News/International

WASHINGTON - NATO’s military campaign against Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi is giving rise to concerns that the effort’s goals remain unclear and will likely lead to a lengthy standoff between the longtime autocrat and rebel forces with innocent civilians caught in the middle.

The concerns revolve around whether the campaign is meant primarily to protect the rebels and their civilian supporters from indiscriminate attacks by troops loyal to Gadhafi or to remove the Libyan leader in the hope that democratic reforms follow.

Guiding the discussion is a relatively new concept in international relations characterized as the responsibility to protect — R2P in diplomatic shorthand. The concept, based on ethical concerns, has evolved over the past 20 years following strife-ridden periods in Somalia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in which civilian casualties mounted during internal conflicts as the world stood by idly.

VATICAN CITY - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas held talks with Pope Benedict as well as with Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, and Archbishop Dominique Mamberti June 3, the Vatican's foreign minister.

The Vatican said the talks were "cordial" and focused on "the troubled situation in the Holy Land," according to a written Vatican statement released after the meeting.

Particular emphasis was put "on the urgent need to find a just and lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one capable of ensuring respect for the rights of all and, therefore, the attainment of the Palestinian people's legitimate aspirations for an independent state," the Vatican statement said.

MADRID - Spain’s National Court has invoked a special law to order the arrest and trial of 20 former Salvadoran military officers for the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter.

Five of the six Jesuits were naturalized Salvadorans of Spanish birth. In announcing the charges, the Spanish court invoked its universal jurisdiction law, which says that some crimes are so grave they can be tried anywhere.

Issuing an indictment May 20, Judge Eloy Velasco Nunez said El Salvador’s juridical process “was a defective and widely criticized process that ended with two forced convictions and acquittals even of confessed killers.” Among those he indicted were a former Salvadoran defense minister.

A 1993 UN Truth Commission report said high-ranking Salvadoran military officials were responsible for ordering the murders and ordered a cover-up.

SAN FRANCISCO - San Francisco Archbishop George Niederauer called a proposed ban on circumcision that qualified for the Nov. 8 ballot in San Francisco "a misguided initiative" and "an unconscionable violation of the sanctuaries of faith and family" by the city.

The archbishop made his comments in a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle that appeared May 25. He expressed support for an opinion piece by Rabbi Gil Leeds published in the newspaper May 20, three days after the San Francisco Department of Elections validated the 7,743 signatures needed to qualify the initiative for the ballot.

The initiative would ban circumcision for any male under 18 except in cases of medical necessity. It says that religious belief could not be used as an exception to the law and violators could be fined up to $1,000 and imprisoned for up to one year.

JOPLIN, Mo. - A Catholic hospital in Joplin that took a direct hit from a category-F4 tornado that struck the city May 22 has made plans to get back to normal as soon as possible.

Five patients and one visitor at St. John's Regional Medical Centre lost their lives in the twister, but 183 other patients were evacuated to other facilities in Missouri and Arkansas.

"A number of Mercy caregivers themselves were injured," said a May 23 statement issued by the hospital. "Their selfless efforts put their patients first and resulted in a timely and orderly evacuation."

The six fatalities recorded at St. John's, a health care ministry of the Sisters of Mercy, were included in the total of 125 confirmed dead by early May 25, and is expected to climb. The number injured in the storm was 1,150 and news reports say there are up to 1,500 people unaccounted for.

"Our first priority is to the community of Joplin and to ensure that our patients, families and co-workers are safe and receiving the best care possible. We are grateful for your support as we work together to assist the Joplin community," the hospital said.

"Please know that Mercy remains committed to the Joplin community, both in the short-term and long-term," the statement said. "We are evaluating interim approaches to providing health care services, and we will be planning for the future as soon as we address more immediate needs."

Structural engineers were set to arrive in Joplin to evaluate the hospital building, said Mercy president and CEO Lynn Britton in a May 23 statement..

Donations to the Joplin Tornado Relief Fund, or wherever the need is greatest, can be made online through a site set up by St. John's at https://ssl.4agoodcause.com/mercy/donation1.aspx?id=1.

"Please keep the people of Joplin in our prayers, especially those whose lives were taken as well as those who lost loved ones," said a May 23 statement from Bishop James Johnston Jr. of Springfield-Cape Girardeau. "We pray especially for the people of St. Mary's Catholic Church and school who suffered a total loss as well as St. John's Mercy Hospital which sustained major damage."

"Diocesan staff have been in contact with the other Missouri Catholic Charities organizations based in the Springfield-Cape Girardeau and Kansas City dioceses and the archdiocese of St. Louis," said a May 23 statement from the neighbouring diocese of Jefferson City.

The church, school and rectory buildings of St. Mary parish were all destroyed by the tornado, but the parish pastor, Fr. Justin Monaghan, was reported unhurt.

"The pastor rode it out in the bathtub. He's fine," said Leslie Anne Eidson, editor of The Mirror, newspaper of the diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau. "He's staying with a local parishioner right now."

At Joplin's other Catholic church, St. Peter the Apostle, parish administrator Elizabeth Runkle told Catholic News Service May 23, "St. Peter's is fine. We're OK. We didn't have any damage. Everybody's fine."

St. Peter has an outreach centre that they're trying to use to speed aid to victims, according to Eidson.

McAuley Catholic High School, which serves the city's two parishes, escaped damage, Eidson said. It was being used as an overflow triage centre.

Catholic Charities of Southern Missouri was in Joplin and seeking donations to aid tornado victims. The Society of St. Vincent de Paul also was co-ordinating its own relief efforts in the Joplin area.

Joplin, in southwest Missouri near the borders of Kansas and Oklahoma, sits in "Tornado Alley," so called for the frequency and ferocity of the region's twisters.

"The tornado has split Joplin in two," reported Eidson. Travel in and out of the city was difficult in the wake of the tornado, she added.

ROME - The Salesians of St. John Bosco removed two European members from their duties after it was discovered one belonged to a pro-pedophilia organization and another made remarks defending pedophilia.

The Salesian headquarters in Rome said a Dutch priest identified only as Fr. "B" and the superior of the Salesians in the Netherlands, Fr. Herman Spronck, had both been suspended.

"The Belgium-Holland Province officially announced that Fr. B no longer has permission to carry out any pastoral activity and that Fr. Spronck has been relieved of his office as delegate," the congregation said in a May 23 press release.

The Salesian provincial of Belgium-Holland, Fr. Jos Claes, said that to the Salesians' "great surprise," Fr. "B" was a member of a Dutch-based association that advocates legalizing sexual relations between an adult and child. Claes said the association is "not compatible with our Salesian identity" and "we therefore condemn the membership and the opinions of Fr. van B."

ROME - The city of Rome erected its first statue of Blessed Pope John Paul II and the reviews are not good. The Vatican newspaper said what a lot of people were thinking: it’s ugly.

Sculptor Oliviero Rainaldi intended to show the late pope with his cape billowing in the wind, as a symbolic image of welcome. The five-metre-tall bronze sculpture was placed outside Rome’s main train station, where tens of thousands of visitors arrive daily.

But when unveiled May 18, it looked more like an open tent, or a sentry-box, or a bell, commented L’Osservatore Romano. The papal cape looks like it was split open by a bomb. More importantly, the newspaper said, it’s unrecognizable as John Paul II — the head is “excessively spherical.”

MANCHESTER, England - American and British diplomats discussed exerting pressure on Pope Pius XII to be silent about the Nazi deportations of Hungarian Jews, according to newly discovered documentation.

The British feared that the wartime pope might make a "radio appeal on behalf of the Jews in Hungary" and that in the course of his broadcast would "also criticize what the Russians are doing in occupied territory."

Sir Francis D'Arcy Osborne, the British ambassador to the Vatican, told an American diplomat that "something should be done to prevail upon the pope not to do this as it will have very serious political repercussions."

Osborne's comments were made to Franklin C. Gowen, an assistant to Myron Taylor, the U.S. special representative to the Vatican. Gowen recorded the conversation in a letter to Taylor, saying he had promised Osborne that he would bring his concerns to the "immediate attention" of the U.S. ambassador.

ROME - Despite the worsening crisis in Libya, religious women and men continue to offer pastoral care and desperately needed services to the country's many migrants.

Many of the migrants who have stayed behind have lost their jobs and have nowhere else to go, which leaves them searching for food, medicine, clothing and most of all, rent money, said a nun working just outside of Tripoli.

Sister Shirley of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary told Catholic News Service May 20 that the livelihood of many immigrants depended on the once-strong presence of diplomats, oil workers and other foreign professionals. After those professionals left, there was little to no work left for the lower-paid immigrant workers, she said.

VATICAN CITY - Every bishops’ conference in the world must have guidelines for handling accusations of clerical sex abuse in place within a year, said the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

In a letter dated May 3 and released by the Vatican May 16, Cardinal William Levada, congregation prefect, said that in every nation and region, bishops should have “clear and co-ordinated procedures” for protecting children, assisting victims of abuse, dealing with accused priests, training clergy and co-operating with civil authorities.

Describing sexual abuse of minors as “a crime prosecuted by civil law,” the doctrinal congregation said bishops should follow local laws that require reporting cases of sexual abuse to police.

Since the early 1990s about two dozen bishops’ conferences, starting mainly with English-speaking countries, have drawn up guidelines for dealing with accusations of sexual abuse of minors filed against clergy and other Church employees. Canada has them in place. Other conferences — for example, the Italian bishops’ conference — have said they did not draw up guidelines because bishops were obliged to follow canon law and special provisions enacted in 2001 by Blessed Pope John Paul II and in 2010 by Pope Benedict XVI.