juridical principles and instruments that allow prevention and counteraction against the phenomena of money laundering and financing terrorism.

The Holy See approves of this commitment and shall adopt regulations in the use of material resources which serve to carry out its own mission as well as the responsibilities of the State of Vatican City.

In this perspective, as in the execution of the Monetary Convention between the State of Vatican City and the European Union on December 17, 2009, I have approved for the Vatican the issuance of a law promulgated today, December 30, 2010, concerning prevention and counteraction against laundering of proceeds from criminal activities and against financing terrorism.

With this Apostolic Letter in teh form of a Motu Proprio:

a) I hereby establish that the said Law of the State of Vatican City and its future modifications shall also be valid for the dicasteries of the Roman Curia and for all the organisms and entities of the Holy See insofar as they carry out the activities described in Art. 2 of said Law;

b) I hereby constitute the Autorità di Informazione Finanziaria (AIF) indicated in Art. 33 of the Law concerning prevention and counteraction against laundering of proceeds from criminal activities and against financing terrorism, as an institution attached to the Holy See, according to the norms in Art. 186 and 190-191 of the Apostolic Constitution Pastor Bonus, conferring on it a public juridical canonical personality as well as a Vatican civilian personality, and approving its Statute, which is attached to this Motu Proprio;

c) I hereby establish that the AIF shall exercise its tasks with respect to the dicasteries of the Roman Curia and all the organisms and entities as specified in letter (a);

d) I delegate to the competent judiciary organs of the State of Vatican City to exercise their penal jurisdiction, insofar as any criminal hypotheses about any of those subject to the said Law, on the dicasteries of the Roman Curia and all the organisms and entities as specified in letter (a).

I direct that the Law shall have full and stable validity as of today, notwithstanding any dispositions to the contrary that may deserve special mention.

I order the present Apostolic Letter in the form of a Motu Proprio to be published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis.

Given in Rome, from the Apostolic Palace
30 December 2010
The sixth year of the Pontificate

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IOR headquarters is in the semi-circular Torrione Niccolo V to the right of the Apostolic Palace.

I am posting separately the news agency stories about the documents released by the Vatican today because MSM reporting on this issue has generally tried to squeeze the most out of its potential scandal value - as it continues to do so now.


Vatican creates financial
watchdog amid bank probe
By NICOLE WINFIELD


VATICAN CITY, Dec. 30 (AP) - The Vatican on Thursday created a financial watchdog agency and issued new laws to fight money laundering and terrorist financing in a major effort to shed its image as a tax haven that for years has been mired in secrecy and scandal.

The decrees, which go into effect April 1, were passed as the Vatican's own bank remains implicated in a money-laundering investigation that resulted in 23 million euros ($31 million) being seized and its top two officials placed under investigation.

The bank, formally known as the Institute for Religious Works, or IOR, is one of several Vatican offices that are covered by the new financial transparency rules. The Vatican city state's governing administration, the department that controls the Pope's vast real estate holdings, even the Holy See's pharmacy, museum and TV station are covered as well.

The bank was created to manage assets placed in its care that are destined for religious works or works of charity. But it also manages ATMs inside Vatican City and the pension system for the Vatican's thousands of employees.

The bank is not open to the public. Its list of account-holders is secret, but bank officials say there are some 40,000-45,000 among religious congregations, clergy, Vatican officials and lay people with Vatican connections.

Pope Benedict XVI, who wrote an entire encyclical on the need for greater morality in finance, said he was issuing the decrees because he wanted the Vatican to join other countries that have cracked down on legal loopholes that have allowed criminals to exploit the financial sector.

International financial organizations, which have been working with the Vatican to help it come into compliance with their norms, said Thursday it appeared the Holy See had taken a step in the right direction.

[But, as IOR president Gotti Tedeschi said in September, when the investigation into IOR was made public, the Vatican had been in negotiations to join the Europe-wide bank conventions for over a year now. It is bad faith on the part of the media to claim that the announcements made today were in response to 'pressure'. Rather, these seem to be in fulfillment of requirements in view of ongoing negotiations that remain to be completed with the Vatican's inclusion in the so-called 'White List' of banks supervised by the EU's Organization for Security and Economic Cooperation.]

The decree creates an independent Vatican compliance agency, the Financial Information Authority, tasked with ensuring all Vatican financial transactions comply with the new laws. The watchdog will also share information with international financial organizations, a big shift for the notoriously private Vatican financial system.

It can freeze suspect transactions for up to five days and can conduct investigations which, if warranted, can be passed onto prosecutors at the Vatican tribunal. Its work is conducted in secret — but the norms stress that secrecy won't get in the way of cooperating with law enforcement agencies.

The legislation adopted alongside the new watchdog agency is remarkable reading given that it concerns a city state the size of 110 acres (44 hectares) which is the seat of the Roman Catholic Church.

It's now against the law in the Vatican to train anyone for terrorist acts or to provide them with chemical or bacteriological weapons. Punishment is stiff: five to 10 years in prison — in this case an Italian prison since the Vatican doesn't have a jail.

People in the Vatican who traffic in human beings, for prostitution or other reasons, or who traffic in human organs, now face eight to 20 years behind bars. It's now even a crime to pollute the Vatican's soil, water or atmosphere: those guilty face up to a year in prison, or two and euro52,000 in fines if the pollutants are particularly dangerous.

But it is the legislation directly concerning financial transparency that is key to the Vatican's efforts to comply with international norms on money-laundering and terror financing and shed its reputation in the financial world as a secrecy-obsessed tax haven whose bank was implicated in one of Italy's largest fraud cases [back in the 1980s! - The problem was that other than a change in teh presidency of the bank several years after the fact, no real reforms were effected in IOR despite that massive scandal. It was not until last year that the Secretariat of State completely replaced the old leadership at IOR.]

The Vatican had pledged to pass such legislation by Friday, the last day of 2010, when it entered into a monetary agreement with the EU in December 2009 concerning the issuance of euros.

The effort, though, went into high gear following the money laundering probe, which greatly embarrassed the Vatican and its bank chairman, economist Ettore Gotti Tedeschi. [Why would it necessarily have gone into high gear, seeing as the deadline for enacting the required legislation was December 30, 2010? The Vatican was obviously ready to meet the deadline as there were advance announcements about the documents issued today!]

Rome prosecutors on Sept. 21 seized euro23 million and placed Gotti Tedeschi and his deputy under investigation, alleging the bank broke the law by trying to transfer money without identifying the sender or recipient. The two men have not been charged. [Was it really a nuisance move then, on the part of the Italian secular establishment, specifically its banking officials, wanting to embarrass the Vatican? There may or may not have been a connection, but the news broke in Italy the day after the Pope returned from a highly triumphant apostolic visit to the UK.]

The Vatican has insisted the probe resulted from a "misunderstanding" that it hoped to clarify quickly. But Rome courts have twice refused to release the money, with a judge earlier this month saying nothing had changed in the way the Vatican guards the identity of its clients.

[Gotti Tedeschi said at the time that the 23 million euros - which were supposed to pay for German bonds - were in the account of IOR itself, and not held in the name of any private client or clients!]

Asked Thursday whether the bank would now identify its clients when it moves their money, Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said the question of the seized account was a very particular case.

"But I maintain that this law creates a situation in which the type of problems that were verified or unsuitable are unthinkable," Lombardi said.

Gotti Tedeschi, who was named chairman of the bank last year, has said he has been working since then to get the Vatican to come into compliance with the norms of the Financial Action Task Force — the Paris-based policymaking body that helps develop anti-money laundering and anti-terror financing legislation.

The task force requires the Vatican to pass legislation making money-laundering a crime; to establish an entity to report suspicious transactions and then investigate them; and to pass legislation requiring that the bank identify its customers properly and make that information available to law enforcement agencies.

Rick McDonell, the task force's executive secretary, said Thursday the agency hadn't had time to study the Vatican norms in detail and in English.

"However on the strength of what has been released I can say it appears to be a significant step towards compliance with the global anti-money laundering standards," he said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

The norms also are designed to comply with EU norms on money-laundering and counterfeiting. Three of the four laws issued Thursday in fact concern the issuing of euro bank notes and coins to guard against counterfeiting and fraud.

Gotti Tedeschi has also said he wanted to get the Vatican on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's "white list" of countries that share tax information to crack down on tax havens.

To do so, though, often can take years as the Vatican must enter into tax information sharing agreements with at least 12 other countries after making a formal commitment to transparency.

Lombardi said the norms issued Thursday were a first step.

The Vatican bank was famously implicated in a scandal over the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano in the 1980s in one of Italy's largest fraud cases.

Roberto Calvi, the head of Banco Ambrosiano, was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982 in circumstances that still remain mysterious.

London investigators first ruled that Calvi committed suicide, but his family pressed for further investigation. Eventually murder charges were filed against five defendants, including a major Mafia figure, and they were tried in Rome and acquitted in 2007.

Banco Ambrosiano collapsed following the disappearance of $1.3 billion in loans the bank had made to several dummy companies in Latin America. The Vatican had provided letters of credit for the loans.

While denying any wrongdoing, the Vatican bank agreed to pay $250 million to Ambrosiano's creditors.

[The Banco Ambrosiano scandal was made doubly 'juicy' for the media then because the head of the IOR at the time was Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, who led IOR from 1971-1989, and at the time the Ambrosiano scandal erupted, he was also pro-President of Vatican city-state. He had served both as principal English interpreter and bodyguard for Pope Paul VI, and had the trust of John Paul II as well. He is credited with having saved the latter from being killed in a 1982 assassination attempt in Fatima (the Pope suffered a slight knife wound).]



Bloomberg News, a business-oriented agency, has a less agenda-driven report:


Pope commits Vatican to
money-laundering regulations


Dec. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Pope Benedict XVI committed the Vatican to upholding European Union rules against money laundering and financial fraud amid an Italian probe into the Holy See’s banking operations.

In an apostolic letter published today on the Vatican’s website, the Pope said a special Vatican authority will begin work in January to implement legislation enforcing the European laws. The move comes amid a money-laundering probe by Rome prosecutors into the Vatican Bank and its top two executives.

“Following the Monetary Convention signed by the State of Vatican City with the European Commission Dec. 17, 2009, I have approved the issue of the Law concerning the prevention and countering of laundering of proceeds from criminal activities and of the financing of terrorism,” Benedict said in the letter.

A “Financial Information Authority” will oversee the implementation of the new Vatican legislation, according to the letter. Vatican judicial officials will be charged with prosecuting any alleged violations of the new law, which will take effect on April 1, according to the statement.

“The implementation of the new norms will certainly require great commitment,” Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said in an e-mailed statement. “Vatican organizations will be less vulnerable in the face of the continuous risks that inevitably arise in the handling of money.”

The Holy See is seeking to embrace greater financial transparency after scandals involving the Vatican Bank, known as the Institute for Religious Works, or IOR. It was implicated in the fraudulent bankruptcy of Banco Ambrosiano in 1982. Italian prosecutors in September seized 23 million euros ($30.5 million) from a Rome bank account registered to the IOR amid suspicions of money-laundering violations.

A Rome magistrate upheld the seizure of the funds in a Credito Artigiano SpA account, Ansa newswire reported on Dec 20. Vatican bank executives have denied any wrongdoing.

“These new laws are part of the Apostolic See’s efforts to build a just and honest social order,” the Secretariat of State, which oversees the Vatican’s diplomatic affairs, said today in a statement.

The Holy See is “fully committed” to putting relevant EU financial legislation into effect by the end of 2010, Amadeu Altafaj, spokesman for EU Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn, said in an October interview in Brussels.

The Vatican is a sovereign city-state outside EU jurisdiction, though surrounded by Italian territory. The Holy See comprises the institutions, many located within Vatican City, that manage the Roman Catholic Church’s global affairs.

The new authority will be “the contact point” for the EU and international organizations active in combating money laundering, such as the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force, Altafaj said in October.

The Vatican said in September that it’s in talks with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development about getting on the Paris-based group’s so-called White List of nations that comply with global norms on financial transparency.


And which Anglophone news agency will be the first to recognize how revolutionary and unprecedented these measures are for the Vatican???? And therefore, a major non-religious milestone in the Pontificate of Benedict XVI?




Now, hear this! Wasn't it Italian banking officials who put the screws on IOR last September for allegedly 'laundering' its own funds? Well, well... hear what an Italian official who knows about these matters said today:

'Vatican now ahead of Italy
in terms of anti-laundering'


ROME, Dec. 30 (translated from ANSA) - "It's a good sign - one that is certainly much appreciated", says Pier-Camillo Davigo, formerly chief prosecutor of the Mani Pulite ('clean hands') investigations in the 1990s [nationwide inquiry into widespread political bribetaking that resulted in the dissolution of many political parties including the Christian Democrats], and now an adviser to Italy's Supreme Court, the Corte de Casszione.

Davigo was referring to the new laws governing financial and monetary activities announced by the Vaticna today.

"Specifically, the Vatican has defined the crime of 'self-laundering' of money which does not exist in Italy," Davigo pointed out out. "If only for this, the Vatican is one step ahead of Italian law".




The New York Times has a more comprehensive story than AP and is surprisngly less snide about the reputation of IOR...


Vatican creates a financial watchdog
By RACHEL DONADIO

December 30, 2010

VATICAN CITY — Amid a judicial investigation into its famously secretive bank, the Vatican created its own financial watchdog on Thursday and issued sweeping and tough new laws aimed at meeting international standards against money laundering and terrorist financing.

In an apostolic letter dated Thursday, Pope Benedict XVI created a new internal body to make sure the Vatican’s disparate financial entities comply with European Union standards of financial transparency.

The new law answered implicit and explicit criticism that the Vatican’s financial self-regulation has long been too loose, setting stiff penalties — including jail time and monetary fines — for any violators.

The law, to go into effect by April 1, was greeted positively by anti-money-laundering organizations. In a year in which a sexual abuse scandal fomented intense debate over who has the power — moral or otherwise — to hold the Church accountable for its actions, the new law appeared to acknowledge the importance of adhering to civil standards.

It was also seen as a victory by Benedict over factions in the hierarchy who would prefer to defend the Vatican’s sovereignty, versus those who wanted more openness.

But the test will be how the new law is put into practice — especially by the Vatican bank, which has periodically come under sharp scrutiny and is now the target of a money laundering investigation.

“A few years ago, an anti-money-laundering law in the Vatican and the Holy See would have been unthinkable,” said Gianluigi Nuzzi, the author of the 2009 best seller Vatican S.p.A., which documented the Vatican Bank’s involvement in a host of some of Italy’s biggest fraud cases and political mysteries. (S.p.A. stands for joint-stock company in Italian.)

“They used to say, ‘We’re a sovereign state; these are our affairs,’ ” he said.

“The important thing is that they created an anti-money-laundering law and an authority to enforce it,” Mr. Nuzzi said. “Without that, the Vatican Bank will remain an offshore bank.”

Still, he added, “now we have to see how it becomes operational to avoid the errors of the past.”

In September, Rome magistrates seized $30 million from the Vatican bank and placed its chairman, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, and director general, Paolo Cipriani, under investigation for failure to disclose adequate information about two money transfers to two accounts it held.

Two judges have subsequently upheld the seizure, the latest one saying the bank had not sufficiently explained the provenance and purpose of the funds. The Vatican bank maintains that the investigation is the product of a misunderstanding, and that it was sending funds between its own accounts. Italy’s highest court is expected to rule on whether to release the funds.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the new norms were not directly in response to the investigation.

Asked whether the law would require the Vatican bank to explain the origin and purpose for funds it transferred, Father Lombardi said the law was meant to prevent “the types of problems” that the bank had faced in the past. “This is a first step,” he said.

The new law emerged from continuing negotiations instigated by the Vatican with the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force over joining the so-called white list of countries with good records on financial transparency. The Vatican had pledged to pass such a law by the end of 2010 as part of a 2009 monetary accord with the European Union that allows it to use the euro as its currency.

In an e-mail message, Rick McDonell, the executive secretary of the task force, called the new legislation “a positive development.”

Mr. Gotti Tedeschi has also been working to get the Vatican included on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s “white list” of countries that share tax information — a badge of transparency — but the Vatican has not yet met all the criteria.

In an e-mail message, Jeffrey Owens, the director of the Center for Tax Policy and Administration of the O.E.C.D., said the new law was “clearly a step in the right direction.”

Thirty years ago, the Vatican bank was involved in a scandal at a large private bank, Banco Ambrosiano, which collapsed after the disappearance of $1.3 billion in loans to companies in Latin America. The Vatican bank denied wrongdoing but paid $250 million to Banco Ambrosiano’s creditors. Banco Ambrosiano’s president was found dead, hanging from a bridge in London.

Under John Paul II, the Vatican bank — the Institute for Religious Works, or I.O.R. in Italian — was a crucial conduit to the East Bloc during the cold war, and its murky practices gave rise to speculation about the source of some funds.

Some wondered what the new law might mean for the Vatican’s ability to operate under repressive governments like those in Cuba or China.

“How will the I.O.R. materially manage to put these norms into effect, especially in places where there are difficult situations with states and particular regimes?” asked Ignazio Ingrao, a Vatican expert at the Italian weekly Panorama. “It will not be easy.”

The Pope has yet to name the president or four members of the internal watchdog, the Financial Information Authority. It will answer directly to the Pope but have “full autonomy and independence,” the statute said.

Charged with cooperating with European Union agencies and ensuring that all of the Vatican’s financial operations comply with European Union laws, the authority will have the power to freeze suspicious transactions for up to five days, conduct investigations and determine whether to pass them to prosecutors at the Vatican’s own tribunal.

Those found to have violated financial reporting norms will be subject to four to 12 years in jail and fines of $1,320 to $19,900.

Significantly, the new law is to extend “to all dicasteries of the Roman Curia and all the organizations and entities of the Holy See wherever it extends its activities” — meaning everything from the Vatican bank and museums to the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, which owns vast amounts of real estate and is now the target of a separate Italian judicial investigation.

Vatican observers said they expected power struggles as different Vatican entities fight to protect their autonomy against queries from the new authority.

In line with other European legislation, the Vatican’s new law prohibits human trafficking, organ trafficking, prostitution, training for terrorist acts or supplying chemical or biological weapons. It also sets fines and jail time for anyone convicted of growing, selling or transporting drugs.

The statute says the new authority will work in secrecy, but that doing so should not pose an obstacle for Vatican employees to respond “when the information requested is necessary for investigations” — although it did not spell out who would determine the necessity.

One would have wished for a different title for this essay, since the Pope isn't striking back at all - he never strikes back - but merely reaffirming what Christ and his Church have been saying for over two millennia. Except that he restates the Magisterium in his own memorably individual way... Still, this reflection by an English non-Catholic intellectual is most welcome for stating a truth that is most inconvenient and unwelcome to the Pope's fanatical and rage-driven opponents - in effect a 'reductio ad absurdum' of all their futile flailing aginst the Pope...A.M. Daniels, who uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is a retired prison doctor and psychiatrist who writes extensively on current affairs and describes his personal philosophy as 'compassionate conservatism'. He professes to be atheist.


The Pope strikes back
by Theodore Dalrymple

Winter 2010 issue

It is a nice question as to whether a true or a false accusation provokes more outrage in the accused. So when, a few days before the Pope’s late visit to this island, Cardinal Kasper said that arriving at Heathrow was like arriving in a Third World country, he was much excoriated by those who hate Cardinals as a matter of principle, and was immediately accused of racism, the accusation against which no defence is known.

Quite apart from the fact that the term Third World corresponds to no racial category, the all too swift resort to the accusation always puts me in mind of Lear’s remark in Act IV:

---

Why dost thou lash that whore?
Strip thine own back.
Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind
For which thou whip’st her.

---

In other words, the accusation of racism is often but a smokescreen for the accuser’s own doubts.

It is obvious to all who know Heathrow that the Cardinal’s remarks about our largest airport could have been interpreted in another way than racist: that its disorganisation, its atmosphere of always being on the verge of chaos or collapse to be brought about by one more passenger, its over-crowdedness, its sheer physical messiness, brings to mind the urbanisation of the Third World.

Has anyone ever heard of people choosing to fly through Heathrow when an alternative presented itself, just because they liked the experience of Terminal Three? The very idea is absurd; the question answers itself; and while the tendency or ability to muddle through might be an admirable one in some circumstances, it certainly is not in the design of airports.

In other words, Cardinal Kasper’s terrible crime was to be right, to draw attention to an unpleasant aspect of our reality from which we would rather avert our attention because we cannot face the effort, and no doubt the expense, that would be required to change it.

A great deal of the hostility to the Pope’s visit was likewise caused by his having been right, at least in some things, such as the insufficiency of consumerist materialism as a basis for a satisfactory existence.

There are few human types less attractive, surely, than failed materialists, which is what the British, or at least so many of them, now are. They consume without discrimination what they have not earned: which is why many of them are so grotesquely fat as well as so deeply indebted.

Indeed, there is scarcely any kind of debt or deficit to which we as a nation have not resorted in order to continue (at least for a time) on our vulgar and degraded way. A nation that behaves thus is quite without honour or self-respect, collective or individual.

All this Benedict XVI has seen with a perfectly clear eye; and if what George Orwell once wrote, that we have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men, we might even call the Pope the George Orwell of our time.

Gratitude is seldom the reward of those who see an unwelcome truth more clearly than others; quite the reverse. But Benedict’s ‘crime,’ apart from being German, goes much further than his failure (or worse his refusal) to screen out the unpleasant consequences of consumerist materialism from his vision, which it is the duty of all right-thinking people.

He lays down a ethical challenge to our utilitarian ways of thinking; in other words, he is a heretic to be excommunicated from the Church of Righteous Liberalism.

In pointing out some of the fallacies, oversimplifications, dangers and empirically unfortunate results of contemporary rationalist utopianism, the Pope is potentially provocative of the kind of spiritual crisis that John Stuart Mill recounts in his Autobiography.

When he was twenty, Mill, who had hitherto been trained as a kind of calculating machine for the felicific calculus, asked himself a question, with (for him) devastating results:

---

Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be erected this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness answered ‘No!’

At this my heart sank within me; the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been founded in the continued pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

---

In other words, Benedict XVI presents not a challenge to this or that piece of social policy, but to a whole Weltanschauung. And hell hath no fury like a questionable Weltanschauung questioned.

Here it is necessary for me to declare an interest, or rather lack of one. Just as one cannot write of the question of tobacco-control without declaring that one owns no shares in a tobacco company, so I must declare that I am not a Catholic, that I am not religious, that I am not therefore an apologist for the curia or anyone else.

I am, in fact, not a systematic thinker at all, lacking the capacity or patience for it. And I disagree with the Pope on many things, but I do not therefore hate him.

The quite extravagant expressions of antagonism towards him — such, for example, as that consideration be given to arresting him for crimes against humanity — seem to me to bespeak a very odd, almost paranoid, state of mind.

And while I hesitate always to use Freudian concepts, surely the idea of projection, the attribution to others of discreditable inclinations, thoughts or behaviour that one has oneself had or indulged in, is appropriate here.

As everyone knows, the Catholic Church has been embroiled in a scandal about the sexual abuse of children by priests and the religious. It is the Pope’s supposed complaisance towards and responsibility for child abuse that has led people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins to call for his arrest for crimes against humanity, under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction for such crimes.

No one would say that the Church has acted always with appropriate expedition in dealing with the problem. But the problem is not only, or even mainly, that of the Church, quite the contrary.

It is universally accepted that step-fathers, for example, are many times more likely to commit both physical and sexual abuse against children than biological fathers; and since step-fatherhood has now become a very much more common relationship than it once was, thanks to the social reforms of the last fifty years or so, it is likely that the great majority of child abuse that occurs in this country is committed by them. Moreover, it is a matter of common knowledge that many mothers connive at such abuse because they wish to retain the favours of the step-fathers.

It follows from this that, if the Pope should be arrested for crimes against humanity, so should the following categories:
- Divorcees with children
- Step-fathers
- Single mothers
- Feminists and all other proponents of lax marriage and easy divorce, including journalists
- All legislators who have eased divorce laws and
- All government ministers who have either failed to support marriage by fiscal means or have actually weakened it by those means
- All judges and other lawyers who have administered easy divorce laws instead of having refused to do so
- All social workers and social security officials who have sought advantages for or administered payments to non-widowed single parents and no doubt many others.

I hope I need not say that I am not in favour of the arrest and trial of perhaps 40 percent of the population between the ages of twenty-five and sixty, or that I expect secular social ‘liberals’ either to arrest themselves or each other, but that they should, does seem to follow from the argument of at least a few of their representatives.

Indeed, the very resort of some liberals to the language of arrest shows how, not very far beneath a veneer of libertarianism, lies an authoritarianism that makes Benedict XVI look very liberal indeed. They want arguments to be settled by arrest: in other words, who can arrest whom, assuming that they will always be the ones to wield the handcuffs.

As is well known, Professor Dawkins has suggested that a religious upbringing should in itself be considered a form of child abuse, because in his view it is a form of child abuse; but he then drew back from the obvious inference that such an upbringing should be illegal.

Of course, there are degrees of child abuse as of every other crime; but if a religious upbringing is not so abusive as to merit legal sanction, is it properly to be called child abuse at all, given the current connotations of that expression?

Given that so intelligent a man as Professor Dawkins, and others like him, were so clearly illogical on the matter of the Pope’s visit, are we not entitled to suspect a deep emotional confusion within them: for example, one caused by a robust and unaccustomed challenge to a brittle Weltanschauung?

And that really is the root of all this dissident 'intellectual' hostility to Benedict XVI! Their extremely circumscribed world view or Weltanschauung - for all that they claim themselves to be 'liberal' - does not stand up at all to the unassailably rational world view of the head of the Catholic Church, a world view that is but the translation of the Christian message. And what they cannot fight with reason, they fight with fallacious reasoning and all the vicious passion they can muster.

What the world has tended to overlook is that John Paul II's battle against Communism - or rather, the free world's fight against Communism - did not end with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire. Communism lives on triumphantly in what has now become the world's second economic power - to whom the first, the United States, is increasingly indebted materially - as well as its most populous nation. Because of China's new and very significant economic clout, the nations of the world, including debtor nation USA, have been virtually ignoring China's daily violation of human rights, despite occasional perfunctory denunciations (as when China kept imprisoned dissident Liu Xiaobo from accepting the Nobel peace Prize for 2010).

In that sense, as this article reminds us with great insight, only Benedict XVI is carrying on the crusade against Communism and its denial of individual freedoms even as he fights the wider battle against secularism in all its negative manifestations.


Popes, atheists and freedom
Secularists should recognize
that the Pope's fight is their fight
By DANIEL HENNINGER
Associate Editor

Dec. 30, 2010


This being the season of hope, Islamic extremists of course have been engaged in their annual tradition of blowing up Christian churches.

An attack by a radical Muslim sect on two churches in northern Nigeria killed six people on Christmas Eve. On the Philippines' Jolo Island, home to al Qaeda-linked terrorists, a chapel bombing during Christmas Mass injured 11.

One of the central public events during these days at year's end is the Pope's midnight Mass at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. In his homily the Pope invariably pleads for peace, but on Friday evening a viewer could not have missed the meaning when Benedict XVI twice mentioned "garments rolled in blood," from Isaiah 9:5.

The image, as befits Isaiah, is poetic and disturbing. Benedict surely intended it so: "It is true," he said, "that the 'rod of his oppressor' is not yet broken, the boots of warriors continue to tramp and the 'garment rolled in blood' still remains."

He was of course referring to the sustained violence against Christian minorities by Islamic fundamentalists.

Hours afterwards, from a window above St. Peter's Square, Benedict also took a pass on the holiday pabulum handed out by other world leaders this time of year by explicitly criticizing China.

He said the "faithful of the Church in mainland China [should not] lose heart through the limitations imposed on their freedom of religion and conscience."

For some, the Vatican's efforts on behalf of Christian minorities in Islamic countries or among China's population of 1.3 billion is regarded as worthy and admirable, but only a footnote against the grand sweep of current geopolitical concerns: Iran's bomb, China's economic importance and all that.

This is a mistake. In these times, the Pope's agenda is the civilized world's agenda. The Pope's agenda is individual freedom.

To the extent that the goal of freedom still occupies a high place in the purposes of foreign policy, then the Pope remains an important strategic ally, as he has been since Karol Wojtyla left Poland to become Pope in October 1978.

The reality of the modern Church's interests aligned with the world's best interests emerges forcefully in the recently published second volume of George Weigel's magisterial biography of John Paul II, The End and the Beginning.

For this final volume, Mr. Weigel had access to material from the archives of former Communist intelligence services. The book's first half tells the tale of Communist security agencies — the Soviet KGB, East Germany's Stasi and Poland's SB — coming to grips with the threat posed to their system by Karol Wojtyla, first as archbishop of Cracow and then as Pope John Paul II. One Polish Communist Party ideologist called then-Cardinal Wojtyla "the only real ideological threat in Poland."

In 1984, after John Paul had completed two pastoral pilgrimages to Communist Poland, a conference was convened by members of the KGB, Warsaw Pact and Cuban intelligence services. Its purpose: to discuss "joint measures for combating the subversive activities of the Vatican."

The Pope's "subversive activities" are relevant to our disagreements today over whether the West should engage or confront Iran, North Korea, China and Russia. Then as now, the issue was not one or the other. Instead, it was about understanding the nature of the opposition and forming policy to fit that reality.

"On being elected Pope," Mr. Weigel writes, "John Paul II did not believe that the day was close at hand when Communism would lose. But he did understand the nature of the confrontation." That meant deploying his best weapon: a direct, public moral challenge.

Before John Paul, the Vatican's dominant diplomatic strategy was Ostpolitik, which tipped toward constant engagement with the status quo. Karol Wojtyla, like many dissidents who emerged in these years, had lived with the daily reality of the communist system.

John Paul pushed Vatican policy toward a public, unapologetic claim for individual freedom. On his final trip to Poland, John Paul openly asserted his support for Lech Walesa's "Solidarnosc" reformers.

Days after Benedict XVI chastised China before thousands in St. Peter's Square last week, a Chinese newspaper run by the Communist Party of China replied to his defense of Christians there: "The Vatican has to face the fact that all religious beliefs are free in China, as long as they do not run counter to the country's laws."

"Face the facts" sums up nicely the worldview and foreign policies of China, Iran and Russia: Get over it. John Paul said no. Benedict again says no.

It has been odd in recent years to see prominent atheists make so much effort to diminish Judeo-Christian belief.

In the modern world, and certainly in the U.S. from the Pilgrims onward to the Bill of Rights, religious practice has been bound up in the idea — now the principle — of individual freedom.

I don't think secularist arguments alone for individual freedoms have sufficient strength and fiber to stand against their current opposition.

Benedict's fight for freedom and that of recent Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo are the same. Wojtyla and Walesa proved that once already.

Only someone like Elizabeth Scalia would have this perspective on the really big news - in terms of significant developments and episodes -in the year about to end.


Eight big stories that shaped 2010
Political, societal, digital and natural happenings
that shaped our world — and the faith — last year
By Elizabeth Scalia
From the 1/2/2011 issue of
OSV Newsweekly


Elizabeth Scalia is an online columnist and contributing writer at First Things, where she also blogs as The Anchoress, and is editor and manager of the Catholic portal at Patheos.com.

As we ring in 2011 with prayers for the world, our nation, our towns, our jobs and our families — and a fervent wish for peace, balance and a chance to do some good where we can — let us look back at a teeter-totter of a year, where high-riding America suddenly found herself hitting the ground of reality with a thud.

War is not over; the economic recovery is slow-to-stagnant and those who are not yet struggling themselves know someone, or love someone, who is.

We learned a few things in 2010: Service economies are hard to grow when housing markets are closed; Brett Favre is not unbreakable; your kids will hear you better if you text them; shooting a TV does not make “Dancing With the Stars” go away; the stock market doesn’t necessarily have any bearing on realities; a college degree in anything but the hard sciences really may not be worth it, after all; Russia is still a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; Christian oppression is not just for ancient Romans, anymore; reality TV has turned half the nation into voyeurs and the other half into exhibitionists; the wrong people want to be the exhibitionists; TSA patdowns may feel like a flashback to a bad dating experience; airport metal detectors are so graphic the only mystery left is your blood type; and no matter how many channels your cable package provides, you will not get away from the ubiquitous Sarah Palin!

Levity aside, 2010 may have been a mostly uncomfortable, disorienting year, but there were some hopeful notes: Adult stem cell therapies made promising gains in treating tumors, spinal-cord injuries and HIV infection; hardy Christmas retail sales made for a cheerful year-end; and polls show a growing opposition to abortion in America. As we move forward on those positive notes, let’s take one last look at the big stories of 2010.


Pope Benedict XVI:
A Vicar Victorious
The 265th successor to St. Peter had been enjoying a fairly good run of it coming into 2010.

The cardinal who had been derided as “God’s Rottweiler” and whose election had caused gnashing of teeth from the usual corners both secular and sacred, had proved over five years to be a gentle, pastoral and professorial shepherd whose encyclicals, documents, travels and talks were uniform in message: Look at Jesus; focus on Jesus; discover Jesus; trust the reality of Jesus.

He spoke the message aloud to cheering throngs; he murmured it into tearful hearts sharing with him the grief of injuries inflicted long-before, but never healed. Under his attention and care, the “long Lent” of 2002 had begun to wane; if the Church was still aching and ashamed of past sins, she was beginning to feel a lessening of the burden — a measure of peace.

And then, Lent began again. It seems always within that penitential season, the ugly stain resurfaces, and more penance is needed. In 2010, the weeks leading up to Holy Week had the Church roiling.

The New York Times, hawking “evidence” that the Pope — then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — had conspired to cover up horrific crimes and protect bad priests, gave front pages and distortive headlines over to their “scoop,” while protests erupted in Rome and elsewhere in Europe.

There were calls for Pope Benedict to resign; calls for his arrest. There were unhelpful, hapless defenses made by members of the Roman Curia.

Through the crescendo of rage that greeted Holy Week, the Vicar of Christ remained steadfast; Easter came, and the Lent of 2010 — eventually overtaken by clear voices speaking truth and by Pope Benedict’s own transparent holiness — did come to an end.

If the noise stirred briefly again in anticipation of the Pope’s historic visit to the United Kingdom, the church-shared prayers of Anglican Evensong in Westminster Abbey, the adoration amid thousands, Pope Benedict’s fond interaction with the youths and the beatification of John Henry Newman silenced his detractors.

And then, with the publication of Light of the World, his book-length interview with German writer Peter Seewald; the not-very controversial “condom controversy” again confounds those who would caricature the Pope. In picking up the book, they meet a man humble and open, driven to refocus the Church and the world on Jesus, the Christ, the True Victor. And that is all.

As the clergy sex abuse crisis rocked Ireland [following a year in which two government reports were released - the first, on physical abuses committed from the 1920s onward in Irish schools run by religious orders, and the second, on sex abuses committed by priests and religious from the 1960s to 2000, along with the cover-up or inaction of some bishops] - the total number of victims in all those decades came to less than thousand, and most of them, victims of school whippings and other puunishments, Pope Benedict XVI issued a letter to Irish Catholics in March urging prayer and penitence.

“I am praying earnestly that, by God’s grace, the wounds afflicting so many individuals and families may be healed and that the Church in Ireland may experience a season of rebirth and spiritual renewal,” he wrote.

In addition to his successful visit to Great Britain, the Pontiff traveled to Malta, Portugal, Cyprus and Spain.

Closing the Year for Priests with a June 11 celebration in Rome, the Pontiff said that the year had been a “summons to purification.”


Haiti's Year of Hell
The new year had barely shaken off the confetti before the first and greatest natural calamity of 2010 struck the impoverished island of Haiti, and with frightful force.

On Jan. 12 a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit the town of Léogâne, approximately 16 miles west of Port-au-Prince, leaving 250,000 dead, including Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot. The presidential palace, the United Nations headquarters and the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption were destroyed.

Around 300,000 were injured, and more than a million Haitians were left homeless; those whose homes survived slept outside for months as aftershocks continued into March.

With thousands dead and morgues quickly overwhelmed, the scene was a hellish mix of mass graves and “stacked” funeral pyres. “Haiti,” remarked Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, then the chairman of the board of directors of Catholic Relief Services, “is the broken and bloody body of Jesus in the arms of his Blessed Mother and crying out to the world for aid and assistance.”

International organizations mobilized to begin delivering aid and medical assistance. When red tape, bad roads or dangerous opportunists slowed the process down, clever solutions were found. American Jesuits in Haiti, possessing a well-equipped mission center and control of a water well, joined with ex-Marines to form “Team Rubicon”; with the help of pilots and donations, medicos, aid and provender were flown into the Dominican Republic and then convoyed into Haiti bringing critically needed assistance to the stricken area while other organizations were still trying to get their people on the ground.

Nearly a year into the recovery, Haiti is still suffering. Housing reconstruction is complicated by land grievances, and the tiny nation is now dealing with a cholera epidemic that has claimed the lives of nearly 1,500 at this writing.

Poverty, hunger, crime and the lack of basic human necessities will keep Haiti and her people trapped in a living nightmare for years to come.

Catholic Relief Services reported in December that over the past year it, along with its partner Caritas Haiti, had provided food to nearly 900,000 people and provided emergency shelter materials to more than 215,000 people.

Donor nations have been slow in making good on the $9.9 billion pledged for Haiti’s rebuilding, with only $265 million contributed as of Oct. 26, the latest date for which information was available from the World Bank.
...

The rest of Scalia's list:
- Rise of the Tea Party movement
- Global warming debate
- Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico
- The struggles of Obama
- The Church and social media
- Defeat of the Democrats

You may read the rest of the article on
www.osv.com/tabid/7621/itemid/7322/In-Focus-Eight-big-stories-that-shaped-2...

NB: According to Catholic News Service, here's how Catholic newspaper editors rank this year's top 5 stories.
- Haiti earthquake
- Health care reform
- Clergy sex abuse, especially in Europe
- Economy/recession
- Gulf oil spill

I find it significant that these so-called Catholic news editors only picked the negative aspect of the clergy sex abuse issue - when the abuses themselves were not news but a flashback to decades of mismanagement and near-neglect of the issue - instead of pointing to the unprecedented response from the Church, and most of all, from Pope Benedict. But then, it seems they were only thinking'locally', in terms of the United States, and unlike the WSJ's Daniel Henninger, a non-Catholic, or Elizabeth Scalia, unable to see the universal value of the actions and words of the Pope.



A year of 'tribulations'
for the Catholic Church
By Edward Pentin

Dec. 29, 2010

In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, this past year has been one of “great tribulations” for the Catholic Church which has been rocked by the clerical sex abuse crisis.

Addressing heads of the Roman Curia just before Christmas, the Pope reiterated the Church’s sorrow and penitence, adding that “every possible effort” should be made to ensuring it doesn’t happen again.

Although involving only a small minority of priests, it seemed as though every day of 2010 brought to light new abuse cases across Europe, set off by the damning results of government investigations into the Church in Ireland.

Benedict XVI would later compare the crisis to a “tremendous [volcano] cloud of filth” sent by the devil to coincide with a special year dedicated to priests. It was a cloud that would cast a heavy shadow over the Church for a good part of the year and even now it understandably hasn’t gone away.

Yet the 83-year-old Pope soldiered on and it was arguably his foreign trips this year — all of which were in Europe — that did much to help defuse the anger. His calls during those visits for repentance, humility, and reparation struck a chord with many inside and outside the Church, and they marked turning points in the crisis.

But beyond the tribulations, this year — when the Catholic Church celebrated Benedict XVI’s first five years as Pontiff — actually saw a number of successes.

It began with his Jan. 17 visit to Rome’s main synagogue — only the second by a Pope, but one in which he was warmly received despite a spate of recent controversies in Catholic-Jewish relations.

In April, Pope Benedict visited Malta, possibly the most Catholic country in the world. Half the island’s people turned out to cheer him during the nadir of the abuse crisis, offering him and the Church some timely solace and encouragement.

Soon after, as a real volcanic cloud over much of Europe dispersed, Benedict XVI received another enthusiastic reception when he visited Portugal.

The same was true during his June visit to Cyprus whose purpose was to prepare the way for a synod on the Middle East in October — a meeting that resulted in a resounding call for greater religious freedom in the region, and which was largely praised by all who took part.

But it was also a year in which the Catholic Church faced a rise in persecution in parts of the world, notably in Iraq where a terrorist attack on a Baghdad church at the end of October left more over 60 people dead.

On a personal note for the Pope, this year he announced he had completed the second volume of the book Jesus of Nazareth (to be published during Lent 2011), dedicated to Christ’s Passion and Resurrection.

Then in November, he issued his follow-up document to a 2008 synod on the Bible. He used it to encourage better use of the Bible at every level of the Church.

This year also saw an unusual papal publication. Entitled Light of the World, the book comprised six hour-long interviews the Pope gave to German author Peter Seewald in the summer. Many found it an enthralling read, offering for the first time a very personal glimpse into how a Pope deals with his office.

The Pope made a consistent point in the book, warning that man is increasingly in danger because of his unwillingness to turn to God, but that he can be saved through an encounter and relationship with Jesus Christ.

The launch of the book was overshadowed by a media-driven controversy and press misrepresentation concerning his comments on condoms and AIDS, not helped by what some saw as mishandling by Vatican communications.

Contrary to the perception, the Vatican insisted the Pope had not changed the Church’s moral position on condom use.

The book was part of the Pope’s push to try to re-evangelize an increasingly secular and relativist West, and this year he created a new Vatican department dedicated to that cause.

In September, Benedict made a historic state visit to Britain in the face of widespread fears of protests and even an outlandish stunt to have him arrested for the clerical sex abuse crisis. Yet the visit was widely viewed as a triumph: many were disarmed by Benedict’s presence, humility and message, which ended up silencing his critics.

Despite a rising tide of secularism in Spain, the Pope also pulled off a successful if quieter and shorter visit to Santiago de Compostela and Barcelona in November.

The past 12 months were something of a roller-coaster year for the Pope, one that presented him with arguably his most serious challenges to date. Yet despite his age, he managed to cope. And just how he did so is perhaps best explained by himself in Light of the World.

“One realizes very quickly that it is an immense office,” Benedict tells Seewald. “If one knows that one already has a great responsibility as a chaplain, as a pastor, as a professor, then it is easy to extrapolate what an immense burden is imposed on the one who bears responsibility for the whole Church.”

“But then of course one must be all the more aware that one does not do it alone: that one does it, on the one hand, with God’s help and, on the other hand, in a great collaboration.”

Little singers bring
a bit of Heaven to the Vatican






30 DEC 2010 (RV) - Five thousand “little singers” lifted spirits in the Vatican Thursday with the pure notes of Christmas carols new and old, delighting Pope Benedict XVI who greeted them in the Paul VI audience hall.

They are the boys and girls of the International Pueri Cantores Federation, ranging in age from 7 to 17, who had come to Rome to sing and pray for peace this Christmas.

Greeting them in eight languages, from English to Russian, Pope Benedict XVI said that seeking the right notes and words to sing to God means bringing a little bit of Heaven to those who listen.

The Pueri Cantores is a Warsaw-based federation of children’s choirs dedicated to sacred music.

The full text of the Pope’s greeting:

---

Dear young members of the Pueri Cantores Federation,
Dear Friends,

I am pleased to welcome you today as you celebrate your thirty-sixth International Congress here in Rome and I thank you for the commitment you have shown to the apostolate of choral singing in the liturgy.

In Saint Augustine’s words: “singing is an expression of joy and … love” (Sermo 34:1). As you use your talents and your faith to sing God’s praises, you give voice to the natural desire of every human being to glorify him, with songs of love.

It is hard to find words to convey the sheer joy of the soul’s loving encounter with God, indeed the great mystics could only remain silent before the mystery.

Yet beautiful music is able to express something of the mystery of God’s love for us and ours for him, as we are reminded by the theme chosen for your Congress, Deus Caritas Est.

Always remember that your singing is a service. Firstly, it is a service to God, a way of giving him the praise that is due. It is also a service to your fellow worshippers, helping them to raise their hearts and minds to the Lord in prayer.

And it is a service to the whole Church, offering a foretaste of the heavenly liturgy that is the goal of all true worship, when the choirs of angels and saints unite in one unending song of love and praise.

I greet especially the groups present today from the United States, Sweden, Ireland, Latvia and South Korea. I encourage you to persevere in your good work, I assure you of my prayers, and I gladly invoke upon you God’s abundant blessings.

---

IOR headquarters is in the semi-circular Torrione Niccolo V to the right of the Apostolic Palace.


Father Lombardi's note
on the new rules against
illegal financial activities

Dec. 30, 2010

The Director of the Vatican Press Office, Father Federico Lombardi, issued a statement today commenting on the new legislation announced by the Holy See for preventing and combating financial crime and money laundering.

---

Today's publication of new laws for Vatican City State, for the dicasteries of the Roman Curia and for the Organisations and Bodies dependent on the Holy See, is an important normative development, but also has far-reaching moral and pastoral significance.

As of today, all organisations associated with the government of the Catholic Church - and with the Church's "support": Vatican City State - have, in a spirit of sincere collaboration, become part of that system of juridical principles and instruments which the international community is creating with the aim of guaranteeing just and honest coexistence in an increasingly globalised world - a world in which, unfortunately, economy and finance is not infrequently a field for illegal activities, such as the recycling of the profits of crime and the financing of terrorism, true threats to justice and peace in the world.

Speaking plainly, the Pope affirms that the "Holy See approves such a commitment" on the part of the international community, "and intends to adopt the rules" the community uses "to prevent and combat" these terrible phenomena.

Illegal activities have always shown an extraordinary ability to infiltrate and contaminate the world of economy and finance, but their growth at the international level, and the use of new technology, have made them increasingly insidious and capable of concealment.

Thus, by way of protection, it has become vital to create mutual control and information networks among the authorities charged with contrasting such activities.

It would be ingenuous to imagine that the perverse intelligence of the people who control illegal activities would not seek to exploit certain weak spots which sometimes exist in the international systems that defend and oversee legality, in order to penetrate and violate them.

For this reason international solidarity is of vital importance in order to safeguard those systems, and it is right and understandable that national watchdogs and the competent international organisations (the Council of Europe and, in particular, FATF the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering) should look favourably upon the States and organisations which offer the requested guarantees, and impose greater limitations on those which fail to conform.

Naturally, this also holds true for Vatican City and for those ecclesiastical organisations which undertake economic and financial activities.

Thus the new norms respond both to the need to conserve the effectiveness of the organisations that work in the economic and financial sector at the service of the Catholic Church in the world and, – more importantly - to the moral requirement of "transparency, honesty and responsibility", which must always be observed in the social and economic field (Caritas in Veritate, 36).

The implementation of the new norms will certainly require great commitment. A new Financial Information Authority must be set up, new obligations must be respected, new powers exercised. But this cannot but be of benefit to the Church.

Vatican organisations will be less vulnerable in the face of the continuous risks that inevitably arise in the handling of money. Those errors which so quickly become the cause of "scandal" for public opinion and the faithful will be avoided.

In the final analysis the Church will be more "credible" before the members of the international community, and this is of vital importance for her evangelical mission.

Today, 30 December 2010, the Pope has signed a document of a type a little unusual for him, but one of great courage and of great moral and spiritual significance. This is a good way to conclude the year: with a step towards transparency and credibility!

---

The next steps:
Verification of the Vatican law
and qualifying for the 'white list'

Dec. 30, 2010


Prof. Marcello Condemi teaches economic law at Rome’s Marconi University. He spoke To Vatican Radio about how the norms are to be put in place. Here is a translation of his comments:

---

I would say at this point, the next step is to begin to talk with international organizations that deal with money laundering and counter terrorist financing.

The Holy See is already in contact with the Paris-based inter-governmental agency known as the Financial Action Task Force – or FATF, in order to start the verification phase - to verify the quality of the new law, and to suggest any fine-tuning than might be required.

So having already made contact, the thing to do now - in light of this new law, this new regulatory apparatus - is to continue along this road in order to participate as full partners in these international organizations, and possibly even to take part in their work, so that the Vatican can coordinate with these organizations to improve legislation.

Then the Vatican still has to continue the path in order to enter the so-called "White List" of European countries whose money-laundering controls meet the standards of the European Union. On the basis of the new legislation, this process should be fairly straightforward.

---

Thanks to
for pointing to this interview in a newspaper from Nouvelle Caledonie (New Caledonia) - a small archipelago that is an overseas French territory located in the Southwest Pacific east of Australia and northwest of New Zealand.

Mons. Fellay of the FSSPX:
'We are not Martians -
in fact, we are much closer
to the Pope's positions
than most people think'
An interview by Berangere Nauleau
Translated from

Dec. 27, 2010



Mons. Fellay in Katiramona, where a facsimile of the Shroud of Turin is on exhibit.

The superior-general of the FSSPX was in New Caledonia for Christmas. He celebrated midnight Mass in Latin in Katiramona, home of the local FSSPX community of about 200 members.

Mons. Bernard Fellay heads the priestly order founded by the late Mons. Marcel Lefebvre in 1970. He was one of four bishops excommunicated upon their consecration in 1988 by Mons. Lefebvre without the approval of Pope John Paul II. In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunication in an act that generated much controversy. The FSSPX is not in communion with the Church in Rome, as they have major objections to some of the principles decreed by the Second Vatican Council.

You arrived on December 23 in Tontouta (a city of New Caledonia). Did you plan to be here for Christmas?
My visit was fortuitous. I was in Australia and New Zealand to ordain new priests. Since I had no other engagements for Christmas, I decided to come here to encourage our small community here, who have built a small chapel even if they still do not have a full-time priest. But that will come.

The FSSPX calls itself traditionalist when others brand it as 'fundamentalist'. Nonetheless, you oppose all the 'progressive' steps that the Church has taken since 1962...
Our situation is controversial, but it also has to do with what has been happening in the Catholic Church. The life of the Church changed after Vatican II. And the results have been devastating. The number of priests and religious has declined. There is a generalized loss in terms of religiosity, and something must be done to recover from this situation.

Total freedom destroys society. Men need special help in order to know the way of God and to save his soul. On the other hand, the Pope has revived traditional ideas. He sees where there have been deviations from Tradition and that they need to be corrected. We are perhaps much closer to the Pope's position than we appear to be.

Were you surprised that Benedict XVI seemed to have said he approved of the use of condoms in exceptional cases to fight AIDS?
I was a bit disappointed by what was said in the book. But I was very happy at the clarifications made afterwards. One could see that Rome really wanted to clear up the confusion.

Condoms are not the way to resolve this particular health problem. Condom use violates the nature of the marital act because it prevents the normal outcome of this act.

Family is very important. And the marital act, must, of course, be done within marriage. Thee is a discipline to be respected that once had great value but which has now depreciated.

Do you feel that in this respect you are going against the current in the evolution of society?
Yes, we are well aware of that. But I don't apologize for it. Though sometimes I like to say that others consider us like Martians. But we are not Martians.

And is the goal of your society to join the Church fully?
Yes, we have always maintained that we do not want to be set apart, that we are Catholics and will remain Catholics. We would like Rome to recognize us as true bishops.

However, I think no one now dares to call us schismatic to our face. So if we are not schismatic nor heretic, then we are really Catholic. The Pope has said that the problem now is canonical. So a simple decree from Rome will enable us to come back to the Church. But that will come. I am very optimistic about that.

Which means you would then accept the decisions of Vatican II?
Not as they are. WE are asking that the great ambiguities left by Vatican II be dissipated.

What do you consider as great ambiguities?
First, the idea of religious freedom. Does it mean that every man has the right to choose his religion? God only founded one religion. Then there's ecumenism: Can man be saved through religions other than the Catholic faith? Only the Church founded by Christ can save... [A single session with Benedict XVI should clear up this type of misinterpretations which conform to the most liberal views! I hope the CDF theologians meeting with their FSSPX counterparts are up to clearing these up!]

And yet many religions exist in the world. How can you legitimately deny this?
I know they exist, but they do not achieve what the Catholic religion does. To affirm the Catholic faith, one must rely on what the Church has said before. The course of the Church was well explained in the First Vatican Council. And there is a whole series of exterior signs by which one can recognize the Catholic religion as the true religion. It is a science that must be learned. The ideal, of course, would be to prove the existence of God. We will get there.

A 'routine' year:
Pope's 2011 calendar
holds full slate of events
By John Thavis



VATICAN CITY. Dec. 30 (CNS) -- For Pope Benedict XVI, the 2011 calendar already holds a full slate of meetings, liturgies and foreign trips.

What's not on the calendar -- at least so far -- is a special "year of" or a "year for." In 2008-2009, the Pope declared a Year of St. Paul. He designated 2009-2010 the Year for Priests.

Perhaps 2011 will mark the Year of Business as Usual for the German pontiff, who turns 84 in April.

Unlike the past three years, there's no Synod of Bishops on the horizon in 2011. Most people are not expecting a consistory this year, either [Not too sure about that, since a number of cardinals are turning 80 in 2011], and there is no sign that the Pope plans to convene the world's cardinals at the Vatican for other reasons.

What many people don't appreciate is that the papacy is not just about commemorative years and cardinal summits. "Business as usual" for the Pope means a steady series of events that begins with a New Year's Mass to mark World Peace Day and ends with a "Te Deum" prayer service of thanksgiving Dec. 31.

In between are hundreds of papal encounters with individuals and groups, ranging from heads of state to schoolchildren.

The first half of January is typical. After the New Year's Mass, the pope presides over a liturgy to mark the feast of the Epiphany Jan. 6. Then he celebrates the feast of the Baptism of the Lord Jan. 9 in the Sistine Chapel, personally baptizing more than 10 infants [22 this year. it was announced].

The next day, the Pope shifts gears and delivers his annual "state of the world" address to the diplomatic corps at the Vatican. He's expected to underline his concern over recent acts of violence and discrimination against Christian minorities around the world, which was a main theme of the World Peace Day message this year.

And with that, Pope Benedict will be off and running.

In 2010, the Pope presided over more than 50 major liturgies. Similar celebrations are already penned into the 2011 calendar, at home and abroad. They range from one-hour prayer services to three-hour ordination Masses, and normally include at least two liturgies to proclaim new saints, one in the spring and one in the fall. Already on the canonization list for 2011 is the founder of the Xaverian Missionary Fathers, Blessed Guido Conforti.

Easter arrives very late in 2011 -- April 24 -- and with it comes the heaviest week of liturgies and public appearances by the Pope. Ahead of Easter, the Vatican plans to publish Pope Benedict's new volume in his series on the life of Christ. Titled, Jesus of Nazareth: Part Two, Holy Week: From the Entrance Into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, it picks up where the best-selling first volume left off.

[Not to forget that the week before Easter will be heavy with papal liturgies for Holy Week, and the sixth anniversary of the Pontificate on April 19, and three days before that, his 84th birthday!]

For U.S. bishops, 2011 will bring the start of a series of encounters with the Pope and his aides, the weeklong "ad limina" visits that begin in November. Bishops from Region I in the Northeast will be the first group to arrive at the Vatican Nov. 7, followed by Region II (New York) Nov. 24 and Region III (New Jersey, Pennsylvania) Dec. 1.

The last time U.S. bishops came through Rome on "ad limina" visits was 2004, so for many of them it will be their first major meeting with Pope Benedict.

Throughout the year, the Pope will hold "ad limina" meetings with bishops from other countries: the Philippines, India, Indonesia, Australia, Angola, New Zealand and the Pacific Ocean area.

The Pope will break away from the Vatican on four foreign trips: June 4-5 in Croatia; Aug. 18-21 in Madrid for World Youth Day; Sept. 22-25 in Germany, including the capital of Berlin; and Nov. 18-20 in the West African country of Benin. He'll also make a two-day visit to Venice in May and three other trips in Italy during the year.

At the Vatican, the Pope resumes his weekly audiences every Wednesday, where he has been sketching brief biographies of early church saints, writers and mystics. He normally makes at least one other public appearance each week, greeting pilgrims from his apartment window at midday on Sundays.

In addition to his World Peace Day message, the Pope generally furnishes messages or letters to mark a whole slew of other annual events -- for migrants and refugees, for the sick, for religious, for priestly vocations, for missionaries, for young people, for the hungry and for communicators.

Although Pope Benedict is widely seen as less prolific than Pope John Paul II, his verbal output each year is impressive: about 300 speeches and talks, more than 50 homilies and nearly 100 other missives of varying length and importance. [And most of them, written by himself, especially the homilies, the catecheses, the Angelus mini-homilies, and all major messages and addresses. Just consider what he has to write for the Christmas and Easter liturgies, or for each trip outside Rome! Also, he must work on his Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortations on the Synod on Africa adn the Synod on the Middle East. And suppose he is planning another encyclical? And start Volume 3 of JON on the infancy and childhood of Jesus? This almost-84-year-old is the 'energizer Benny' of Popes!]

In his recent book-length interview, Pope Benedict said the day-in, day-out schedule of the papacy was pretty taxing for someone his age. He spoke openly about his diminishing energy, and even left open the possibility of papal retirement [only in the event he feels he is no longer physically or mentally able to carry out his duties!] -- but as his 2011 calendar makes clear, he's not ready for that yet.

[Also, don't forget, he always springs some major surprise somehow! - Like his first two encyclicals. Perhaps we will get Encyclical #4 in 2011, as he was reported to have started working on it last summer. Both the Year of St. Paul and the Year for Priests were unexpected. As was his trip to Compostela and Barcelona last November... Who knows what he will say and do on his visit to Germany this year? Or at the next World Youth Day? Or the topic for his next catechetical cycle?...With B16, the Pontificate has never been anything less than a thrilling adventure for those of us who follow him...]

Friday, December 31, Seventh Day in the Christmas Octave
Extreme left illustration: Legends about Sylvester claim he fought dragons to save lives. Center panel depicts Emperor Constantine and Pope Sylvester I.
ST. SYLVESTER (Pope Sylvester I, 314-335), Pope and Confessor
For one of the longest-serving Popes, who served during the reign of Emperor Constantine - who was most crucial to the survival and propagation of Christianity in antiquity - very little is known about Sylvester as a person, not even when he was born, though it is known his father was a Roman native. During his Pontificate, the Church emerged from the catacombs; the great basilicas Saint John Lateran, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, the first St. Peter's Basilica, and many cemeterial churches over the tombs of martyrs were built; and the Council of Nicaea was held [which dealt with the Arian heresy once and for all] - all of them made possible because of the Emperor. But it has been noted that only a great and wise Pope could have served for almost a quarter-century in these circumstances, helping to build the Church spiritually and materially in many fundamental ways. The so-called 'donation of Constantine' forged in the sixth century was supposed to have taken place in Sylvester's time: it claims that after Sylvester cured the emperor of leprosy, the latter was so grateful that he confirmed the Pope as primate among all bishops, abandoned Rome to Sylvester, and settled in Constantinople. This fiction was used successfully to support the later doctrine of papal supremacy under which papal auctoritas (authority) guided imperial potestas(power). Sylvester's feast falls on the seventh day of Christmas. In the German-speaking countries, New Year's Eve is popularly called Silvesterabend, and celebrations greeting the New Year are called St. Sylvester parties.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/nab/readings/123110.shtml


OR today.

Benedict XVI issues Vatican norms against money laundering and funding of terrorism:
Financial transparency for the Holy See
Page 1 is dominated by the above news, accompanied by an editorial commentary. The other papal story is his audience for participants of the International Congress of Pueri Cantores (children's choirs). Page 1 international news: US stock market hits highest levels in two years; and international diplomacy is unable to work out a solution to the Ivory Coast crisis. In the inside pages, an essay about Blessed John Henry Newman and his analysis of third-century Christianity as very similar to the crisis of the modern era; and an interview with the Archbishop of Santiago de Compostela, who looks back on the Holy Year of St. James which ends today.


THE POPE'S DAY




The Vatican released the text of a letter written by the Holy Father to Archbishop Julian Barrio Barrio
of Santiago de Compostela to mark the end of the Holy Year of St. James. Letter in Spanish.


And 23 minutes ago, Sydney, as usual, became the first world capital to welcome 2011:






- The Italian media are not as matter-of-fact as the Anglophone news agencies so far about the significance
of the financial and monetary measures decreed by Benedict XVI yesterday, and in fact, many articles today
underscore the revolutionary nature of the reforms.

The year that was
for Pope Benedict XVI

December 31, 2010

During the course of a joint radio and television interview early in his reign, Benedict XVI made a remark to the effect that he would not likely do much travelling as Pope. Nevertheless, his Apostolic voyages were among the most important highlights of the year, 2010.

A visit to the island of Cyprus – part of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land - to present the instrumentum laboris for the Extraordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops for the Middle East, took place in Rome in October, where he spoke of the changeless mission of the Church:

---

We are called to overcome our differences, to bring peace and reconciliation where there is conflict, to offer the world a message of hope. We are called to reach out to those in need, generously sharing our earthly goods with those less fortunate than ourselves. And we are called to proclaim unceasingly the death and resurrection of the Lord, until he comes. Through him, with him and in him, in the unity that is the Holy Spirit’s gift to the Church, let us give honour and glory to God our heavenly Father in the company of all the angels and saints who sing his praises for ever.

---

The Pope made another to Malta, in the footsteps of St Paul, during which he returned to the fundamental truth of Christian living:

---

More than any of the cargo we might carry with us – in terms of our human accomplishments, our possessions, our technology – it is our relationship with the Lord that provides the key to our happiness and our human fulfilment. And he calls us to a relationship of love.

---

The Holy Father also made a pilgrimage to Portugal to mark the 10th anniversary of the beatification of Jacinta and Francisco Marto, the younger two of the child visionaries of Fatima; and a pilgrimage to Spain, with stops in Santiago de Compostela, to mark the Year of St. James, and in Barcelona to consecrate the Basilica of La Sagrada Familia.

Each of these events was a powerful moment of apostolic witness and integral to the Pope’s pastoral plan for the renewal and revitalization of the Church’s basic mission – to make the Gospel known to all the nations and peoples of the world.

It was, however, the historic state visit to the United Kingdom, that was the highlight of the Pope’s travels in 2010, and the high point of that Apostolic journey was the beatification of John Henry Cardinal Newman:

---

Cardinal Newman’s motto, Cor ad cor loquitur, or “Heart speaks unto heart”, gives us an insight into his understanding of the Christian life as a call to holiness, experienced as the profound desire of the human heart to enter into intimate communion with the Heart of God. He reminds us that faithfulness to prayer gradually transforms us into the divine likeness.

---

Cardinal Newman was a model Christian, and also a model citizen – and the profound historical connection between Christian faith and responsible citizenship was a major theme of Pope Benedict’s historic address at Westminster Hall:

---

The central question at issue, then, is this: where is the ethical foundation for political choices to be found? The Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation. According to this understanding, the role of religion in political debate is not so much to supply these norms, as if they could not be known by non-believers – still less to propose concrete political solutions, which would lie altogether outside the competence of religion – but rather to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles.

---

The Holy Father went on frankly to discuss the damage that a distorted notion of religion, and mangled reason can and have done to society – citing the slave trade and 20th century totalitarianism as just two of the many disastrous effects of degenerate reason and warped religion.

---

This is why I would suggest that the world of reason and the world of faith – the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief – need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilization.

The good of our civilization: the civilization that has longest and most basically been shaped by the Gospel; the Pope’s plan for renewal and revitalization includes those areas of culture and civilization, which first received the Good News long ago – a plan, the implementation of which took a major step forward with the creation this year of a new Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization.

---

The Holy Father also released his Post-synodal Exhortation on the Word of God in the life and mission of the Church. Titled Dei verbum, the 300-page document is the longest and most sustained Papal treatment of sacred scripture as a vessel of divine revelation in the post-Conciliar period.

Then, there was the impact of the Pope’s personal encounters with the faithful. During 2010, Pope Benedict met with 2,272,650 people through audiences, liturgies, Angelus and Regina caeli prayers.

In scores of meetings with Catholic bishops come from around the world to make their ad limina visits, and with leaders of Churches and communities not yet in full communion with the Church, the Holy Father carried out his mission of strengthening the brethren and presiding in love.

Earlier, the Italian service of Vatican Radio had this report:

At least 2.3 million faithful
saw the Pope at the Vatican
and Castel Gandolfo in 2010
Translated from the Italian service of

December 31, 2010

Aboult 2,300,000 took part in 2010 in public events with the Pope at the Vatican and Castel Gandolfo, an increase of 30,000 compared to the figures in 2009, according to the Prefecture of the Pontifical Household.

Data is based on the number of tickets given out for specific audiences and estimates for crowds at non-ticketed events. ]But even the number used for ticketed events does not take into account the usual attendance by a significant number of persons without tickets in St. Peter's Square.] Such occasions in St. Peter's Square include the Angelus and Regina caeli, general audiences, and liturgical celebrations.

The breakdown for the 2010 data is: general audiences 493,000; special and private audiences 178,000; liturgical celebrations 381,000; and Angelus/Regina caeli 1,200,000.

The figures do not include the crowds drawn by the Pontiff during his visits to Roman parishes, within Italy, and to other countries - figures which have always surpassed expectations.



Most under-reported
Vatican stories of 2010

Dec. 31, 2010


If it’s true that the only thing worse than negative publicity is no publicity, then 2010 was a banner year for the Vatican. It opened with a sexual abuse crisis in Ireland that would sweep across Europe and put the personal record of Benedict XVI under a spotlight, and it ended with frenzy over the pope’s comments on condoms and various Vatican efforts to explain what Benedict did, and didn’t, mean.

[Why does Allen end his 2010 reckoning with Condomania #2 which erupted in late November, and like the Regensburg lecture, had a heated burst of attention that lasted only two weeks though it seems much longer for all the heat and fury invested into it?...What happened to the Message for World Peace Day, the address to the Roman Curia, the Christmas Day messages and the revolutionary financial measures at year's end?]

The Religion Newswriters Association, made up of beat reporters in the United States, ranked the sexual abuse crisis the third-biggest religion story of the year, behind the New York mosque controversy and faith-based relief efforts in Haiti. That’s quite something, given that the crisis of 2010 wasn’t even primarily an American story. [Yeah, yeah, but anything that makes the Vatican look bad is 'big news' enough for many journalists, and not just in the US!]

To be fair, the year’s news wasn’t all bad for the Holy See. Arguably the highlight of 2010 from the Pope’s point of view came in September, when his improbably triumphant trip to the United Kingdom also drew wide international interest. ['Improbably triumphant'? Did we learn nothing from Benedict XVI's earlier 'pre-judged to be disastrous' foreign visits? Despite the viciousness of UK secularists, faithful followers of the Pope acknowledged in our hearts the possibility, not probability, of untoward incidents during the visit, but were more confident that Benedict XVI would once again come through with grace and triumph, but humbly, without triumphalism, as he did!]

As is always the case when a few massive narratives dominate coverage, other storylines tend to slip through the cracks. Herewith, my annual run-down of the “Top Five Under-Reported Vatican Stories of the Year” – five stories with important implications for the Vatican and the way it thinks about the world, which didn’t get the traction they deserve.

5. The Boffo Case
What Italians call the giallo, literally meaning “yellow” but used to refer to a mystery, surrounding Italian Catholic journalist Dino Boffo first erupted in 2009. Facing accusations that he had harassed a woman because he wanted to pursue a gay affair with her lover [husband, not lover, to be accurate], Boffo resigned as editor of L’Avvenire [Dear John, it is simply Avvenire, not L'Avvenire!], the newspaper of the Italian bishops, in September 2009. Boffo denied the charges, but said he stepped down to spare the bishops the embarrassment.

In mid-January 2010, the case reignited after revelations that a purported police document about Boffo was a fake. Speculation ensued in the Italian press about who was behind it, which congealed into the following hypothesis: The Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, wanted to get rid of Boffo because he was associated with Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the former president of the Italian bishops and Bertone’s rival for preeminence in Italy. Bertone supposedly enlisted the editor of the Vatican newspaper and the head of the Vatican gendarmes in the plot. A fake document was cooked up and passed to allies in the secular press, who proceeded to smear Boffo and ensure his demise.

In reality, that reconstruction never passed the “smell test” – to begin with, the Secretary of State has far less complicated ways of sacking the editor of L’Avvenire [AVVENIRE!] – but it captivated the country for a full 18 days before the Vatican made any comment. Under the rubric of silence signifies consent, many Italians concluded that it must all be true. When the Vatican spokesperson was finally authorized to reject the accusations, one Italian paper carried the following banner headline, which seemed to capture the moment: “The Vatican Denies Everything, No One Believes It.”

Aside from exercising a kind of macabre fascination, like train wrecks and NASCAR pile-ups, the Boffo case confirmed that the Vatican remains remarkably slow and ambivalent with regard to the dynamics of public opinion in the 21st century.

Especially among Italians, the fact that the Vatican let the Boffo case spin so far out of control also cemented impressions of a crisis of governance under Bertone. Remedying that crisis may figure prominently on the “to-do” list of many cardinals the next time they gather to elect a Pope. [???? Does that mean they will take care to stay away from Bertone? For all his 'bluster', however, I don't think Bertone has ambitions in that respect. Not that anyone - other than Cardinal Tettamanzi before the 2005 Conclave - openly makes known his ambition to be Pope!]

As a footnote, Boffo has been more or less rehabilitated. In October, he was named the director of TV2000, the official television network of the Italian bishops. [It was one of the three positions he held when he resigned. he was also director of RadioBlu, the CEI radio network. Inasmuch as I tried my best to keep the Forum informed and up to date on the Boffo case, followers of the Forum will be familiar with the details.]

4. Scandals at Propaganda Fide and the Vatican Bank
In 2010, two venerable Vatican institutions, the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples (the department for missionary activity still known by its old name, Propaganda Fide) and the Institute for the Works of Religion (popularly called the Vatican Bank), faced accusations of financial shenanigans.

For centuries, Propaganda Fide has been a financial empire all to itself, owning scads of prime real estate and managing large bank accounts in order to fund overseas missions. The cardinal-prefect is informally dubbed the “Red Pope,” a reference to the power and influence those resources generate. (The Italian newspaper Libero has estimated the market value of the congregation’s real estate holdings, which reportedly include 761 buildings, 445 sets of grounds, and 2,325 apartments, at roughly $1.7 billion.)

Many observers have long believed that the wealth of Propaganda Fide, coupled with its near-total autonomy, made it ripe for a financial scandal, and 2010 turned out to be the year those chickens came home to roost.

In June, Italian prosecutors announced that Italian Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe of Naples, who headed Propaganda Fide from 2001 to 2006, is the target of an anti-corruption probe. The theory is that Sepe gave Italian politicians sweetheart deals on apartments at the same time that millions of Euros in state funds were allocated for remodeling projects at Propaganda Fide, including its headquarters in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna.

In effect, the suggestion is that Sepe bribed public officials to fund work that in some instances was never completed.

As of this writing, an investigation by Italian prosecutors is on-going. Sepe has declared his innocence, saying, “I acted solely for the good of the Church.”

At the Vatican Bank, meanwhile, some $30 million in assets was seized by civil authorities in September for violations of European anti-money laundering laws. Although bank officials have described the case as a “misunderstanding”, recently released court documents show prosecutors suspect that clergy with accounts at the bank may be involved in laundering money for corrupt businessmen and even the Italian mob.

One brief filed by prosecutors in November states that while the bank has expressed a “generic will” to conform to international standards, “there is no sign that the institutions of the Catholic church are moving in that direction.”

In an effort to combat those impressions, the Vatican yesterday announced the creation of a new financial watchdog, the “Authority for Financial Information,” to supervise all transactions, including those of the Vatican Bank. Benedict XVI issued a motu proprio, or legal document, creating the new authority, which is designed to put the Vatican in compliance with international standards against money-laundering, financing terrorism, insider trading and market abuse.

The new authority reportedly will be headed by Cardinal Attilio Nicora, a financial expert who negotiated the 1984 revision to the concordat between the Vatican and Italy.

The lay president of the Vatican Bank, Italian economist Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, has repeatedly expressed his commitment to transparency; indeed, most Vatican-watchers saw his appointment in 2009 as a signal that Benedict XVI wanted a “glasnost” in Vatican finances.

Both the Propaganda Fide and the Vatican Bank scandals illustrate two broad points.

First, the era of broad civil deference to ecclesiastical authority is over. These days, police and prosecutors aren’t reluctant at all to target the Church, a point also brought home in June by police raids against the Catholic church in Belgium as part of a sex abuse probe, which included drilling holes in the tombs of two former archbishops of Brussels.

Second, the Vatican finds itself between a rock and a hard place when it comes to cooperation with secular authorities. On the one hand, it faces a 21st century world in which the Vatican is expected to be accountable before the law like any other institution.

On the other, it has an internal culture shaped by centuries of battles to resist civil interference, and an evangelical ethos resistant to being co-opted by secularism. Some old Vatican hands are skeptical of Gotti Tedeschi’s “glasnost” precisely on the grounds that it risks surrendering the independence for which Popes in previous centuries struggled so mightily. That rock-and-hard-place dynamic would seem to augur more church/state battles to come.

[Yes, but this much-commented 'skepticism among old Vatican hands' is always raised by Vatican journalists without naming any names. It almost sounds like a conveninent but fictional scapegoat. What does it matter what these anonymous worms in the woodwork think if the authorities who head the Vatican organisms adhere to the letter and spirit of Benedict XVI's leadership in all matters? Now that only a couple of top Curial positions remain in the hands of persons not originally appointed by Benedict XVI, one must believe he has not appointed his own men to head the Roman Curia in vain!]

Finally, the eruption of these financial scandals is also likely to increase pressure for good governance in the Church, not only in the Vatican but in dioceses, parishes, and other Catholic institutions around the world.

In the States, groups such as the Leadership Roundtable on Church Management have a new card to play in their conversations with bishops and pastors: “Do you want to be the next Sepe?”

3. Europe and the Crucifix
Speaking of Church/state battles, in November [of 2009!, not 2010], the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the display of crucifixes in Italian public schools is a violation of “confessional neutrality” and ordered the Italian government to pay a complaining parent roughly $6,500 in damages. If upheld on appeal, the ruling could establish a broad European standard against the display of religious (mostly, to be honest, Christian) symbols in public spaces.

The decision galvanized wide opposition in Italy, where the crucifix is generally seen as a symbol of national identity. It also fueled resentment about faceless European bureaucrats imposing their will on member states.

Italy filed an appeal, which has been joined by Armenia, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Lithuania, Malta, Monaco, Romania, Russia and San Marino. A final decision is expected in early 2011, though observers caution against expecting a dramatic reversal, given that many of the same judges from the first round also sit on the court of appeals.

Seen through Vatican eyes, the crucifix case has cemented two broad impressions.

First, it’s strengthened a conviction that the European Union is in the grip of a runaway secularism hostile to the Catholic Church. Among other things, that has accelerated the demise of antique anti-Americanism in the Vatican; today, most senior personnel in the Vatican, including Pope Benedict XVI himself, look longingly across the water at what they regard as a more religion-friendly culture in the United States.

Second, it’s contributed to the transition from “inter-religious” to “inter-cultural” dialogue as the primary model for engaging other religions. The idea is that while different religions cannot come to theological agreement, they face many of the same social, cultural and political pressures, especially vis-à-vis secular efforts to drive religion from the public square. [DUH! It's one of the very first arguments - quite self-evident, actually - that I found myself raising constantly against Allen who always thought otherwise! Has he finally come around to it, then?]

On that front, it’s telling that the lawyer representing the Vatican before the European Court of Human Rights is actually Jewish: Joseph Weiler, who was born in South Africa and who now teaches at the NYU School of Law. [I believe he is an amicus curiae, a friendly advocate in favor of the Italian position, not exactly 'the' lawyer for the Vatican, which is not even part of the suit!]

2. The Synod for the Middle East
Granted, synods of bishops are rarely the stuff of high drama. More often than not, they’re reminiscent of what Oscar Wilde once said about the problem with Socialism: “It takes up too many evenings.”

In some ways, the Oct. 1-24 Synod for the Middle East was a case in point. The assembly produced 44 propositions, a 5,000-word final message, and a tidal wave of speeches, without any appreciable impact on the situation on the ground. Christians were an endangered species in the Middle East before the bishops gathered in Rome, and they remain so afterwards. [Did anyone in his right mind really expect that two weeks of meetings in the Vatican would change the situation in the Middle East, when more than six decades of UN 'good intentions' and huffing and puffing every American President and administration since Truman have failed to do that!]

In fact, the only development with any bite as a news story was actually a distraction. In a concluding news conference, a Greek Melkite archbishop from Massachusetts told reporters that Christ had “nullified” the notion of Israel as a “promised land” for Jews, triggering accusations of both theological and political anti-Semitism. While those comments made for good news copy, they hardly represented the dominant thrust of discussion.

As a result, the synod was largely a missed opportunity to tell the most dramatic Christian story anywhere in the world. In the Middle East, Christians have shrunk from 20 percent of the population a century ago to maybe five percent today, yet they’re desperately trying to punch above their weight.

Their great dream is to catalyze a democratic revolution across the region – pressing Israel to better integrate its Arab minority, and Islamic societies to make their peace with modernity. It’s a vision that unites Catholics with an ecumenical smorgasbord of other Christians, not to mention like-minded Muslims and Jews.

If that vision fails, not only will Christianity face extinction in the land of its birth, but the most natural human bridge between the West and the Muslim world will collapse.

The synod actually generated some interesting ideas toward that great dream. They included concrete ways of overcoming the traditional turf wars among the seven Catholic rites of the Middle East (Armenian, Chaldean, Coptic, Latin, Maronite, Melkite and Syrian), empowering the local patriarchs, and strengthening ties between local Christians and their diaspora communities abroad.

The bishops of the Middle East, typically known for a soft approach to Islam, also flirted with a more realistic line, pushing beyond the “tea and cookies” stage of dialogue into blunt talk about pluralism, reciprocity and the perils of Islamization.

Bottom line: If there’s any Christian community on the planet that merits the concern of Catholics in the West, especially in America given the influence of the United States in the region, it’s in the Middle East. An opportunity to build that awareness was all but missed this year, as the synod flew below radar until the very end, and then drew notice only for a sideshow.

1. Christianophobia
Strictly speaking, “Christianophobia,” referring to anti-Christian intolerance and persecution around the world, isn’t really a Vatican story. After all, the 108 acres of the Vatican city-state are probably the safest bit of real estate for Christians on the planet.

Yet what many experts regard as a rising global tide of anti-Christian animus carries enormous, and often under-appreciated, consequences for the Vatican’s priorities and the way it thinks about the world.

The term “Christophobia” was coined by Weiler to refer to the growing marginalization of Christians in secular Europe. Modified into “Christianophobia,” it entered the European lexicon in 2004 when Italian politician Rocco Buttiglione was blackballed as European Commission of Justice over his orthodox Catholic views on abortion and homosexuality.

The United Nations Human Rights Commission now recognizes “anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and Christianophobia” as forms of religious intolerance.

“Christianophobia” has since become a broader concept, referring to anti-Christian oppression wherever it occurs, including its violent forms – and around the world, it occurs with stunning frequency.

Aid to the Church in Need, a German-based Catholic aid agency, produces a widely trusted annual report on global threats to religious freedom. It estimates that somewhere between 75 percent and 85 percent of all acts of religious persecution are directed against Christians.

In a report to the European Parliament last month, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life said that while Muslims and Jews face significant persecution, “Christians faced some sort of harassment in two-thirds of all countries,” or 133 states.

Those statistics are fleshed out by headlines almost every day.

This Christmas season alone, scores of Catholic Masses were cancelled in Iraq due to threats from extremist groups. Since the first Gulf War in 1991, Iraq has lost two-thirds of what was once among the largest Christian populations in the Middle East.

In China, a new crackdown on the Church is in full swing, as the government has orchestrated elections for a rump bishops’ conference and an assembly of Catholics calculated to preserve state control. Some clergy were herded into those elections virtually at gunpoint.

In Vietnam, a Catholic bishop was banned from celebrating Christmas Mass in the country’s mountain region, reportedly because of his success in converting the Montagnards, a cluster of ethnic groups often stigmatized and seen as potential threats by other Vietnamese.

In the Philippines, Muslim extremists attacked a Catholic chapel on the island of Jolo on Christmas Day. It was merely the latest assault on Jolo, where a bomb exploded inside the local cathedral in July 2009, killing six and wounding forty.

In Nigeria, fighting between Christians and Muslims in the northern city of Jos over the Christmas period has reportedly left at least 80 people dead.

Christianophobia is on the rise for a whole cocktail of reasons. Part of it is simple math: There are 2.3 billion Christians in the world, the largest following of any religion, so in terms of raw numbers there are simply more Christians to oppress.

That’s especially true as Christianity’s center of gravity shifts to the developing world, where democracy and the rule of law are sometimes conspicuous by their absence.

Because of the historical association between Christianity and the West, Christians are often convenient targets for individuals and groups expressing anti-Western rage. In some cases, too, the logic is exquisitely local.

In India, a disproportionate share of Christian converts come from the “untouchable” Dalit community, so it’s often difficult to disentangle specifically Christian persecution from older caste prejudice. (A similar point could be made about the Montagnards in Vietnam).

A spike in anti-Christian backlash shapes Vatican attitudes in three ways.

First, it eats up an increasing share of time and attention. To explain why the Vatican isn’t in a full, upright and locked position on the sex abuse crisis, the priest shortage, the health care debate in the States, or whatever the issue du jour is, part of the logic is straight out of Maslow: When there’s a perceived threat to survival, it’s tough to move on to higher-order aims.

Second, it’s become a prism through which Vatican personnel see everything else. For instance, if you want to know why Pope Benedict XVI has not imposed a uniform global policy of cooperation with civil authorities on sex abuse cases, it’s partly because such a requirement would be a death sentence in parts of the world where police and prosecutors are quite openly out to get the Church.

Third, Christianophobia is a primary reason that reciprocity and religious freedom have claimed pride of place among the Vatican’s geopolitical priorities. In recent years, diplomats accredited to the Holy See say their opposite numbers in the Vatican seem focused like a laser beam on religious freedom, sometimes leading them to slow down on other fronts, such as anti-poverty efforts, conflict resolution, etc.

That’s been a source of concern in diplomatic circles, and it’s sometimes perceived as part of the crisis of governance under Bertone. Yet it’s also related to the point made above: when survival is perceived to be on the line, at least in some parts of the world, it tends to blot other priorities out of the sky.

While individual anti-Christian incidents often attracted wide coverage in 2010, both the scope of the phenomenon and its impact on Vatican psychology were often left out of the picture.

[There are two other other blatant aspects of contemporary Christianophobia that Allen leaves out in what is otherwise a very good presentation of the issue - and the two aspects are related.

The first is the virus of political correctness that appears to have infested the brains of so many liberals in pandemic proportions - according to which everyone must be punctiliously mindful of the sensitivities of minorities. but turn the other cheek when everyone else assails Christianity and Christians with gleeful viciousness!

Emblematic of this is the never-ending, sometimes escalating, anti-Christmas animus by fanatic secularists and atheists who have brought their 'scorched earth' anti-Christian campaign to schoolchildren everywhere - while happily availing themselves of the days off work and other positive things that come with the celebration of the Christmas season.

The second is the physical fear of violent retaliation, including death, from Muslim extremists who are ready to take umbrage at the slightest pretext for anything a Christian says that they consider to be an insult to their religion.

And BTW, insofar as reporting adequately on the above stories, I would like to think that this Forum has not been remiss in any way.]

POPE'S LETTER TO MARK
THE CLOSE OF COMPOSTELA'S
HOLY YEAR OF ST. JAMES
Translated from

---

To my Venerated Brother
Mons. Julián Barrio Barrio
Metropolitan Archbishop of
Santiago de Compostela

1. On the occasion of the solemn closing of the 2010 Holy Year in Compostela, I recall with emotion the home of the Apostle James which I visited recently with profound interior joy.

I wish to join in giving thanks to God for the gifts that his goodness has bestowed these months on the multitudes who have come on pilgrimage to that holy place with loving faith, renewing their firm adherence to the message handed down to us by the Apostles and experiencing the encounter with the mercy and love of Jesus Christ in a spirit of penitence.

In affectionately greeting the pastors, religious, seminarians and faithful congregated for this occasion, evoking those unforgettable moments that we shared together at the tomb of the first Apostle Martyr, I wish to address them with words of encouragement, that the fruits of Christian life and ecclesial renewal that were harvested abundantly in this Holy Year may impel everyone who comes to Santiago de Compostela to be real witnesses to the Risen Christ.

2. Indeed, on their journey, they shared their concerns, hopes and challenges with the brothers and sisters at their side who, like them, seek to listen to God who speaks to us and dwells within us, so that we may come out of ourselves and open up to our fellowmen.

At the Portal of Glory in Compostela, Christ's loving and welcoming majesty awaits them, in whose light man can find the authentic sense of his existence and the path to peaceful and constructive coexistence among peoples.

Under the serene gaze of the Apostle, they renew their faith, sing his glory, and humbly confess their sins. The profession of faith is followed by receiving forgiveness in the sacrament of Penance and the encounter with the Lord in the Eucharist.

3. Such an encounter cannot leave them indifferent. Pilgrims return to their homes as the disciples of Emmaus returned to Jerusalem, after having conversed with Jesus along the way and recognized him when he broke bread with them.

Joyful and grateful, they returned to the Holy City to communicate to everyone that Christ had risen and had appeared to them alive. Thus they became joyful and confident messengers of the living Christ, who is balsam for our pains and the foundation of our hope (cf Lk 24,13-35).

Likewise today, pilgrims leaving Compostela after having experienced the welcoming love of the Lord, will also feel the desire to fulfill the counsel of the Apostle Peter: "Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts. Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope" (1 Pt 3,15).

This requires that we strengthen our faith everyday, participating assiduously in the mysteries of grace entrusted to the Church, and giving effective and concrete examples of charity.

We shall not be credible witnesses of God if we are not faithful co-workers and servants of other men. This service to a profound comprehension and a courageous defense of man is demanded by the Gospel and an essential contribution to society of our Christian condition.

4. With these sentiments, I wish to address myself now to the young, whom I shall have the good fortune to join next year in Madrid, for the celebration of World Youth Day.

I invite them to let themselves be interpellated by Christ and to establish with him a frank and deliberate dialog, while asking themselves: Can the Lord count on me to be his apostle in the world, to be a messenger of his love? May they not lack for generosity in their response, nor that impulse which made James follow the Master without counting the sacrifices.

In the same way, I wish to urge seminarians to identify more and more with Jesus who has called them to work in his vineyard (cf Mt 20,3-4). Vocation to the priesthood is an admirable gift of which one must be proud because the world needs persons dedicated totally to making Jesus Christ present, especially by configuring one's life and work to him, humbling repeating his words and actions daily, so that he may appear in him for the flock which has been given to his care.

Because in this lie the labors as well as the glory of priests, whom, along with St. Paul, I wish to remind, that nothing and no one will be able to separate us from the love of God that is manifested in Christ (cf Rom 8,39).

5. With the memory of my most gratifying visit to Compostela alive in my spirit, I ask the Lord that the forgiveness and the aspiration for holiness that have germinated during this Holy Year in Compostela may help to make more present, under the guidance of St. James, the redeeming Word of Jesus Christ in your local Church and in all the towns and cities of Spain, and that his light may be perceived equally in the rest of Europe as an incessant invitation to reinvigorate her Christian roots, thus potentiating her commitment to solidarity and the firm defense of human dignity.

6. To the loving protection of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, in whom, tradition tells us, the Apostle James confided all his sorrows and joys, I commend all the sons and daughters of your noble land and impart on them the Apostolic Blessing as a token of comfort and of constant divine assistance.

From the Vatican
December 18, 2010

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VESPERS WITH YEAR-END
THANKSGIVING, TE DEUM
AND EUCHARISTIC BENEDICTION



Libretto cover: Adoration of the Baby Jesus, Andrea della Robbia, 15th-cent. ciborium, Cathedral of Barga (Lucca)




Pope prays for families
in financial difficulties
at year-end Vatican service



VATICAN CITY, Dec. 31 (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI marked the final hours of 2010 on Friday with public prayer and a word of concern for families struggling with economic troubles.

Benedict gave thanks for God's grace and love throughout the year as he presided over a traditional New Year's Eve Vespers service in St. Peter's Basilica.

He offered praise for volunteers who work with the downtrodden and spoke of his concern for those suffering economic woes.

"The current moment still generates worry for the precariousness in which so many families live," Benedict said. He said the tough times require solidarity "with those who live in conditions of poverty or deprivation."

He was philosophical about the year's passing.

"At the end of this year, 2010, before leaving its days and hours to God and his just and merciful judgment, I feel a very strong need in my heart to elevate our thanks to Him and his love for us," said Benedict during his homily.

A choir solemnly sang hymns of praise and ministers sprinkled incense around the flower-bedecked altar as the Pope stood silently with his hands folded in prayer.

The 83-year-old Pope will return to the basilica at midmorning Saturday to celebrate Mass on New Year's Day, which the Vatican dedicates to world peace.



Here is a translation of the Holy Father's homily:

---

Dear brothers and sisters:

At the end of a year, we find ourselves together here in the Vatican basilica to celebrate the First Vespers of the Solemnity of Mary, the Most Blessed Mother of God, and to raise a hymn of thanksgiving to the Lord for the numerous graces that he has given us, but also and above all, for Grace in person, the living and personal gift of the Father, his beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

This gratitude for the gifts received from God in the time we are given helps us to discover the great treasure inscribed in time: in its annual, monthly, weekly and daily rhythms, it is inhabited by the love of God, by his gifts of grace - it is a time of salvation.

Yes, the eternal God has entered and remains in man's time. He has entered and remains in the person of Jesus, the Son of God made man, Savior of the world.

It is what the Apostle Paul reminded us in the brief reading just proclaimed: "But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son... so that we might receive adoption" (Gal 4,4-5).

And so, the Eternal has entered time and renews it at the root, freeing man from sin and making him a child of God. Already 'from the beginning', that is, with the creation of the world and man in the world, the eternity of God has made time flower in which human history runs from generation to generation.

And with the coming of Christ and his Redemption, we are 'in the fullness' of time. As St. Paul points out, with Jesus, time is filled, it reaches its fulfillment, acquiring the significance of salvation and grace intended by God before the creation of the world.

Christmas recalls to us this 'fullness' of time, that renewing salvation that Jesus brought to all men. It recalls this to us, and mysteriously but really, it always gives it back to us afresh.

Yes, our human time is laden with evil, with sufferings, with tragedy of every kind - those provoked by the man's malice and those that come from unfortunate natural events - but it now includes, definitively and indelibly, the joyous and liberating novelty of Christ the Savior.

And it is particularly in the Baby of Bethlehem that we can contemplate, in a specially luminous and eloquent way, the intersection of eternity with time, as the liturgy of the Church likes to express it.

Christmas makes us find God in the humble and weak flesh of a baby. Is there not here perhaps an invitation to find the presence of God and his love which gives salvation even in the brief and demanding hours of our daily life? Is it not perhaps an invitation to discover that our human time - even in difficult and oppressive moments - is incessantly enriched by the graces of the Lord, or rather, by the Grace that the Lord is himself?

At the end of the year 2010, before consigning its days and hours to God and his just and merciful justice, I feel much more in my heart the need to raise our thanks to him and to his love for us.

In this atmosphere of gratitude, I wish to address a special greeting to the Cardinal Vicar [of Rome], to the auxiliary Bishops, to the priests and consecrated persons, as well as to so many lay faithful who are gathered here. I greet the honorable Mayor and the other authorities present. And a special greeting goes to all those who are in difficulty and have to spend these days of celebration in unfortunate circumstances.

To each and everyone, I assure my affectionate thoughts and prayers.

Dear brothers and sisters, our Church in Rome is committed to help all baptized persons to faithfully live the vocation they have received and to bear witness to the beauty of the faith. In order to be authentic disciples of Christ, an essential aid comes to us from daily meditation on the Word of God which, as I wrote in the recent Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Domini, is "the basis for authentic Christian spirituality" (No. 86).

Therefore, I encourage everyone to cultivate an intense relationship with it, particularly through lectio divina, in order to have the light necessary to discern the signs of God in the present time and to proclaim the Gospel effectively.

Even in Rome, in fact, there is always need for a renewed announcement of the Gospel so that the hearts of the residents of our city may ge open to an encounter with that Baby who was born for us - with Christ, the Redeemer of man.

Since, as the Apostle Paul reminds us, "Faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ" (Rom 10,17), a useful aid in this evangelizing activity can come - as it was already experienced during the Citizens' Mission in preparation for the Great Jubilee of 2000 - from the 'Gospel listening centers' which encourage and revitalize evangelization not only in residences, but also in hospitals, in workplaces and wherever the new generations are formed and where culture is elaborated.

The Word of God, in fact, became flesh for everyone, and his truth is accessible to every man and every culture. I have appreciated the recent effort of the Vicariate of Rome in organizing 'Dialogs in the Cathedral' which will take place in the Basilica of St John Lateran. These important events express the desire of the Church to meet everyone who seeks answers to the great questions of human existence.

The privileged place to listen to the Word of God is the Eucharistic celebration. The diocesan convention last June, in which I participated, aimed to underscore the centrality of Sunday Mass in the life of every Christian community, and offered indications in order that the beauty of divine mysteries can shine better in the celebratory act and the spiritual fruits that come from it.

I encourage parishioners and priests to carry out what the pastoral plan indicates: the formation of a liturgical group to animate the Mass, and a catechesis that helps everyone to better learn about the Eucharistic mystery, from which testimony to charity can flow.

Nourished by Christ, we too are drawn to his act of total offering in which the Lord gave his own life, thus revealing the immense love of the Father. The testimony of charity possesses an essential theological dimension which is profoundly united to the announcement of the Word.

In this celebration of thanksgiving to God for the gifts received during the year, I remember the visit I made to the Caritas hostel at Stazione Termini [Rome's central train station], where, through the service and generous dedication of numerous volunteers, so many men and women can touch first-hand the love of God.

At present, there is still great concern for the precariousness most families face and the entire diocesan community is called on to be near to those who live in conditions of poverty and discomfort. May God, infinite love, inflame the heart of each of us with that charity which led him to give us his only begotten Son.

Dear brothers and sisters, we are asked to look at the future, and to look at it with that hope referred to in the final words of the Te Deum: In te, Domine, speravi: non confundar in aeternum! - Lord, you are our hope, let us never be confounded.

And she who gives us Christ, our hope, is the Mother of God, Mary most holy. As she did to the shepherds and the Magi, her arms, and even more, her heart, continue to offer to the world Jesus her Son and our Savior. In him lies all our hope, because from him, salvation and peace have come for every man. Amen!

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