NEWS & VIEWS
from a CATHOLIC perspective

      BELFAST (CWNews.com) - Northern Ireland First Minister David Trimble, a leader of pro-British loyalist Protestants, said on Tuesday that he hopes to meet with Pope John Paul II during a visit to Rome this week, the first leader of the Ulster Unionist Party to do so.

      Trimble will be in Rome for a meeting of Nobel Peace Prize laureates, called by former Soviet Communist leader Mikhail Gorbachev, for a seminar on Kosovo. Northern Ireland Catholic republican leader John Hume will also join Trimble in Rome. The two men won the Peace Prize last year for the efforts that brought about the Good Friday peace accords in the troubled region.

      "Insofar as the opportunity arises I will brief him on political progress here and our continuing efforts to implement all aspects of the Belfast agreement," Trimble said of his meeting with the Holy Father. He added that he expected to be criticized by radical anti-Catholic members of his party.

      Trimble has been criticized for attending a Catholic service in Donegal last August for victims of the Omagh bombing, the worst atrocity in Northern Ireland's 30-year sectarian war, and for meeting Archbishop Sean Brady of Armagh in September 1997.