NOTABLES - People who make the news, not necessarily Church-related

George Weigel's Call to Action
Posted by Carl Olson
Ignatius Insight
1/15/08


Father Thomas Berg, Executive Director of the Westchester Institute, recently interviewed George Weigel about his new book, Faith, Reason and the War Against Jihadism (Doubleday).

The interview is in Fr. Berg's e-letter; since I cannot locate the interview on the Westchester Institute site, I've posted it here in its entirety.

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Clear thinking on complex moral and cultural issues is a scarce commodity these days. George Weigel, Catholic theologian and one of America's foremost commentators on issues of religion and public life, has for years been responding to that paucity with a consistent output of robust, penetrating and cogent thought.

Last September 11th, I dedicated this column (9/11, Jihadism and Reason) to highlighting some of Weigel's reflections on the occasion of the 6th anniversary of the attacks. Those thoughts were an excerpt from the sixth William E. Simon lecture which Weigel had delivered for the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington in January 2007. Happily, the elements of that lecture have now taken the form of a new book entitled Faith, Reason, and the War against Jihadism.

The book is, quite simply, a must-read for persons who are trying to be thoughtful, realistic and objective about the complex issues posed by Muslim jihadists to western civilization as we know it. If you think my posing the situation in such stark terms is hyperbole, then you will likely find Weigel's blunt assessment of things hyperbolic as well.

"The challenge of global jihadism cannot be avoided," writes Weigel. "The war that has been declared against us-and by "us" I mean the West, not simply the Unites States-must be engaged, and through a variety of instruments, many of them not military."

The fact that many might discover hyperbole in such declarations takes us to the very heart of Weigel's message: it has taken far too long for the U.S. and other western democracies to understand the situation we are in.

Over the weekend, I interviewed George on a number of issues the book raises, and probed him for his take on the future of the conflict between Jihadism and the West.

FTB: You note that "Christians have taken an aggressive and bloody-minded posture toward Islam on many occasions over the past fourteen hundred years, an aggressiveness that has left deep resentments in the Islamic world..." (p. 21). Is this one of the root causes of Jihad?

George Weigel: Resentment of Western success ("the Great Satan" and all that) is certainly part of the motivational mix among jihadists today, although the endless references to "Zionist Crusaders" nicely mix 20th century hatreds with 12th century hatreds. But the basic point to be stressed is that jihadists have their own motivations: i.e., if "jihadism" is the religiously inspired ideology that teaches that it is the moral duty of all Muslims to employ all means necessary to compel the world's submission to Islam, that in itself is motivation enough.

FTB: We grew accustomed to Pope John Paul II reiterating the need to get at the "roots" of terrorism, which he identified as various forms of injustice. For instance:

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History, in fact, shows that the recruitment of terrorists is more easily achieved in areas where human rights are trampled upon and where injustice is a part of daily life. This is not to say that the inequalities and abuses existing in the world excuse acts of terrorism: there can never, of course, be any justification for violence and disregard for human life. However, the international community can no longer overlook the underlying causes that lead young people especially to despair of humanity, of life itself and of the future, and to fall prey to the temptations of violence, hatred, and a desire for revenge at any cost (Address to new British ambassador, Sept. 2002).

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Do you find in this notion-particularly as it is insisted on today-at all naïve or misguided?

Weigel: The jihadists of 9/11 were not the wretched of the earth; they were college-educated, middle-class people. The command structure of al-Qaeda is not composed of peasants or the Arab lumpenproletariat, but of rich men and professional men. This follows the established pattern of modern terrorism (which began in 19th century Europe with well-to-do anarchists).

That authoritarian politics plus corruption, and a lack of economic opportunity creates a fertile field for jihadist recruitment in populations with a large "surplus" of unemployed young men, I don't doubt; the young men heading for terrorist training camps in Waziristan probably fit this profile.

So yes, changed political and economic conditions in the Arab Islamic world are going to be a necessary part of winning the war against jihadism. But to repeat it again: the jihadists have their own motivations, and if we don't understand that, we won't understand the depth and breadth of the problem.


FTB: Is the problem Islam itself-the religion (understanding that "Islam" contains "many worlds" as you put it)?
Weigel: That the great majority of the world's Muslims do not accept the jihadists' definition of a faithful Muslim's responsibilities suggests that the jihadist "answer" to the problem of Islam-confronts-modernity is not inevitable. Still, a frank inter-religious dialogue would recognize that certain core themes in Islamic self-understanding - its supersessionism (i.e., its claim that the revelation to Muhammad effectively cancels the revelatory "value" of the revelations of the God of Abraham to the people of Israel and in Jesus Christ), its concept of a dictated sacred text, its tendency to detach faith and reason (due in part to its lack of a notion of God as "Logos") do, under certain historical, cultural, social, and economic conditions, tend to produce a very aggressive notion of Islam's relationship to "the rest."


FTB: Has Benedict taken a "hard line" with Muslims? How would you describe his approach to the problem of jihadism?

Weigel: The immediate problem, as Pope Benedict XVI has suggested on numerous occasions, lies in Islam's difficult encounter with the Enlightenment political heritage, especially with the idea of religious freedom as a human right than can be known by reason and with the idea of the separation of religious and political authority in a just state. Those are the areas where the dialogue should focus today, for those are the issues that tend to create what Samuel Huntington called "Islam's bloody borders."


FTB: Do you envision a future in which some modernized form of Islam-liberated from the jihadist element-will have accomplished a fruitful "encounter with modernity" (p. 33) and will be able to subsist at peace with the 'rest'?

Weigel: I think you can find places where the effort to broker a more fruitful engagement between Islam and modernity is underway: Indonesia, for example, or Bosnia.

One of the great difficulties in all this is the inordinate influence of Wahhabism, the radical Islamist ideology that has been exported from Saudi Arabia throughout the Islamic world.

Add the passions of Middle Eastern politics to the effects of Wahhabist radicalism, and you get the kind of problems that we've seen, not only throughout the Levant, central Asia, and southwest Asia; you get the kind of problems we see in France, Great Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, and elsewhere - like in American prisons.


FTB: Will it take another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil to provoke a broader understanding of "who the enemy is" and acceptance of the fact that we are at war?

Weigel: I hope not. That's one reason I wrote the book. But there does seem to be an odd, almost Victorian, reticence to name the unpleasant thing that's staring us in the face. If we don't learn to name it - and if we don't understand that this is fundamentally a war of ideas, ideas about human goods and the human future - we 're going to be surprised again and again.

As for immediate dangers, anyone who doesn't think that al-Qaeda is working 24/7 to pull off, during our current election cycle, something similar to the attack on Madrid prior to the Spanish elections a few years ago simply isn't paying attention.


FTB: What would you respond to critics who would call your book "myopic," an "exaggeration," "neo-con war-mongering hype", and so on?

Weigel: I would invite anyone inclined to think I am exaggerating to read the book. The case is made there with evidence, calmly, and in a spirit that looks toward both a revitalized inter-religious dialogue and a renewal of American culture.

Rev. Thomas V. Berg, L.C., Ph.D. is Executive Director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person.


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Here are the blurbs on the book jacket:

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“History must be made to march in the direction of genuine human progress; world affairs have no intrinsic momentum that necessarily results in the victory of decency. Maintaining the morale necessary to achieving progress in history requires us to live our lives, today, against a moral horizon of responsibility that is wider and deeper than the quest for personal satisfactions. The future of our civilization does not rest merely on the advance of material wealth and technological prowess; the future of the West turns on the question of whether our spiritual aspirations are noble or base.”
—from Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism

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More than half a decade after 9/11, safe passage through a moment of history fraught with both peril and possibility requires Americans across the political spectrum to see things as they are.

In this incisive, engaging study of the present danger and what we must do to prevail against it, George Weigel, one of America’s foremost public intellectuals, does precisely that: he sees, and describes, things as they are — and as they might be.

Drawing on a quarter century of experience at the intersection of moral argument and public policy, he describes rigorously and clearly the threat posed by global jihadism: the religiously inspired ideology which teaches that it is the moral obligation of all Muslims to employ whatever means are necessary to compel the world’s submission to Islam.

Exploring that ideology’s theological, social, cultural, and political roots, Weigel points a new direction for both public policy and interreligious dialogue, one that meets the challenge of jihadism forthrightly while creating the conditions for a less threatening, more mutually enriching encounter between Islam and the West.

Essential reading in a time of momentous political decisions, Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism is a clarion call for a new seriousness of debate and a new clarity of purpose in American public life.



“This brilliant little book is, quite simply, the best analysis of the role played by religion in what I call World War IV.”
—Norman Podhoretz


“Absolutely masterful: the moral principles, the strategy, and the tactics to win this war for the survival of the West and democracy are all here—coherent and persuasive. Osama bin Laden and Ahmadinejad will hate this little book above all others.”
—R. James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency


“A stirring book: the battle of ideas against Islamist radicalism is now fully joined. George Weigel — a brilliant author with deep knowledge of theology and practical politics — provides a way forward for the western democracies. A badly needed and urgent book.”
—Fouad Ajami, director of the Middle East Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University

ignatiusinsight.com/features2008/schall_orderthings2_jan08.asp


Part 2 of Carl Olson's interview with Fr. Schall on his 80th birthday.
Part 1 is in the preceding page.



Ignatius Insight: One thing that you seek to do—and you do it very well—is to introduce readers to the minds and thoughts of writers and thinkers they might not otherwise meet. In the first few pages of Redeeming the Time, for example, you mention or cite J. F. Powers, Pourrat, G. L. Prestige, Shelley, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and E. M. Forester. Likewise, in the opening pages of The Order of Things you discuss Plato, C. S. Lewis, Belloc, Aquinas, Josef Pieper, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, and (of course) Aristotle. Do you find that this approach to teaching and writing puts you at odds with the prevailing trends in education? How do students and readers react to it?

Schall: Yes, what I seek to do is to take readers to books and essays. Usually, I entitle my book lists something like "Twenty-Five Books that No One Will Ever Tell You About." Even though I am a reader of the so-called "great books," the Platos, Aristotles, Aquinases, Machiavelli's, Hegels, and Nietzsches, I am not really in the business of pursuing studies in texts or issues of scholarly wissenschaft, however valuable that may otherwise be. I am interested in the whole.

Philosophy is the knowledge of the whole, in so far as we can have it. And if we cannot have it all in this life, which we cannot, it is about knowing what we can. Socrates' "knowing that I know nothing" is nothing other than the negative theological principle that however much we can know about God, what we do not know is infinitely greater.

But as the pope said in the Regensburg Lecture, we really do know something even if we do not know everything. And that slim bond is what keeps all things together.

Often I tell the story of being a young man in the Army. After a semester at college, with some leisure time, I went into the Post Library (at Fort Belvoir, Virginia). Looking over the stacks, I suddenly and vividly realized that I did not know what to read! Nor did I really know where to go to find out. But the impact of that realization was only brought home to me in later years after I had read some things.

Now, this latter opportunity and reflect was only possible to me, in my particular circumstances, because I entered the Order at a time when we were taken off the streets ("out of the world," as it was quaintly put) for long years—seventeen years, to be exact. We really did nothing much but read and reflect.

Many a modern cleric thinks that sort of thing was absurd because it is the culture that is to educate us, that social justice is safe without philosophy. But I now have read Plato and Augustine, and I know better.

Moreover, I have been influenced by Aquinas, Chesterton, Lewis, and others in the view that the truth can be stated clearly and succinctly. It can also be stated charmingly. And, with Chesterton, there is no reason why what is true cannot also be funny.

I have been much influenced by the notion that there is a joy behind things, something I found certainly in Chesterton and Belloc above all, but also in Flannery O'Connor, Charles Schulz, and all the humorists. P. G. Wodehouse writes many truths.

Humor is, as I once wrote, close to sadness; but the converse is also true. I know that to be a Christian means to hold that in the end there is gladness, but only if we choose it. Not surprisingly, that is often what we find out in our daily lives dealing with those we love and know.

You will recall the Ignatius Insight essay, "31 Questions for Schall" (October 2007). That essay was occasioned by my participating at a program at the University of North Dakota in which the student seminar read a number of my books — Students' Guide for Liberal Learning, Another Sort of Learning, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs, and the Sum Total of Human Happiness.

When the seminar was over, the two professors who conducted this seminar required a paper of the students reflecting on what they had read. Almost all of these students said the same thing that you did, namely, that Schall directs one to books that lead to other books that lead to truth. That is pretty close to what I have always thought that I was doing.

The very title, Another Sort of Learning, with its long sub-title, was designed to tell students that they were not to despair if they did not learn anything really important or if they only were given ideology. Anyone can read.

My friend Anne Burleigh says that this is the first freedom, the ability to read. And with that little blessing, anyone can read a few books to get him started. But some of these books are the best he will ever read, I think.

My books lists usually contain short, concise books. The first thing a young man or woman needs to do is wake up. I can read something that is important, true. Once this initial fire is kindled in our soul, we are all right. Plato has much to say about this, the "turnings around," the "what did you say, Socrates?" but also his warning that we often start too young. We are not ready to see or understand so we turn away. This in part is why I love to cite C. S. Lewis' remark that "if you have only read a great book once, you have not read it at all."

I often describe my mission to students by saying, "It is the function of Schall to get you through the book the first time." The first time is often confusing and bewildering if someone is not there to urge the student on. That is, as I see it, why I am in a classroom and in fact enjoy being there. Over the years, I have had thousands of students in class. Samuel Johnson, another hero of mine, once remarked on what a delight this is to have them about. He was right.


Ignatius Insight: Why a book on "order"? Isn't that considered a rather quaint, even restrictive, notion? Why not a book on "liberation" or "the politics of gender" or "self-expression"?

Schall: I did write a book once called Liberation Theology! Well, you cannot write a book on gender until you first decide what men and women are. Get this wrong and you will probably get every thing else wrong. Indeed, you even first have to decide what grammar is.

I have always thought one of my better books was Human Dignity and Human Numbers. That was written in the days when the literati thought that there would be too many of us. In the meantime, Paul VI wrote a prophetic encyclical in which he suggested that if you stop having babies, soon there would be too few of you.

One of my most prophetic short essays was published in the old Month in London, in September, 1969, entitled the "Papacy and Humor." I suspected even then that the papacy would have the last laugh, and it did.

It has always struck me as rather odd to be "expressing" oneself before one has anything to express or any check of reality on whether what one expresses had any object or truth. I am frankly put off by people who go about "expressing" themselves when their only claim for the worth-while-ness of what they express is that they express it. All you can say to such a thesis is, "Well, fine, now what?" If my "expression" is true and so is yours, even if they are the opposites, then all that is left is universal incoherence.

But "order" is a different matter. If we take a look at the index of Aristotle's Basic Works, we see that everything is ordered. We know where things belong. I never forget the thrill I had when I first realized — and this was not too long ago — that there were really two worlds.

The first was the natural world of things that could not be otherwise. This is the world that supports our existence, and includes the whole cosmos. The second is the world that could not exist without us, the world. This is the world full of our own choices, each of which could be otherwise. This is the world of "praise and blame," as Aristotle called it. The first, cosmic world is for the second, moral world. The ultimate purpose of the universe lies in this second world.

"Why a book on order?" you ask. We do not so much live in a world that betrays no order as in a world that maintains that even if there is an order we cannot know it. It is an epistemological problem. The various forms of relativism are the product of this view. But it has a moral origin, I think.

Modern relativism is really an effort to protect us from having to face the truth that there has been a revelation which is addressed to a world that has reason. If this is the case, the only way to protect ourselves to be "free," in the sense of doing whatever we want, is to deny the power of reason to know anything.

I am a fan of Chesterton's notion that the real problem of the world in accepting a coherent order of things is that the truth is too good to be true. It is not so much that mankind does not want to know the truth, but it does not want to know it if it comes from a certain place which they have convinced themselves cannot know the truth. This means that they go off in their own order of disorder, as Aquinas put it. It is very strange, really.

The problem is not just that there is an order, but that we are intended to understand and acknowledge it as an order that ultimately does not come from ourselves. The Order of Things simply says that, even though we may want to deny that order exists in our lives and in our soul, the fact is that it is there. The reason we deny it is because we want only to live under our own order. As opposed to the order of joy of which Chesterton spoke, it is an order of sadness. The stakes are very high.


Ignatius Insight: In the opening chapter, "The Orderly and the Divine," you point out something that often amuses and frustrates me at one and the same time: "There remains, of course, those who find no order or reason in reality. They even somewhat illogically perhaps, spend a good deal of time explaining why it is 'reasonable' that there is no order or reason in things." What to make, for instance, of the recent spate of books by atheists attempting to use logic and reason to assert that there is, in the end, no source or meaning to logic or reason? Isn't that like a neo-Luddite using the internet to denounce technology?

Schall: The current "atheist" books have received an amazingly large number of highly critical reviews suggesting that the gentlemen atheists are rather superficial in their tastes and deficient in their logic. It is no longer possible to shock the world when some scientist announces in the New York Times or Nature that he is an atheist. Most people yawn and wonder what else is new. If you want to cause a stir suggest that there is something to "intrinsic design."

The atheist onslaught, if it is that, arises, I suspect, out of desperation. The notion that the whole universe has a very precise order as does everything in it, which the old determinists could accept, is not so much the problem with the current crop of atheists, who know that there is indeed an argument for intrinsic design. And this argument does not arise from religion.

No, religion has long capitulated to the notion of "evolution." It is certain scientists who have the problems with their notion that there is no order in a universe which seems not only to betray order at every step, but to betray an order that seems designed to bring forth the rational creature some place within this same universe.

In the "Regensburg Lecture," Benedict had a very penetrating remark. He was stating that the Church has no problem with science or its modern discovery if they have a proper human use. In fact, he said, the modern world was the result of a combination of "Plato and mathematics." Then he added that the world is not simply matter and therefore subject to the jurisdiction of mathematics, which presupposes matter. By restricting itself only to what could be analyzed by mathematics, science neglected to know the myriad of things that were not material, which the older religions and philosophies understood.

Benedict then remarked that it was rather curious that mathematics actually worked in the world. If we do not measure or calculate properly, the things we make fall down. Does it not seem odd that there is a correspondence between mathematics, from the tradition of Plato, and the real world? The world of ideas and the world of physical being seem to belong together.

"Why?" the pope wonders. He addresses himself to the scientists, "does it not seem that they have a common origin that can be from either the world or our own minds?" Benedict leaves it at that. I suspect the current atheist books know very well what is at stake. They are no longer facing a philosophic and Christian mind (which is also itself philosophical) that does not know their game. The agenda of this pope includes the minds of scientists on their own grounds.


Ignatius Insight: There are chapters on "The Order within the Godhead," "The Order of the Cosmos," "The Order of the Soul," and "The Order of the Mind" (among others). But "The Order of Hell?" Please explain a bit.

Schall: Ah, you have caught Schall in his favorite Platonic topic, namely "Hell." It is a place Schall would prefer not to visit, but is glad it is there, wherever there may be. Christ asked, "How could Beelzebub's kingdom stand if it was not united?" The "order" of hell is found in revelation. It is also found in philosophy. The great last book of Plato's Republic is precisely about the punishment due to those who persist in their evils. Christianity did not "invent" Hell. It was already in the Old Testament and in the Greeks.

Over the years, I have included a chapter on hell in my books — The Politics of Heaven and Hell, At the Limits of Political Philosophy — as well as doing several essays on this happy topic. I even gave a talk called "The Hell It Is" at a pub in Stamford, Connecticut. And there is an essay on Chesterton in the New Blackfriars called "Haloes in Hell."

Now, I happen to think the doctrine of hell, far from being an awful topic that all liberal thinkers must treat as an aberration, is the charter of our freedom. Without the doctrine of Hell, our lives would be utterly vapid and insignificant.

Indeed, I have held — and the Pope touches on this same point in Spe Salvi — that modern political philosophy is nothing less, at times, than a constant recreation of Hells in this world as a result of its own dynamic. The gulags and the concentration camps, even the abortion clinics, are but this-worldly versions of Hell. They flow directly out of modern thought seeking to give us a perfect world by our own powers.

Basically, the doctrine of Hell means that each of our lives at every minute of our existence is infinitely important. Each of us can, if we choose, commit an act against ourselves or against others that can send us to Hell. This means, looked at from this angle, that our lives really are meaningful. The very drama of human existence is made poignant because of this divine insistence on its importance.

The "order" of Hell, I think, reflects the order of our actions. Those who reject the existence of Hell are logically left with an unjust world, the very purpose that Plato set out to show was not possible. There is no actual city in which all crimes done within it are adequately punished or all good deeds rewarded. The modern secularist, who has spent over a half century making movies of Hitler, must in the end conclude that the gentleman's crimes really went without punishment.

We Christians do not necessarily know what happened, but Spe Salvi does not belong to that theological school that maintains dogmatically that everyone is saved. The Pope says that even if through repentance the man who kills another is saved, there will still be distinctions in Hell.

So, I look on Hell as a kind of liberal doctrine. It says straight-forwardly that our acts are of transcendent importance. We do not trifle with one another about ultimate things. We do not finally escape from our crimes even if we avoid punishment in this world. Not everything is forgiven if no repentance is forthcoming. Much of this is already in Plato.

Indeed, there is a wonderful passage in the Phaedo in which the punishment of the unjust is being described. It seems that those who have committed great crimes are cast into the river to be circulated about Tartarus endlessly until (and this is significant for us Christians) the person against whom we committed the crime forgives us.

We have an advocate, that is Christ the Lord, but it is the same principle. You see why I like Plato. And why I take with a grain of salt all those pundits who are so horrified by the doctrine of Hell. If they had their way, our lives would be totally meaningless.


Ignatius Insight: Can you leave us with one of you famous lists? Perhaps: "A List of books that you should have read by the time you are eighty"?

Schall: It may be immoral to give Schall temptations he cannot resist! Before I do, I want to say that often I have said that on the day I die, I hope my shelves contain many books I intended to read but never got around to reading. Why do I say this? Simply because no human being should delude himself that he has "read it all." I know many friends and scholars and ordinary folks who are far more well read than I.

I've often had the experience (somehow I think of Scott Walter or Andrea Ciliotta Rubery) of suggesting a book, a book that took me days and weeks, even months to read. Two days later, not only do they tell me what the book was about, they want to know if I have any other suggestions.

Just today, I received an e-mail from a student who had been in my class a couple of years ago. He confessed to me that he had not read carefully all the books that I had assigned in class, but now with a little experience — he tells me he is a stand-up comedian in New York! — he realizes that he missed things that would be useful and important him now after a little experience. This is just what Plato said to young men in book seven of the Republic. He wanted to know if I had any books I might suggest to him! Well, I did. I told him to look up the lists in Another Sort of Learning but in particular to read James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times and Chesterton's Orthodoxy.

But here is your requested list:

TWENTY BOOKS TO BE READ BY THE TIME YOU ARE EIGHTY:

1). Chesterton, Orthodoxy
2). Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed
3). Kreeft, The Philosophy of Tolkien
4). Lewis, Till We Have Faces
5). Pieper, Josef Pieper—an Anthology
6). Belloc, The Four Men
7). Boswell's Life of Johnson
8). Jane Austen, Persuasion
9). Simon, A General Theory of Authority
10). Guardini, The Humanity of Christ
11). Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture
12). Jaki, The Road of Science and the Ways to God
13). Sayers, The Whimsical Christian
14). Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov
15). Huizenga, Homo Ludens
16). Morse, Love and Economics
17). Arkes, First Things
18). Derrick, Escape From Skepticism: Liberal Education as if the Truth Really Matters
19). Baring, Lost Lectures
20). Sokolowski. The God of Faith and Reason

Permit me one book of Schall: On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs.

Thanks for the questions, I enjoyed them.

Spanish priest to lead Jesuits




ROME. Jan.. 19 (AP) — The Jesuits, a Roman Catholic order known for intellectual excellence and missionary work, on Saturday chose a 71-year-old Spanish priest with top academic credentials and extensive
experience in Asia to be their new leader.

The Rev. Adolfo Nicolas was chosen to serve as superior general, the 29th successor to St. Ignatius Loyola, who founded the Society of Jesus, as the order is formally known, in 1540. With nearly 20,000 members worldwide, it is the largest Catholic religious order.

The choice of Nicolas followed four days of prayer and discussion among 217 electors who came to Rome from around the world, the Jesuits said.

Pope Benedict XVI was informed of the choice and immediately gave his approval, Vatican officials said. Papal approval is required.

Nicolas succeeds Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, a Dutch priest who was elected leader in 1983 and who was widely credited with improving the Jesuits' often tense relations with the Vatican.

Jesuit leaders traditionally serve for life, but Kolvenbach, who turns 80 this year, had asked to retire because of his age.

A native of Spain, Nicolas was ordained a priest in Tokyo in 1967 after studies in theology in that city and earlier in philosophy in Madrid. He received a masters degree in sacred theology in Rome's prestigious Gregorian Pontifical University.

He then embarked on nearly four decades of work in the Pacific, taking a theology professorship at Sophia University in Tokyo in 1971 and directing a pastoral institute in Manila, from 1978 to 1984.

In the 1990s he held leadership positions in the order in Japan and from 2004 to 2007 served as moderator of the Jesuit Conference for Eastern Asia and Oceania. He also has had experience in Korea.

Nicolas's Asian experience will help him "understand the world, and the church, from a non-European perspective," said James Martin, a priest who is associate editor of America Magazine, a New York-based Jesuit publication, in an e-mailed comment.

In a profile last year on an Australian Jesuit website, Province Express, Nicolas expressed the conviction that the West does not have a monopoly on meaning and spirituality.

"Asia has a lot yet to offer to the church, to the whole church," Nicolas was quoted as saying.

The new leader in his Asia positions has been responsible for training young Jesuits as the order grapples with a drop in a number of new priests, a problem affecting Catholic religious orders in general.

In the same profile, Nicolas said he was wary of missionaries who are more concerned with teaching and imposing orthodoxy than in having a cultural exchange with the local people.

"Those who enter into the lives of people, they begin to question their own positions very radically," Nicolas said.

Intellectual challenges have long characterized Jesuits.

The Jesuits have had a tense relationship with the Vatican on issues of doctrine and obedience. The Vatican occasionally disciplines Jesuit theologians and issues reminders of the their vows of obedience to the pontiff.

In past decades, aspects of their work with the poor in Latin America left the Vatican with the perception that some Jesuits were embracing liberation theology and Marxist political movements.

In 1981, Pope John Paul II named a temporary replacement to lead the Jesuits after its superior, the Rev. Pedro Arrupe, suffered a crippling stroke, brushing aside Arrupe's chosen successor. Paolo Dezza, an Italian who later was made a cardinal, guided the Jesuits until 1983, when Kolvenbach took the helm.

Arrupe, who died in 1991, had pushed for the church to move for a more socially just world while remaining faithful to papal authority.

For many, the Jesuits are synonymous with higher education. In the United States alone, the Jesuits run 28 colleges and universities, including Georgetown in Washington, D.C., Fordham in New York and the University of San Francisco, and dozens of middle schools and high schools.

MILINGO DENIED COMMUNION
IN ITALY
From National Catholic Reporter online

A Catholic priest in Pompeii, Italy, denied Communion to Zambian Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo Jan. 10. Milingo attended an early evening Mass with Maria Sung, the woman he married in a Unification church ceremony in 2001.

Milingo, 77, responded by blessing the celebrant and touching his head. Milingo was excommunicated after he began ordaining married men to the priesthood in 2007.

He is in Italy promoting a book, Confessions of an Excommunicated Man.


Milingo photographed in a Rome bookstore last week, promoting his book.

Italian president opens crisis talks
after Prodi resignation



ROME, Jan. 25 (AFP) - President Giorgio Napolitano will open talks on Friday to resolve Italy's political crisis after prime minister Romano Prodi's resignation and the end of his centre-left government.

While the centre-right is clamouring for snap elections after 20 months in opposition, observers say the president is unlikely to send voters back to the ballot box before Italy's electoral law is overhauled.



Right-wing newspapers gloated over the demise of 68-year-old Prodi, the arch-rival of conservative flagbearer Silvio Berlusconi, both of them now former prime ministers twice over.

"The dream has come true," headlined Il Libero over a cartoon showing Prodi hanged by the Senate, where the prime minister lost a vote of confidence on Thursday, precipitating his resignation.

Prodi "leaves the country in tatters," the paper wrote.

The left-leaning press was more sympathetic, Ezio Mauro writing in the daily La Repubblica that the former economic professor's exit was a "strange and unjust destiny for a politician who has twice defeated Berlusconi (and) twice cleaned up the public accounts."

Berlusconi, now 71, and right-wing National Alliance leader Gianfranco Fini immediately called for fresh elections on news of the resignation.

The flamboyant Berlusconi, Italy's richest man, clearly wants to take advantage of the left's steep drop in popularity as Prodi, struggling to keep his squabbling coalition together, was unable to address many pocketbook issues.

But observers say Napolitano will resist calls for fresh polls.

"Both left and right know that this system creates instability," political scientist Franco Pavoncello told AFP.

He said he "wouldn't be surprised" if Napolitano, a former communist, asked Mario Monti, a former EU commissioner for competition, or Bank of Italy chief Mario Draghi to head an interim team of technocrats.

Prodi, crippled by the defection early this week of the centrist Catholic UDEUR party, had decided to go ahead with the Senate vote despite appeals from top leaders, including Napolitano, to resign instead.

Despite a last-minute change of heart by one of UDEUR's three senators and the support of five of Italy's unelected senators for life including Nobel medicine laureate 98-year-old Rita Levi-Montalcini, Prodi fell five votes short in the upper house.

Berlusconi, who owns a vast media empire, has never come to terms with his loss by just some 24,000 votes to Prodi in the hard-fought elections of April 2006.

It was in anticipation of those elections that the Berlusconi government pushed through a new electoral law in December 2005 with the goal of limiting the extent of an expected win by the left -- causing the legislative gridlock that hastened Prodi's downfall.

Berlusconi "put the seeds of its own demise in the system itself," political scientist Pavoncello said.

Prodi's second government faced a series of close votes in the upper house, falling briefly in February 2007.



Romano Prodi resigns a
after losing confidence vote
By Richard Owen in Rome
Times of London, 1/25/08

Silvio Berlusconi was poised to make a remarkable political comeback last night after the collapse of the Italian Government led by Romano Prodi.

Only 20 months after defeating Mr Berlusconi in a close-fought general election, Mr Prodi, 68, fell from power in a senate confidence vote, losing by 161 to 156. The Prime Minister went immediately to the Quirinale Palace to tender his resignation to President Napolitano.

An exultant Mr Berlusconi held a celebratory champagne party at the Palazzo Grazioli, his residence in the historic centre of Rome, after hearing the news. “We need to go to the polls in the shortest time possible without delay,” he told reporters.

However, the ambitions of the flamboyant media tycoon, whose centre-right political movement enjoys a comfortable poll lead, may yet be frustrated by the President, who will begin consultations today on how to proceed. He could decide to appoint a caretaker administration to overhaul the Italian electoral system before new elections are held.

Walter Veltroni, the leader of the largest party in government, argued last night that early elections would “push the country into a situation of dramatic crisis.”

Mr Veltroni, regarded as Mr Prodi’s successor in waiting, is said to want an interim administration and a new electoral law to give the Left time to prepare for the battle with Mr Berlusconi.

Mr Prodi, fighting to stay in power against the odds, had opened the confidence motion debate in the senate by appealing to senators to back him so that he could complete “urgent reforms”.

In a reflection of the tense atmosphere, a senator from the Christian Democratic faction — the party that sparked the crisis by deserting Mr Prodi’s coalition — fainted after being assaulted by fellow party members when he declared that he was supporting Mr Prodi after all.

In extraordinary scenes, Nuccio Cusumano was spat on and insulted and had to be taken out of the chamber on a stretcher. He later returned, but his vote was not enough to save Mr Prodi.

President Napolitano can now call new elections, appoint an interim caretaker government or ask Mr Prodi to try to reform his coalition, as he did when the Prime Minister lost a senate vote a year ago on the deployment of Italian troops in Afghanistan. Potential candidates for the post of caretaker Prime Minister would include Mario Draghi, the widely respected governor of the Bank of Italy.

Mr Prodi, who had gone ahead with the vote despite the prospect of defeat, said that he had done so in the spirit of the founders of postwar Italy, who had devised a democratic constitution whose 60th anniversary is being celebrated this week. This provided for votes of confidence to confirm or dissolve governments, and not for “extra-Parliamentary crises”. He said that Italy could not afford the luxury of a power vacuum.

Opinion polls indicate that the Centre Right would win elections handsomely. Mr Berlusconi has already fought four elections as centre-right leader, winning two of them, and a fifth election bid for the premiership would be an Italian record.

Mr Prodi’s problems were sparked by the resignation last week of Clemente Mastella, head of the UDEUR Christian Democratic faction, as Justice Minister after magistrates began a corruption investigation involving him and his wife, Sandra.

Some on the Left have accused the Vatican of persuading Mr Mastella to sabotage the Prodi Government — the 61st since the Second World War — because its policies on issues such as abortion and gay civil unions are against Roman Catholic doctrine. Vatican officials and Mr Mastella deny this.



How An Italian Government Falls
By JEFF ISRAELY
TIME Magazine
Thursday, Jan. 24, 2008


This is how an Italian government ends.

One-by-one, each Senator was required to say out loud whether he or she wanted the center-left government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi to stand or fall.

It was the final evening act in a day's worth of high and low drama in the ornate chambers of the Italian Senate on Thursday. There were bombastic speeches by party members defying their leaders' orders on which way to vote.

Former Justice Minister Clemente Mastella, who'd brought on the government crisis by yanking his support from Prodi, choked up as he recited a Pablo Neruda poem.

One lawmaker was accused of spitting at another, as he screamed "traitor!", "piece of merda!" and made the gesture of firing a gun. The targeted Senator then duly fainted (or feigned a fainting) in his soft chamber chair.

Finally, just after the votes were counted, victorious center-right lawmakers uncorked Spumanti directly on the Senate floor.

"Take them away!," implored Senate President Franco Marini, pounding his gavel as the bubbly spilled out of the bottles onto the carpet. "This isn't a tavern here!"

The final tally after nearly an hour: 161-156 to bring down the coalition, 20 months after Prodi eked out a victory over his perennial nemesis Silvio Berlusconi, the controversial TV mogul-turned-politico. It was all good theater, but yet another sign that Italy's political system is in serious disrepair.

It had appeared evident to most that Prodi had lost his slim working majority in the Senate on Monday when Mastella announced that he was pulling out of the coalition following a magistrate's filing of influence-peddling charges against him and his local politician wife.

Most expected Prodi to promptly submit his resignation, but the sometimes stubborn 68-year-old former European Union president challenged his fellow lawmakers to the individual oral vote on Thursday.

After the vote, Prodi submitted his resignation to President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano, who now has the task of either searching for Parliamentary support for a bipartisan caretaker government or calling snap elections.

Berlusconi, his eyes on a chance to return to the Prime Minister's office, has demanded an immediate election.

Having forced the situation to a vote probably makes it more difficult for Napolitano to find consensus for a caretaker government to usher in a badly needed electoral reform before going back to the polls.

A vote without altering the current system will most likely produce a similary fragile majority, regardless of which side wins. Indeed Prodi was on the verge of a government crisis for nearly his entire 20-month reign. The former economics professor had similarly been pushed from power in 1998, after having beaten Berlusconi two years earlier.

Most expect that the next showdown at the polls will feature Berlusconi and Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni, who was Prodi's No. 2 back in 1996-98 administration but is no longer close in the same camp.

There are reports that Prodi will team up with small parties from the far left to try to stave off Veltroni's rise, which would no doubt bring on more nasty infighting.

Many believe that a caretaker government made up of moderates from both center-left and center-right is necessary to bring about the reform necessary to bring more stability to the political system. Such an interim affair would probably turn out to be arcane, and painfully boring. That may be just what the country needs.

Former Vatican liturgist
persuaded to cancel tour?
From the Catholic Herald (UK)
posted by Shawn Tribe on
www.thenewliturgicalmovement.blogspot.com/



The Vatican’s most senior cardinal has persuaded Archbishop Piero Marini to cancel his book tour of America, it has been claimed.

Archbishop Marini, who served for two decades as the papal Master of Ceremonies, was due to tour major US cities next month to promote his study of the post-Vatican II Mass – seen by some commentators as a coded criticism of Benedict XVI’s liturgical reforms.

But the trip has been postponed, ostensibly because of concerns that it would clash with the run-up to the Pope’s own American tour two months later.

However, one source said that Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State, had asked Archbishop Marini to cancel the visit.

Another source in the Vatican told The Catholic Herald that he “wouldn’t be surprised if there was an intervention from the top”.

The book, entitled A Challenging Reform: Realising the Vision of the Liturgical Renewal, was launched in Britain at a grandiose event hosted by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor and attended by a number of prominent liturgical figures.

Among the 100 people gathered for the event were Archbishop Fausto Sainz Muñoz, the papal nuncio, Bishop Arthur Roche of Leeds, chairman of the International Committee for English in the Liturgy (ICEL), and Mgr Bruce Harbert, ICEL’s executive secretary.

The book charts the struggles of the Consilium, a body set up to introduce liturgical changes in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. It argues that the Roman Curia has “for years” been characterised by a “preconciliar mindset”, and warns that the reforms of the Second Vatican Council “seem to be increasingly questioned”.

The Archbishop also caused offence when, in an interview with America’s National Catholic Reporter in December, he compared “nostalgia” for the pre-Vatican II Mass with the longing that some Israelites felt for the “onions and melons” of Egypt after they had been freed from slavery.

Last year Benedict XVI replaced Archbishop Marini as papal Master of Ceremonies and moved him to the lesser position of president of the Pontifical Committee for Eucharistic Congresses.

The archbishop’s removal was welcomed by traditionalists who had long been dismayed by his enthusiasm for liturgical innovation.

A canonisation Mass in Mexico City several years ago notoriously included a troupe of indigenous dancers and a shaman who performed an exorcism on John Paul II.

Archbishop Christodoulos, of the Greek Orthodox Church - shown with Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican on Dec. 14, 2006 - died of cancer early Monday at his home in Athens, Greece.

Christodoulos, 69, eased centuries of tension with the Vatican but angered liberal critics who viewed him as an attention-seeking reactionary. [Caption story from AP]

Greek Orthodox Leader Dies
By ANTHEE CARASSAVA
The New York Times
Published: January 29, 2008

Athens — Archbishop Christodoulos, the charismatic head of the Greek Orthodox Church who helped heal centuries-old grievances with the Roman Catholic Church but stirred controversy with his politically tinged statements and tireless interventions in state affairs, died on Monday. He was 69.

He led Greece’s 10 million Orthodox Christians for a decade, boosting church attendance. He died at his residence in the Athens suburb of Psychiko, refusing hospital treatment in the final days of a seven-month battle with liver cancer.

Christodoulos’ health had deteriorated severely in recent weeks, and by Sunday, church officials said, he was slipping in and out of consciousness amid hepatic failure.

The government declared a three-day mourning, during which his body will lie in state .

Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis said in a statement: “The archbishop brought the Church closer to society, closer to modern problems and to the youth.”

Enthroned in 1998, Christodoulos trained as a lawyer but switched to the priesthood in 1961, preaching reform in Greece’s stuffily old-fashioned church and becoming one of the country most popular, albeit divisive, figures in its recent history.

A polyglot who surfed the Internet, instituted sign-language liturgies for the deaf and made plans for a religious television station, Christodoulos buoyed the faith’s dwindling numbers with the aura of a rock star.

He enlivened sermons with humorous one-liners and animated antics. He cheerfully allowed teenagers to wear miniskirts and body-piercing jewelry to Mass. He embraced rather than disgraced AIDS patients, and he mended rifts with the Vatican, receiving the late Pope John Paul II in Athens in 2001 -- the first pontiff to visit Greece in nearly 1,300 years.

Despite widespread opposition from conservative adherents of the Orthodox faith, the influential clergyman, who was schooled by Catholic monks in Athens, followed up with a historic visit to the Vatican last year, meeting Pope Benedict XVI.

The divide between Rome-based and eastern European Christianity dates back to 1054, but it deepened in the 20th century .

“He leaves behind a powerful legacy which his successor will have difficulty following,” said Maria Papoutsakis, a religious commentator for the Athens-daily Eleftherotypia.

Under the Constitution, senior prelates will have 20 days to elect a new Church leader in an election procedure shrouded in secrecy.

More than 90 percent of Greece’s 10.2 million population are baptized into the Church and at least 5 million more live abroad.

Championing a more liberal image for an institution often considered a bastion of conservativism, Christodoulos, the son of a local mayor, enjoyed a popularity rating of nearly 75 percent — far higher than any Greek politician.

Even so, he remained a controversial figure.

To his critics, Christodoulos was the arch-conservative — a nationalist, who ruled the Church with an iron grip and meddled in public affairs with the intent of becoming a national political leader.

His blasts of nationalist rhetoric, most strikingly against the European Union and the Turks — he called them “eastern barbarians” -- irritated Greece’s European Union partners and Athens’ efforts to improve relations with Ankara.

A vocal critic of NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign in Kosovo, Christodoulos and the Greek Orthodox Church provided funds and humanitarian aid to Orthodox Serbia.

He decried some parts of popular culture, leading protests against Greece’s television program Big Brother, and in 2001 he caused shock waves when he said the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York were waged by “despondent men who acted out of despair caused by the injustices of the Great Powers.”

Five years later he retracted the remark but continued to rail against his favorite targets: globalization, the European Union and other institutions which he feared would strip Greece of its Orthodox Christian character and see Hellenism “ sucked into the European melting pot.”

To his critics, such populism would have mattered less if Orthodoxy was not the established religion in Greece.

But in 2001, Christodoulos’ set the country’s most powerful institution on a collision course with the government, rallying millions of faithful against designs by the then ruling socialists to scrap religious affiliation from state identity cards.

The crusade, as Christodoulos called it, failed. But the showdown precipitated a political crisis, contributing to the socialists’ downfall in 2004.


=====================================================================




The late Pope John Paul II shakes hands with former Indonesian President Suharto at Merdeka Palace in Jakarta in this October 9, 1989 file photo.

Suharto, who ruled with an iron fist for 32 years, has died, a senior police official told reporters on January 27, 2008 at the hospital where he was being treated in Jakarta. [Caption story from
Reuters]

======================================================================

From the International Herald Tribune:


OBITUARIES:
Gordon Hinckley, president of the Mormon Church;
Archbishop Christodoulos of the Church of Greece
By Laurie Goodstein

Gordon Hinckley, the president and prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who led Mormonism through a period of global expansion, died Sunday at his apartment in Salt Lake City. He was 97.

The church, which announced his death on its Web site, said a successor to Hinckley was not expected to be formally chosen until after his funeral.

Hinckley spent 46 years in the church's top leadership ranks, nearly 13 of those as its 15th president - becoming the longest-serving president in the church's history and the oldest.

In a faith that is relatively young, founded in 1830, Hinckley's impact was formative.

He traveled to 60 countries and dedicated 95 of the church's 124 temples, some on sites that he himself had surveyed and selected. Wherever he went, he drew large crowds of church members waving white handkerchiefs, a sign of affection that began in Chile and spread.

Today in Americas
Bush's defiant look at what little lies aheadUse of bail bondsmen a quirk of U.S. justiceGunmen holding some 30 hostages in Venezuelan bank standoff.With his buoyant personality and affinity for public relations, Hinckley made Mormonism more familiar to the public and more accepted in the Christian fold. When the Winter Olympics went to Salt Lake City in 2002, the church's home base, he guided the church outreach campaign.

To emphasize its commonality with other churches, he changed the church's logo, making the words "Jesus Christ" in the church's name much larger than "Latter-day Saints." He arranged to make the church's huge library of genealogical records publicly available on the Internet.

"He's been the face of the church, not only for church members, but more than any other president, to the world at large," said Richard Lyman Bushman, professor of history emeritus at Columbia University and a member and scholar of the church. "He exposed himself to all these interviews and seemed to enjoy it. That has won the admiration of church members. We have been a little bit isolated and clannish, and it's wonderful to see our church presented to the world."

During his tenure, Hinckley faced tough questions about whether the church had muzzled critical scholars and about the role of Mormons in the Mountain Meadows massacre in 1857, when a wagon train of emigrants crossing the Utah territory was attacked. Under Hinckley, a church magazine published an article about the event and a memorial was constructed at the massacre site.

In Hinckley's term as president, the church grew to count more than 12 million members worldwide - more than the largest Lutheran denomination. It is now believed to be the fourth largest church in the United States. (But the Mormon church has acknowledged reports that a significant percentage of new converts, especially overseas, do not remain active members.)

*******

Archbishop Christodoulos, the leader of the Church of Greece, who eased centuries of tension with the Vatican but angered liberal critics who viewed him as an attention-seeking reactionary, died Monday at his home of cancer, church officials said, according to The Associated Press. He was 69.

Christodoulos, who headed the church for a decade, was first hospitalized in Athens in June before being diagnosed with cancer of the liver and large intestine.

He spent 10 weeks in a hospital in Miami, but a liver transplant in October was canceled when doctors discovered that the cancer had spread. He refused hospital treatment in the final weeks of his life. He died at his home in the Athens suburb of Psychiko.

Greek authorities announced three days of national mourning.

Christodoulos was elected leader of the church in 1998 and is credited with reinvigorating the vast and powerful institution that represents 97 percent of Greece's native-born population.

He was one of several leaders of national Orthodox churches across the world. The Istanbul-based ecumenical patriarch, Bartholomew I, is the spiritual leader of the world's 250 million Orthodox Christians.

In 2001, Christodoulos received the late John Paul II, the first pope to visit Greece in nearly 1,300 years. They held a landmark meeting in Athens despite protests from Orthodox zealots.

The archbishop followed up in 2006 with a historic visit to the Vatican, where he and Pope Benedict XVI signed a joint declaration calling for interreligious dialogue and stating opposition to abortion and euthanasia.

Greeks mourn popular Orthodox archbishop
By Elena Becatoros



ATHENS, Greece, Jan. 28 (AP) — Hundreds of mourners gathered Monday at Athens' cathedral to file past the remains of Archbishop Christodoulos, the first leader of Greece's powerful Orthodox Church to welcome a Catholic pope to Athens in 1,300 years.


The Greek flag flows at half-mast over the Parthenon;
and a priest pays his last respects to his departed Patriarch.

The charismatic cleric was often named Greece's most popular public figure but was also criticized as a reactionary. He died of cancer Monday at his home in Athens, leaving the race for his succession wide open.

Christodoulos, 69, was credited with reinvigorating a church seen as distant from its followers in a country where more than 90 percent of the native-born population is baptized into it.

Greece's Orthodox Church holds considerable sway among the world's Orthodox churches. Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I is the spiritual leader of the world's 250 million Orthodox Christians.

Despite vigorous protests from Orthodox zealots who marched through Athens denouncing the pope as the anti-Christ, Christodoulos in 2001 hosted the late John Paul II — the first pope to visit Greece in centuries. The archbishop followed up in 2006 with a visit to the Vatican, where he and Pope Benedict XVI signed a joint declaration calling for interreligious dialogue.

Orthodox zealots supported Christodoulos, however, on one of his most outspoken public campaigns. His efforts to stop the government from dropping the religion entry from state identity cards saw him holding public rallies before hundreds of thousands of people in 2001. The church claimed that its petition campaign gathered 3 million signatures — more than a quarter of the population. But the campaign failed.

Christodoulos was elected church leader in 1998 and thundered onto the public stage, appearing on television and radio shows, visiting schools and hospitals, alternately fascinating and shocking Greeks with his fiery speeches.

"Clergymen are above kings, prime ministers and presidents," he once said.

Within months, he had expounded on everything from Greece's economy to relations with Turkey, leading some politicians to grumble about his apparent political ambitions.

A spate of scandals that saw senior clerics accused of embezzlement, involvement in sexual misdeeds and even trial-fixing in 2005 led to calls for his resignation. Christodoulos publicly apologized and defeated a no-confidence motion in the church's governing Holy Synod by a vote of 67-1.

But public criticism quickly faded after he was diagnosed with cancer of the liver and large intestine in June, and he was widely praised for the strength and dignity he showed during his illness.

The government declared four days of mourning, culminating in a funeral in Athens with full state honors Thursday. Election of his successor will begin Feb. 7.

Coptic leader hospitalized in Ohio
By MEGHAN BAR



COLUMBUS, Ohio, Jan. 29 (AP) - The leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt was being treated Tuesday at the Cleveland Clinic, where he had previously undergone surgery, a hospital spokeswoman said.

The clinic didn't plan to release any additional information about Pope Shenouda III, 84, said clinic spokeswoman Heather Phillips.

Pope Shenouda was scheduled to consecrate the church Tuesday at St. Mary's Coptic Church in Columbus, said Mary Sedarous, daughter of the Rev. Sedarous A. Sedarous, the church's pastor. She said he was taken to the hospital Monday night.

The cleric suffers from chronic cholecystitis, or stones in his gall bladder that cause a high fever and severe pain, and was hospitalized in November in Cairo.

He had spinal surgery at the Cleveland Clinic in October 2006.

The Coptic Church is the native Christian church of Egypt, and has a doctrine similar to the Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox churches.

Pope Shenouda has led the church since 1971. Copts are believed to be 10 percent of Egypt's 77 million population, making up the largest Christian community in the Middle East.

Under his leadership, the church has established congregations in the United States, South America, New Zealand and Australia. It has more than 100 North American congregations, up from four in 1971.

Thousands line Athens streets
for Greek Orthodox leader's funeral



The funeral cortege in front of the Greek Parliament.


ATHENS, Jan. 31 (dpa) - Church bells tolled and flags flew at half-mast as thousands of people lined the streets of central Athens for the state funeral of Greek Orthodox leader Archbishop Christodoulos on Thursday.

Christodoulos, the religious leader of 10 million Greek Orthodox, and one of the key leaders behind improving ties between the Greek Orthodox Church and the Vatican in Rome, died of cancer on Monday. He was 69.



Thousands of black-clad mourners, many weeping, followed Chrisdodoulos' coffin as it was escorted from Athens Cathedral to the First Cemetary in Athens while others leaned over balconies to catch a last glimpse of the controversial religious leader.



President Carlos Papoulias, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis, ministers, church delegates and a 12-member delegation from the Vatican attended the morning mass led by Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I.

Schools, government offices, tax offices, courts and all public services remained closed for the day.

Tens of thousands of Greeks could be seen queueing for hours outside Athens Cathedral during a three-day wake in order to pay their last respects.

"I am here today because he really cared about the young and tried to accept us as we were," said 15-year-old Athina Theodoridou.


Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens and all of Greece was the youngest archbishop to head the Church when he was elected in 1998 and was seen as the country's most popular public figure in opinion polls.

He was one of several leaders of national Orthodox churches around the world. The spiritual home of the world's 250 million Orthodox Christians is in Istanbul, where Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I is based.

Christodoulos, who was one of the key leaders behind improving ties between the Greek Orthodox Church and the Vatican in Rome, received Pope John Paul II in 2001, the first pope to visit Greece in more than 1,000 years.

The visit marked a turning point in relations between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches since the Great Schism of 1054 that split the two Christian churches.

The archbishop followed with a reciprocal visit in 2006 to the Vatican where he and Pope Benedict XVI signed a memorandum of inter- religious dialogue.

Almost as soon as he was elected, Christodoulos tried to modernize the Orthodox Church, which represents 97 per cent of the population, by approaching the young by telling jokes during visits to local schools and weekly sermons.

He appeared regularly on television, opened internet cafes near churches and called on young people to attend church, even if they were wearing ripped jeans and earrings.

But the archbishop's carefree style soon lead to bitter feuds with the then ruling Socialist government over new ID cards, which according to European Union directives no longer lists a person's religion.

Despite claims that the Orthodox Church collecting millions of signatures from religious zealots, the government dropped the religion issue.

His popularity lessened over the years as he was frequently criticized for meddling in political affairs, calling neighbouring Turkey a land of "barbarians" and was openly critical of homosexuals, calling gays "handicapped."

Born Christos Paraskevaidis in 1939 in the north-eastern city of Xanthi, the archbishop was the son of a local businessman.

He spent most of his childhood in Athens and was ordained to the priesthood at the age of 22, while also obtaining degrees in law and theology from the University of Athens.

He was appointed secretary to the Church's Holy Synod, the church's top governing body, during the 1967-74 military dictatorship but years later claimed he was unaware of the widespread abuses carried out during the dictatorship because of his heavy study load at school.

Following the collapse of the military junta he was elected the metropolitan bishop in the eastern city of Volos, until he was elected archbishop in 1998.

The church said a successor will be elected by the Holy Synod on February 7.


Greek Orthodox priests in the funeral procession, passing in front of
the ancient Temple of Olympian Zeus and Hadrian's Gate in Athens.

Schools, courts, ancient sites and public services were closed for today's funeral.

'Theology of Progress,'
not liberation theology,
is key to the new Jesuit General
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome, Jan. 30, 2008


In 1971, Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutierrez coined the phrase “Liberation Theology” with his groundbreaking work A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation.

Liberation theology, partly because it carries a direct political payoff, went on to become perhaps the most consequential and controversial movement in Roman Catholic theology in the second half of the 20th century.

In the same year, another young Spanish-speaking theologian was also pondering the question of how to credibly preach salvation in the modern world. Unlike Gutierrez, however, the cultural point of reference for Adolfo Nicolás was not Latin America but Asia, and the answer he came up with was not the theology of liberation but rather The Theology of Progress – the title of the doctoral dissertation of the future Father General of the Jesuit order, completed at Rome’s Gregorian University in 1971.

Therein lies a key to understanding the mind and the perspective of the new leader of the flagship religious order in the Catholic church, according to a Jesuit who knows both Nicolás and the development of Catholic theology in the 20th century well: Fr. Josep M. Benitez i Riera, a historian and long-time faculty member at the Gregorian.

Benitez offered an informal briefing today for journalists about the new Jesuit general at the invitation of Rome’s Foreign Press Club.

Nicolás was never opposed to liberation theology, Benitez stressed, pointing out that he and Jon Sobrino, the famous Spanish Jesuit liberation theologian who has spent most of his career in Latin America, are friends and Jesuits of the same generation.

“Yet Sobrino chose the path of El Salvador, and Nicolás that of Asia,” Benitez said.

In brief, Benitez said the central difference between liberation theology and the “theology of progress” worked out by the young Nicolás is that the former is more pastoral and more political, while the starting point for Nicolás is more academic and existential – raising the question of the meaning of individual human lives in a rapidly changing world, rather than focusing directly on sociology and questions of structural injustice.

The theology of Nicolás, Benitez said, was informed more by Kant than by Marx, and drew above all on the pioneering theological work of the late German Jesuit theologian Fr. Karl Rahner.

His dissertation, Benitez said, was written under the direction of Jesuit Fr. Juan Alfaro of the Gregorian University, a onetime member of the Vatican’s International Theological Commission known for his writings on theological anthropology.

“This was the era of social realism, of Marx, and so on, in which progress was the watchword,” Benitez said. “Nicolás asked the question, 'Progress towards what?' In other words, is the modern concept of progress truly adequate for the human person? What is the finality of the human being and of creation?”

In turn, Benitez suggested, this contrast between Nicolás and the liberation theologians was shaped by differing cultural experiences: by the time he arrived at the Gregorian for doctoral studies, Nicolás had already spent four years teaching and working in Japan, and it was clear that Asia was his intellectual and spiritual horizon.

It is partly for this reason, Benitez argued, that Nicolás was correct when he insisted in a meeting with the press last Friday that he is not the second coming of the late Jesuit Fr. Pedro Arrupe, associated in the popular mind with the Jesuit commitment to social justice.

While Nicolás supports and admires the social apostolate, Benitez suggested, his own interests cut deeper, towards the personal foundations of faith amid great social and cultural transformations.

While few Jesuits probably voted for Nicolás directly on the basis of this relatively obscure piece of academic work from almost 30 years ago, nonetheless, Benitez suggested, it reveals something about the man that many still find attractive: a deep intellect combined with a keen pastoral awareness of “today’s realities.”

In general, Benitez said that among Jesuits Nicolás is seen as “very balanced, very intelligent, and very calm.”

“He’s never created scandals in the past, and he knows how to manage very difficult problems,” Benitez said. He summarized the style of the new Jesuit general as “wanting to understand the reality of situations, with enormous respect for dialogue and the experience of the other,” combined with a “touch” of what Nicolás himself described last Friday as sort of Italian mentality by way of the Philippines – meaning a healthy capacity to adapt law to particular circumstances, thus avoiding what Benitez described as “fanaticism or fundamentalism.”

One further quality recommended him to the Jesuit electors, Benitez argued: the deep optimism of Nicolás about the future of religious life.

On that front, Benitez pointed to another book by Nicolás: The Horizon of Hope: Religious Life Today, published in 1978.

“There was a great debate in that era,” Benitez said. “The numbers were going down, and some actually wrote that religious life does not have a future.” In that context, he argued, Nicolás “opened a new path of hope” with his book, “putting the accent in religious life on discipleship of Christ and the importance of personal witness,” as opposed to great corporate works.

“That was the future, and Nicolás saw it,” Benitez said.



In a sense, Benitez argued, the 1978 title by Nicolás anticipated some elements of Pope Benedict XVI’s later encyclical on hope.

Finally, Benitez revealed one other intriguing aspect of the new Jesuit leader’s intellectual biography: Nicolás has a great capacity, Benitez said, for etymology, with the ability to explain the roots of terms in a variety of languages.

This is one of the reasons, Benitez suggested, that Nicolás is likely to get on well with Pope Benedict XVI: not only are they men of roughly the same age, but they are both intellectuals who can speak the same academic language.

The Rev. Marcial Maciel, 87,
Conservative Catholic Leader, Dies
By IAN FISHER
The New York Times
Published: February 1, 2008





ROME — The Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the influential Roman Catholic group the Legionaries of Christ and the most prominent priest disciplined after accusations of sexual abuse, died Wednesday, the group announced Thursday. He was 87.

Father Maciel, who was born in Mexico, where he lived most of his life, died at an unspecified location in the United States, the Legionaries said in a statement.

Born on March 10, 1920, in Michoacán State, Father Maciel founded the Legionaries in 1941 as a conservative movement active both in training priests and in organizing lay people, and he remained its charismatic leader.

The group, also known as the Legion of Christ, has 650 priests worldwide, 2,500 seminarians in 20 countries and 50,000 members in its lay affiliate, Regnum Christi. The Legionaries run a dozen universities, including their first degree-granting college in the United States, the University of Sacramento.

A friend to many Mexican politicians and business executives, Father Maciel played a major role in several of Pope John Paul II’s visits to Mexico. The pope frequently praised him and the Legionaries, calling him an “efficacious guide to youth” during a visit in 1994.

That description prompted several former Legion seminarians to go public with allegations that Father Maciel abused them from the early 1940s to the early ’60s, when they were 10 to 16 years old.

Nine of them made their claims public in 1997 in newspaper articles and then a book, “Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II” (Free Press, 2004), by Jason Berry and Gerald A. Renner. One accuser later recanted, calling the allegations fabricated.

Father Maciel repeatedly denied the charges. “I never engaged in the sort of repulsive behavior these men accuse me of,” he said in 2002.

But as scandals erupted in the United States involving abuse by priests, the case became a symbol of what critics said was the church’s unwillingness to acknowledge the problem or to punish offenders.

In 1999 an inquiry about Father Maciel — who had been investigated in the 1950s for possible drug abuse but cleared — was shelved, reportedly by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was in charge of enforcing church doctrine.

But in late 2004, several months before John Paul died, Cardinal Ratzinger reopened the investigation. He was elected pope in April 2005, taking the name Benedict XVI; the next year, in May, the Vatican issued a rare public censure, addressed to Father Maciel.

Without addressing the charges specifically, the Vatican statement said Father Maciel had been asked to give up his public ministry in favor of a quiet life of “prayer and penitence.”

News reports at the time said he had been barred from saying Mass publicly or giving speeches or interviews.

Reaction from the accusers and groups that represent other victims of abuse by priests varied. Some praised the move as a virtual admission of guilt, while others complained that it did not go far enough because there had been no explicit resolution of the charges, and that Father Maciel had not been expelled from the priesthood.

In 2006, Pope Benedict canonized Father Maciel’s great-uncle, Bishop Rafael Guizar Valencia, a missionary who had tended to the wounded in the Mexican revolution in 1910. He died in 1938.



Legionaries of Christ founder passes away




Denver, Jan 31, 2008 (CNA)- Father Álvaro Corcuera, General Director of the Legionaries of Christ, announced today that their Founder, Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, has died in the United States at the age 87 from natural causes.

In the official statement, Fr. Corcuera announced "the departure of their beloved founder, Father Marcial Maciel Degollado to heaven on January 30,” as well as the Legionaries “deep gratitude to all those who wish to unite in prayer for the eternal repose of his soul".

By the will of Father Maciel, the funeral will be celebrated privately, "in an atmosphere of prayer and simplicity in his hometown, Cotija, in the state of Michoacán, Mexico."

Fr. Marcial Maciel was born in Cotija de la Paz, Mexico on March 10, 1920.

At the age of fifteen, he entered a seminary run by his uncle, Saint Rafael Guizar y Valencia, the bishop of Veracruz. According to his official biography, it was in 1936 when he felt the call to found what in time would become the religious congregation called the Legionaries of Christ, with the later addition of the Regnum Christi lay movement.

On January 3, 1941, with the bishop’s blessing, he established a community in the style of a minor seminary with thirteen teenagers, while he was only 20 years old.

He was ordained a priest on November 26, 1944; and on June 13, 1948, the bishop of Cuernavaca, Bishop Alfonso Espino y Silva, canonically established the religious congregation of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart and of Our Lady of Sorrows, which would later be called the Legionaries of Christ.

The Legionaries of Christ gained recognition as a congregation of pontifical right through the “Decree of Praise” granted by Pope Paul VI in February of 1965.

The Legionaries of Christ currently have three bishops, about 750 priests, and close to 2,500 aspirants to the priesthood, novices, and religious in formation, with centers established in 20 countries. Regnum Christi currently has 70,000 members from about 40 different nations.

The Center for Higher Studies of the Legionaries of Christ in Rome currently forms more than 400 religious, and through Regnum Christi, Father Maciel also established an international network of Catholic volunteers.

Father Maciel participated in the bishops’ synods on priestly formation (1990), on consecrated life (1994), and on the Americas (1997). He also took part in the Fourth General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate in Santo Domingo (1992).

After directing the congregation for 64 years, Father Maciel declined to accept re-election as the General Director in January of 2005.

Sixteen months later, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a statement to settle the issue of accusations of misconduct leveled against him.

Father Maciel "spent his final years in a private life of prayer, a spirit of obedience, submission, and reverence for the Catholic Church which he had so deeply loved and taught others to love", the official statement says.

A date for his funeral has not been released.

Have you noticed that no officeial response has come from the Holy Father on the death of the Legionaries' founder? Seems a bit odd. Usually the condolences come very quickly ... and it's been two days since his death.

TOP CATHOLIC ISLAMIST
TAKES A BREAK
All Things Catholic
by John L. Allen, Jr.
Friday, February 1, 2008

I detached this segment from John Allen's multi-part Friday column - which I posted in NEWS ABOUT THE CHURCH - since it is a 'people' item.

By any standard, one of the most remarkable Americans in Rome over the last quarter-century has been Jesuit Fr. Thomas Michel, a St. Louis-born expert on Islam who has served the Vatican, the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences and, for more than a decade now, as head of the Jesuits' Secretariat for Inter-religious Dialogue.

Michel knows the Muslim world from the inside out, speaking its languages and knowing its people. He studied Arabic and Islam in Egypt and Lebanon, did his doctoral dissertation on the 14th century Muslim scholar Ibn Taymiyya, and received a Ph.D. in Islamic thought from the University of Chicago.

A true citizen of the world, Michel took his Jesuit vows in Indonesia, the world's most populous Islamic country, and is a member of the Jesuits' Indonesian Province. He probably racks up more frequent flier miles moving in and out of Muslim nations than any other Western-born Catholic one might name.

I can testify from personal experience that Michel is one of the few people I know in Rome who can converse freely with waiters at Roman restaurants in Italian, then go back and swap hellos in their own languages with the Egyptians or Lebanese or Turks who often work in the kitchens.

Inevitably, that background makes Michel an object of fascination. For example, when the late journalist Tad Szulc wrote a novel about the 1981 assassination attempt against John Paul II called To Kill the Pope, his hero was an American Jesuit expert on Islam secretly called upon by the Vatican to investigate. Szulc was actually compelled to stipulate that this was a fictional character not meant to be Michel.

All this by way of announcing that Michel is leaving Rome. He has completed his term as head of the Jesuit Secretariat on Inter-religious Dialogue, and will spend a year in the United States at the Woodstock Theological Center in Washington, D.C. Eventually, he thinks he'll settle into a Jesuit parish in Turkey.

I sat down with Michel on Tuesday, his last day in the office before leaving for Washington. We talked about the current state of Catholic/Muslim relations, and the prospects for dialogue created by the recent letter from 138 Muslim scholars and jurists to Pope Benedict XVI and other Christian leaders, proposing love of God and of neighbor as theological common ground. Pope Benedict is slated to meet with a group of signatories to that letter later this year.

Michel said this will be the first time, at least in the modern era, that a pope will take part in a serious theological conversation with Muslims.

"During the second inter-religious gathering in Assisi, in 1993, John Paul II listened as Muslims explained their views on peace," Michel said, who helped organize meetings of religious leader in Assisi both in 1986 and 1993 while serving in the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. "He wasn't just speaking, he was listening to them. But this was a much more limited conversation."

The normal pattern when Muslims (or leaders of other religions) come to the Vatican, Michel said, is to have a ceremonial event with the pope, but the substantive conversations are held with the president and secretary of the Council for Inter-religious Dialogue. In that sense, Michel said, it's important that the pope himself will be at the table.

"It's good for us, for the Church, and for the Pope to listen to Muslims," he said. "When the conversation is all one-way, something is obviously lacking."

Michel said the letter from the 138 Muslims represents a watershed moment for three reasons:

First, it reflects a "broad spectrum" from across the Islamic world, representing more than 40 countries, and transcending historical intra-Muslim conflicts pivoting on sect, language, and ethnicity. In that sense, Michel suggested, the letter may be as significant for dialogue among Muslims themselves as it is for Muslim/Christian relations.

Second, Michel said, "it's about time that somebody moved the conversation off geopolitical conflicts and onto faith questions."

Although some Vatican officials have argued that inter-religious dialogue ought to be seen as part of a broader dialogue among cultures, Michel said he doesn't share that view.

"Religion is already too often relegated to the status of folklore, of being a mere artifact of culture," he said. "Muslims are making us all aware that if we're not talking directly about God and religion, we're not accomplishing anything."

Third, Michel pointed out that the letter was "an Arab initiative," led by the Al al Bayt Foundation in Jordan. "In recent decades, most of the initiatives for dialogue from the Muslim side have come from Turks, Iranians, Southeast Asians and Muslims living in the West, in the diaspora," he said. "Central Arab countries haven't shown much leadership. It's important to see them returning to their traditional role."

I asked Michel to comment on one issue certain to surface in any Muslim/Christian conversation: "reciprocity," or the insistence that if Muslim immigrants in the West receive the benefit of religious freedom and protection of law, Christian minorities in the world's 56 majority Muslim states ought to get the same deal.

"We have to be careful," Michel said. "Reciprocity is not a gospel value, but something that comes out of diplomatic and trade negotiations."

It's entirely appropriate, Michel said, to insist that Muslims treat minorities fairly. On the other hand, he said, respect for human dignity can't become a bargaining chip. [And since when has the Vatican used this as a bargaining chip at all, when on the contrary, Pope Benedict XVI has always listed this as among the principles that the Church considers 'non-negotiable'!]

The true Christian attitude, he said, is to honor the rights of others because of their inherent worth, rather than threatening to withhold equal treatment in order to influence someone else's behavior.

He also said that perceptions of reciprocity differ widely across the Muslim/Christian divide.

"When I talk to Muslims, it's very important to give them concrete instances of when and how we've respected their rights," he said. "For example, when we've helped them open mosques, or have access to halal food, or get time off to pray on Fridays."

It's important to tell those stories, he said, because often what Muslims see from the media or hear about in the street are contrary instances, such as recent images of right-wing Germans parading pigs across grounds where a local Islamic group hopes to build a mosque. Michel said he picked up reactions to those images in far-away locales such as Bangladesh and Indonesia.

Perhaps the biggest challenge in the Muslim "street," Michel said, is that many Muslims struggle to distinguish resentments directed against the American government and the foreign policy of the Bush administration from the West generally, and from Christianity.

In that context, Michel waded directly into contemporary American politics. If the Muslim world had a vote, he said, he's confident it would go overwhelmingly to Democratic candidate Barak Obama.

"I was just in Indonesia, and whenever people found out I was an American, they began shouting, 'Barak Obama! Barak Obama!'" Michel said. He compared that to his experience 40 years ago of entering Palestinian refugee camps and seeing pictures of Egyptian President Gamal Abdle Nasser on one wall and John F. Kennedy on another.

"Kennedy represented something positive to them," Michel said. "There's a longing to be able to support the American ideal of freedom and respect for the rights of persons, but that has been blasted in the last eight years. America is now seen as a global oppressor."

Whatever one makes of the merits of that perception, of course, it's still interesting as a barometer of global attitudes. In that context, Michel predicted that Obama would have a special appeal.

"Throughout the Third World, and especially in the Muslim world, there's a feeling that the world has been run so long by white males -- from their point of view, badly -- that somebody different like Obama would be welcome. My sense is that they'd bend over backwards to give him a break."

======================================================================

John Allen may lament Michel's departure from the Vatican, but what I will not forget about him is that just two days after the Regensburg furor erupted in the Muslim world, this priest wrote an article in a Turkish magazine that took the Muslim side completely - even if it was based on misinterpretation of one citation made by the Pope int the entire lecture - pontificating about how Benedict XVI does not avail of any Islamist experts who 'know' Islam [implying thereby that Benedict himself knows little about Islam], and saying that if he were still in the Vatican, as in the time of John Paul II, Benedict would never have been 'allowed' to make the 'mistake' he did.

Not content with that, Fr. Michel went online on a site associated with Islamic extremists to 'answer' the anti-Benedict rants on the site by agreeing with them.

I am surprised Allen does not make any reference to all that - promptly reported at the time on this Forum - in this hagiographic profile, even if I am not surprised that Michel himself does not refer to Regensburg at all as the catalyst for the dialog that he now praises - and seems to credit the Muslims for ( [The letter of the 138] "was an Arab initiative").

In fact, in all his statements, he bends over backwards to give Muslims the benefit of the doubt - and I do not question that, except if it is done at the expense of the Church.

Indeed, this holier-than-thou attitude of some high-profile Jesuits with respect to the Church and the Pope - and their attendant 'wiser-than-thou' attitude to the Magisterium - that give me the most grief about this order!

Filipina founder of
the Religious of the Virgin Mary
is one step closer to beatification
by Santosh Digal



Manila, Feb. 2 (AsiaNews) - The founder of the first and oldest religious women's congregation in the Philippines - the Religious of the Virgin Mary - is now a "venerable".

The president of the Filipino bishops conference, the Archbishop of Jaro, Angel N. Lagdameo, read during a solemn Mass celebrated yesterday the decree conferring the title of venerable on Mother Ignacia del Espiritu Santo.

Cardinal Gaudencio Rosales of Manila celebrated the Mass at the shrine of Lorenzo Ruiz, in Binondo.

Mother Ignacia was born in Binondo in 1963, to a Chinese father and Filipino mother. Instead of marrying, Ignacia worked as a seamstress and led a life of prayer, meditation, and apostolic service. Her life was an example for other Filipino women, who at the time could not formally enter religious convents, which were reserved for those of Spanish descent.

She started the first religious institution for Filipino women, known as the Congregation of the Religious of the Virgin Mary. The congregation, which today is one of the largest in the Philippines, with more than 700 members, directs schools, retreat centres, and centres for social and health assistance.

The proclamation of Mother Ignacia as venerable came on her birthday, which according to her baptismal certificate falls on February 1st. The promulgation of the decree is an important step toward beatification.

In the decree dated July 6th, 2007, Pope Benedict XVI accepted the conclusions of the prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, and declared that "the Servant of God, Ignacia, foundress of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is found to possess to a heroic degree the theological virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity toward God and neighbor, as well as the cardinal virtues of Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Fortitude".

Mother Ignacia is the second person of Filipino origin to receive the title of "venerable", after Isabel Larranage Ramirez, the founder of the Sisters of Charity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, who was proclaimed venerable in 1999.

If she is canonized, Mother Ignacia could become the second Filipino saint. The first, Saint Lorenzo Ruiz, was martyred during the persecution of Christians in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1637.

According to the documents presented in Rome for the cause of beatification, it must be ascertained that Mother Ignacia led a life of holiness and that at least one miracle has been obtained through her intercession.

The case presented to the Congregation for the Cause of Sainthood is the healing of a diabetic. Victoria Peña-Utanes suffered from a serious infection of her left foot, which her doctor was planning to amputate.

In desperation, Utanes invoked the intercession of Mother Ignacia, and in an act of faith the sick woman placed a photo of Mother Ignacia on the wound and bandaged the foot. When she arrived home in the evening, the wound had been healed, and according to her doctor the healing could not be explained in scientific terms.

Cardinal Jaime Sin, Rosales's predecessor, began the cause of beatification in 1986. The Vatican guaranteed the "nihil obstat", giving permission to proceed with the investigation the same year, and an archdiocesan tribunal was created.

It's official:
Sarkozy marries Bruni



Couple photographed in Egypt on Dec. 30, 2007


PARIS, Feb. 2 (Reuters) - President Nicolas Sarkozy of France married the supermodel-turned-singer Carla Bruni at the Elysée Palace on Saturday, witnesses said.

The Italian news agency ANSA quoted Bruni's mother, Marisa Borini, as confirming the wedding had taken place. Two French radio stations said the marriage conducted by François Lebel, mayor of Eighth Arrondissement of Paris, where the Elysée Palace is situated.

"The bride was wearing white and was ravishing," Lebel told Europe 1 radio without naming the couple. "The bridegroom wasn't bad, either."

Sarkozy and Bruni indicated last month that they planned to marry and made it clear that any wedding would be a private affair, far from the eyes of the media. A French newspaper report on Jan. 14 that they had married proved unfounded.

RTL radio named the couple's witnesses and quoted Bernadette Chirac, wife of former President Jacques Chirac, as saying getting married at the Elysée, the president's official residence, was "a wonderful thing".

"I want to express all my best wishes to this new household," she added. It was not immediately clear if she was present.

Bruni, 40, has previously been linked with the rock stars Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, as well as former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius.

Sarkozy, 53, and his second wife, Cécilia, divorced last October after 11 years of marriage, just five months after he took power.

It was the first time in modern French history that a serving president and his wife divorced, but within two months Sarkozy was photographed in public at Disneyland Paris with Bruni, and the French media reported they were a couple.

The two went on vacation together over the Christmas period in Egypt and Jordan, and photographs of them walking arm in arm made the front cover of almost every news magazine in France.

The media frenzy has dealt a blow to Sarkozy's popularity ratings, with French voters complaining that he was concentrating too much on his personal life and not enough on the affairs of state.

Bruni has a son from a previous relationship, while Sarkozy has two grown-up sons from his first marriage, and a third son from his marriage to Cécilia.

RTL radio said Sarkozy's witness at the wedding was Nicolas Bazire, a senior figure in the LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton luxury goods group, while Bruni's witness was Mathilde Agostinelli, head of communications at Prada France.



French President Sarkozy
Marries Former Model Bruni
By Rudy Ruitenberg

PARIS, Feb. 2 (Bloomberg News) -- French President Nicolas Sarkozy married Italian model-turned-singer Carla Bruni in a ceremony at the Elysee presidential palace in Paris today.

The couple "were married this morning in the presence of their families in the strictest of intimacy," the President's office said in an e-mailed statement.

The wedding lasted about 20 minutes and was attended by close family and friends, said Francois Lebel, the mayor of Paris's 8th arrondissement, who oversaw the formalities this morning. He spoke in an interview on Europe 1 radio.

"The bride was in white, she was thrilling as usual, but the groom wasn't bad either," Lebel said.

"It's the first time in the history of the Republic that a President has married in office," he noted.

Sarkozy's marriage comes amid a drop in popularity, in part as the French say their president publicizes his private life too much. His approval rating fell 8 points to 41 percent in a Jan. 31 TNS-Sofres poll, below his 'disapproval' rating for the first time since he took office in May.

Nicolas Bazire, the head of French billionaire Bernard Arnault's private investment company, was the witness for Sarkozy, while Mathilde Agostinelli, head of communications for Prada France, was the witness for Bruni, RTL radio reported on its Web site.

"There were about 20 people, the close family and some friends," Lebel said. "I wished them a lot of happiness."

Media coverage of the divorced president's Christmas trip to Egypt with Bruni aboard the private jet of French financier Vincent Bollore, along with concern over accelerating inflation, contributed to Sarkozy's declining approval rating.

In a January poll by LH2, 63 percent of the French said Sarkozy was publicizing his private life too much. In the same poll, the president's overall popularity dropped two percentage points from a month earlier to 54 percent.

Bruni, 40 and Sarkozy, 53, were first photographed together Dec. 17, taking her son to Disneyland Paris. Since then, they traveled together to Jordan after the Egypt trip. Bruni didn't accompany him in December to her native Italy, where Sarkozy met Pope Benedict XVI.

In the TNS-Sofres poll, conducted on Jan. 23 and 24 and published last week, those who don't have confidence in Sarkozy rose to 55 percent from 48 percent.

Bruni, who was born in Turin, Italy, has lived most of her life in France. After a successful career as a model in the 1990s, she turned to music and has released two albums. She said in a newspaper interview last year that she planned to vote for Segolene Royal, the Socialist candidate that Sarkozy defeated in last May's presidential election.

Sarkozy divorced his second wife Cecilia in October. He has one son with her and two from his first marriage. Bruni has a son from a relationship with philosopher Raphael Enthoven. She's also been linked to Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger, guitarist Eric Clapton and real estate developer Donald Trump, according to whosdatedwho.com, a Web site about celebrity relationships.


The newlyweds photographed the day after their wedding at a cafe in Versailles (top photo); and
Walking in the woods near Versailles with Bruni's father and stepmother. The fifth person is a security officer.

Cardinal offers insight on church, media
By CHAD DAY
The Missourian
Feb. 2, 2008




COLUMBIA — The Vatican’s former head of communications preached the “good news” of media relations Friday night.

Cardinal John Foley spoke on the relationship between media and religion to a crowd of about 400 at the St. Thomas More Newman Center.

Foley emphasized the importance of public relations in the Catholic church in communicating the news of the church to the media. He particularly stressed the need for an open and honest dialogue between the church and the media.

“I would ask you in your communication efforts, to share the good news of what is happening here and abroad,” Foley said.

Foley was the head of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications at the Vatican until 2007. He coordinated media relations for Pope John Paul II’s funeral and the election and installment of Pope Benedict XVI. He also holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in New York.

During the 1960s, he covered Vatican II and later became editor of the Catholic Standard and Times, where he instituted a page that highlighted members of the Church who exemplify the doctrinal beliefs in their lives.

“I think people are always interested in people,” he said.

Foley said this type of coverage was vital to showing the positive side of the church and improving the church’s perception in today’s media coverage.

“I thought people needed good role models,” he said.

When asked by a member of the audience whether he felt the U.S. media was intentionally critical of the church, he said that in his experience that has not been the case. He said the church must always act with candor when dealing with the media, particularly when the news could paint the church in an unfavorable light.

The cardinal’s stance surprised some of those in attendance.

Elizabeth Freese, an employee at the State Historical Preservation Office, heard Foley’s distinct voice for the first time this past Christmas during his annual commentary on the pope’s Midnight Mass and wanted to see him in person.

“He made a really good point that the good that we do is never really talked about in the media,” Freese said.

Dick Hronick, a retired Jefferson City postal worker, said Foley’s remarks were more optimistic about the current media situation than he expected.

“I think that because of his position that the media might treat him with deference,” Hronick said. “I think that generally the media, at least more and more in the last few years, is being more antagonistic to traditional Christianity than his experience seems to indicate.”

Even so, he sees hope in Foley’s good experience with the media.

“I would like to think his experience is closer to the truth, and maybe people are looking for something a little more,” Hronick said.

Foley also spoke to the importance of teaching students and the public about the processes involved in news gathering and production in order to foster a more media-literate society.

“We should become intelligent consumers of the media and not just couch potatoes,” Foley said.

Tom Bander, a development officer at William Woods University, said he was grateful for the cardinal’s candor with the audience.

“I appreciated that he didn’t talk down to us or above us,” he said.

As part of his visit to MU, Foley also visited a public relations class at the MU School of Journalism on Thursday afternoon. He offered insight into managing large events from a strategic communication perspective and many anecdotes from his past experience with popes, presidents and senators.

Friday’s forum was the fourth installment of the St. Thomas More Newman Center.


Another Missouri newspaper had an extensive interview with Cardinal Foley:



Vatican's 'nicest guy'
shares ideas in visit here
By Tim Townsend
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Feb. 2, 2008


For 23 years, John Foley was the Vatican's highest communication official. His department oversaw all film, television and photographic work at the Vatican, and prepared official policy statements.

In November, Pope Benedict XVI gave him a red hat, elevating him to the College of Cardinals, and naming him Grand Master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem (more on that title later.)

Cardinal Foley, who is 72, is now one of 13 American cardinals who are under 80, and therefore eligible to elect the next pope.

He swung through St. Louis this week on his way to Columbia, where he was due to give a couple of talks to University of Missouri students, including one titled, "Is Religion Still Good News?" Foley, who grew up in Philadelphia, has a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

In a conversation at Aquinas Institute of Theology on Wednesday, Foley — who has been called the nicest guy in the Vatican — spoke about everything from Catholic-Muslim dialogue to watching videos in his apartment with Pope John Paul II. Here are excerpts from that conversation:


In your 23 years in the Vatican, what have you learned about the media world?
We tried to make it easier for people to cover the Pope. (Pope John Paul II) was most open to having all of his public activity covered. He didn't do interviews, or else he would have done nothing else. …

I've been at the United Nations every time a Pope has been there. I was at Columbia in 1965 when Paul VI came and they sent me down to cover it. Then I was the English-language press secretary for John Paul II on his trip through Ireland and the United States in 1979. And then I was back with him as an archbishop in '95. I don't know whether I'll be back with the new Pope this year (when Benedict XVI addresses the U.N. in April), but I'd like to be.


What are the differences between John Paul and Benedict in terms of how they worked with media?
John Paul was a more dramatic figure, and given to dramatic gestures, which the present Holy Father is not.

But the present Holy Father is very open to the media. He's very kind, gentle, and he has given interviews before he has gone to specific countries. He did for the Polish media before he went to Poland. He did for the German media before he went to Cologne for World Youth Day. So, it would be nice if he'd do that for the American media, too, but I don't know. He doesn't feel as secure in English. He speaks English very well, but I guess he just lacks confidence. He's a professor, so he like to get things right. …

… Not too many people could say that a Pope has been in their living room watching videos. Shortly after I arrived in Rome, I had this video player with three systems — American, European and French-Russian systems. (John Paul II) wanted to see some videos, so his assistant asked if he could come to my apartment to watch them. They were religious videos — it wasn't "Spiderman" or anything like that.


Can you explain what the Grand Master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem is?
That's sort of an imposing title, isn't it? The order of the Holy Sepulchre is a group of about 120,000 men and women around the world who are pledged, not only to the deep meaning of their own spiritual lives, but to assist in the Christian community in the Holy Land, which is interpreted as far as their rules are concerned as Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Cyprus.

What we want to guarantee is that there is a continuing Christian presence in the Holy Land. These are the descendants of the original followers of Christ, and it would be a great tragedy of they had to leave.


You've been in Rome a long time now, but what issues do you think the American church is confronting today?
Well, a challenge facing all religions is a secularism — the increasing distraction from ultimate values to the satisfaction of immediate needs.

Another, of course, is the difficulties of maintaining a Catholic school system, a Catholic education program in an American society which has an interpretation of the strict separation of church and state, so that there can't be any benefit for Catholics schools even though they provide a major benefit to society.


Do you know Archbishop Raymond Burke?
I know Archbishop Burke very well. … I always found him exemplary. He's a kind, prayerful, gentle, very intelligent and learned person. He has a great sense of humor.


What are your thoughts about the recent letter to Pope Benedict, called "A Common Word Between Us and You" and signed by 138 Muslim scholars around the world asking for dialogue?
I think it's wonderful. It's not easy to dialogue with Islam because: Who represents Islam? In the Catholic church you have a central authority, and you have representatives delegated by that central authority or by the bishop of a particular area to deal with other faiths. And you don't have that in Islam.

So, individuals who have this dialogue may not be representative of the main forces within the Islamic community.

I'm very interested in it because it touches on my present work.


When you received an alumni award from Columbia in 1985, what made you suggest a course in religion journalism, which the school now offers?
Unfortunately, many assignment editors confuse ignorance with objectivity, and they assign someone to cover religion who knows absolutely nothing about it, thinking that in that way they're being unbiased. I said, "If you did that in sports, imagine the riots in the street."

Monk tipped to be next
Archbishop of Westminster
By Christopher Morgan and Mark Macaskill
The Sunday Times (London)
Feb. 3, 2008


MaryJos reported this briefly yesterday in NEWS ABOUT THE CHURCH. Here is how the Times reported it:


A MONK in a remote Scottish abbey has emerged as a surprise contender to replace Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor as leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales.

Hugh Gilbert, 55, the abbot of Pluscarden Abbey in Elgin, Moray, has become a serious candidate to replace Murphy-O’Connor when he retires later this year.

The ultimate decision will rest with the Pope, but senior church figures are said to have been impressed with Gilbert’s orthodox views and leadership skills.

No candidate has succeeded to the post from such an obscure background since Basil Hume more than three decades ago. He was the relatively unknown abbot of Ampleforth, in Yorkshire, when in 1976 he was appointed Archbishop of Westminster, the most senior Catholic post in England and Wales.

Although several serving bishops have been mooted as possible successors, one senior Catholic source said: “It is time to go outside the episcopal club of England and Wales.”

For some time Rome has felt that the liberal drift of the bishops has failed to halt declining church attendance. Gilbert would represent a change in style because he is known as a traditionalist with dynamic qualities of leadership. He has presided over an expansion of his abbey and the founding of two offshoots in Africa and America.

Another senior Catholic said: “It’s true that Hugh’s name is being discussed as a potential successor and he is mortified and embarrassed at the attention he is receiving.

“I don’t think it’s out of the question that he could be appointed. He is part of a very successful monastic community which is bursting at the seams. He is a quiet, scholarly monk who would probably accept the appointment out of obedience to the church.”

Vatican officials visited Pluscarden and are said to have been impressed with Gilbert’s powers of delegation and the high esteem in which he is held within and outside the monastery.

An Englishman and a convert to Catholicism, Gilbert was educated at St Paul’s school and King’s College London. He became a monk in 1974. Since his election as abbot in 1992, Pluscarden has gone from strength to strength and is now home to 27 monks. He is known for humility, a self-effacing style and “a dry sense of humour and sparkling wit”.

Murphy-O’Connor was due to retire last year on his 75th birthday but was asked to remain in office. His successor will be chosen by the Pope from a list of three names drawn up after extensive consultation.

In addition to Gilbert, those tipped for the position include Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Birmingham. He is known to be an enthusiastic supporter of the Pope’s campaign for liturgical renewal and, although he was long suspected by Rome of being liberal, he has now presented himself as a conservative. Nichols is said to have impressed Rome with a sermon he gave in Oxford last year on traditionalism in the church, as well as with his readiness to challenge government policy over Catholic schools and gay adoption.

Murphy-O’Connor is believed to favour Peter Smith, the Archbishop of Cardiff, a chain-smoker who has been prominent in dealing with issues such as abortion and euthanasia. Smith played a leading role in 2004 in ensuring that the Mental Incapacity Bill did not lead to euthanasia by the back door. In addition to the two archbishops, Arthur Roche, Bishop of Leeds, has established a reputation as chairman of the body that is revising the texts of the mass.

Whoever succeeds will be expected to find a way of tackling secularism and boosting church attendance. The Catholic Church has suffered a serious fall in the size of its congregations in Britain, although recently its numbers have been bolstered by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Poles and Lithuanians after the expansion of the European Union in 2004. Attendance at Sunday mass in 1991 was recorded as 1.3m, a drop of 40% since 1963.

Were Gilbert to move to Westminster, it would be a marked change of lifestyle.

As well as being in a remote location, Pluscarden belongs to the Benedictines, who follow the rule of the 5th-century pioneer St Benedict. The monks lead a life of prayer and quiet reflection, rising each morning before dawn and spending much of the day singing Gregorian chants.

They do not have access to television or radio and believe the world is best served by withdrawing from it and praying for it. Last week Gilbert was unavailable for comment.

MaryJos provided the link to Pluscarden Abeey's site:
www.pluscardenabbey.org/home.asp


Benedictine abbot could be
new Archbishop of Westminster


London, Feb 3, 2008 (CNA).- Prominent Catholic figures believe a monk at a Scottish abbey is a leading candidate to become the next Archbishop of Westminster, the highest office of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, the Scotland on Sunday newspaper reports.

Abbot Hugh Gilbert, O.S.B., heads Pluscarden Abbey in the Moray council area town of Eglin. His orthodoxy and leadership have reportedly impressed important churchmen, though the final decision for the Archbishop of Westminster’s successor remains with Pope Benedict XVI.

The abbot, 55, is known as a traditionalist and has presided over an expansion of his Benedictine abbey and the founding of two offshoots in America and Africa. A convert to Catholicism, Abbot Hugh became a monk in 1974 and was elected abbot at Pluscarden Abbey in 1992.

According to the Scotland on Sunday, one senior Catholic acknowledged Abbot Hugh was a candidate for the major archbishopric. "He is a quiet, scholarly monk who would probably accept the appointment out of obedience to the church."

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor is the current Archbishop of Westminster. He was set to retire when he turned 75 in 2007 but was asked to remain in office.

Other clergy believed to be likely choices for the see of Westminster include: Archbishop of Birmingham Vincent Nichols, a supporter of the Pope’s liturgical renewal movement; Archbishop of Cardiff Peter Smith, who has been prominent in pro-life issues; and Bishop of Leeds Arthur Roche, who is responsible for revising the text of the Mass.

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The following is a good companion piece to the above. Although it is not about NOTABLES, I've decided to post it here for continuity.

A grand vision for
the English Catholic Church
The Catholic Herald (UK)


Fr Aidan Nichols wrote an article for this newspaper almost a decade ago in which he argued that the Church’s true mission was “the conversion of England”.

His essay caused a stir and was picked up by the BBC, which gave him a John Humphrys-style grilling. Why, his interviewer demanded to know, was he advocating something so plainly “offensive” to non-Catholics?

Fr Nichols pointed out that he had never suggested that Catholics should target Protestants, or practising members of any other religious group. Nevertheless, he was accused of wanting to “eliminate” other Christian and non-Christian religions.

Fr Nichols’s new book, The Realm, will almost certainly provoke similarly aggressive misunderstandings. Nowhere in the book does he call for Catholics to prey on other religious groups.

But when the average Englishman hears the phrase “the conversion of England”, he thinks “Spanish Inquisition” – a spectre you might think a Dominican would be especially wary of evoking.

Many Catholics will recall the controversy that ensued when Cardinal Basil Hume used the term in an interview. He was later forced to apologise.

Fr Nichols is clearly prepared for brickbats, but, as he says in the first chapter, he is not going to apologise. He regards the taboo surrounding the contentious phrase as a “specifically contemporary-Catholic form of political correctness”, which has led to confusion about what, precisely, the English Catholic Church is for.

Is it simply one among many exclusive religious clubs or is it a universal body that aims to bring the world to its divine fulfilment? Fr Nichols, unsurprisingly, thinks it’s the latter.

For him, Catholics display false modesty when they settle on a goal less radical than the complete transformation of our society in the light of Christian revelation.

Given the catastrophic decline of English Catholicism, isn’t this all a bit of a pipe dream? Fr Nichols recognises that the figures are “scary”, but that doesn’t dampen his enthusiasm. If the Church once “made England”, it can do so again, he says.

The English Catholic Church’s great advantage, he believes, is its dynamic mix of indigenous and foreign elements. In contrast to the Church of England, which is “too exclusively indigenous” and the Orthodox Church, which is “too little indigenous”, Catholicism “can present itself as quintessentially English and generously inter-ethnic at one and the same time”. This, he says, is crucial to transforming our culture.

The theologian sets out a bold list of “policies” he thinks will equip the Church to transform society. Anyone familiar with the thought of Pope Benedict XVI will find most of the items familiar.

What Fr Nichols is proposing is that the English Church imports the Benedictine revolution from Rome. This may, as he says, seem a “colossal task”. But at least it lifts our sights and gives us something collectively to aim for.

There are insuperable problems with reviving the term “conversion of England”, but Fr Nichols is essentially right: the Church needs a coordinated strategy for drawing individuals to the Catholic faith and transforming English culture from within. His programme is the most convincing yet proposed. We hope his book will inspire English Catholics to think big again.

BERLUSCONI'S MOTHER DIES AT AGE 97

Adapted, abridged and translated from a report in PETRUS today:





VATICAN CITY, Feb. 4 - Rosa Bossi Berlusconi, 97, mother of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, died yesterday at her home in Milan. There was unanimous condolence in the political world.

A note from Berlusconi thanked everyone for their sympathy and said a "strictly familial and private funeral' would take place in Milan Tuesday.

Born in 1911, Rosa Bossi had three children, and since she was widowed in 1989, always remained close to her son, who entered Italian politics in the 1990s when he was already one of the richest businessmen in the world, perhaps Italy's richest man.

When Berlusconi first met Pope Benedict XVI shortly after the 2005 Conclave, he told the Pope his mother would have wanted to be present, but since she was unable to come, would he give him a rosary for her. His mother often said she prayed three rosaries a day for her son.

Despite her age, she remained quite active to the end. She finally met the Pope last June 27, when the Pope gave Berlusconi a private audience after the General Audience of the day.

A few days earlier, on June 23, the city of Milan granted her an honorary citizenship for having saved a Jewish woman during the war from being arrested by a German solider.

She often said that she and her husband made it a habit to put aside a little something everyday, and that it was such savings that gave Silvio a start in business.

Bin Laden's son wants to meet the Pope




Rome, 5 Feb.(AKI) - Omar bin Laden, son of the infamous al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, has said he wants to meet Pope Benedict XVI and visit the Vatican.

Bin Laden, a 26-year old practising Muslim, spoke to the Italian TV network LA7 on its programme called, Nothing Personal, aired on Monday night.

" I would very much like to meet the Pope in St. Peter's, but I have been told that it is not easy," said bin Laden, who considers himself an ambassador for peace.

Bin Laden also wants to return to Italy in the future and visit the Vatican.

During the television interview, Omar also said that he did not believe his father is dead.

"I do not believe my father is dead, otherwise I would have known it; the world would have known it," said Omar.

Omar bin Laden is one of 19 children of the al-Qaeda leader, who tops US President Bush's most wanted list.

The younger bin Laden said in previous interviews that a truce between the West and al-Qaeda is possible.

He arrived in Rome from Switzerland, amid tight security, accompanied by his wife Zaina.

Zaina is a 52 year-old British divorcee and Muslim convert, previously known as Jane Felix-Browne. The couple currently lives in Cairo, Egypt.

Zaina is Omar bin Laden's second wife, as he also has a wife in Saudi Arabia.

Under Islamic law, men can have up to four wives provided the man treats them all equally.

In a previous interview recorded in Cairo by an Italian TV network, in January, bin Laden said he had not seen his father for several years.

"The last time I saw my father was in 2000, 2001. I was in Saudi Arabia and felt a terrible sorrow for all the victims," [of the September 11 attacks] he said.

"My father has a kind heart," said Omar bin Laden.

Osama bin Laden's whereabouts remain unknown. He is accused of being behind a number of atrocities, including the 1998 bombing of two US embassies in East Africa and the mastermind of the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 2001.

His al-Qaeda network has been linked indirectly to bombings on the island of Bali in Indonesia and its capital Jakarta, as well as suicide attacks in north Africa and Turkey.