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TUESDAY February 29, 2000 vol. 11, no. 42 SECTION THREESee why so many consider the Daily CATHOLIC as the "USA Today for CATHOLICS!"
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WORLDWIDE NEWS & VIEWS with a Catholic slant continued:
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Beginning March 15th, the St. Andres Association of the Quirinale for the Roman Jubilee, as well as the Pontifical Gregorian University will hold three conferences to make further preparations for the Holy Father's continuing "Jubilee Journey" to the Holy Land. Joining these two institutions will be the Israeli Embassies in the Vatican and Italy, as open dialogue continues and gains momentum in the Judeo-Christian understanding. These efforts are expected to help pave the way for a smoother trip for the Pope and to ease concerns by extreme fundamentalists throughout the mideast. continued inside.
ROME, FEB 27 (ZENIT).- Beginning March 15, the St. Andrew Association of
the Quirinale for the Roman Jubilee and the Pontifical Gregorian
University are offering three conferences in connection with the Pope's
forthcoming trip to the Holy Land. The events are intended to learn more
about the Jewish culture and religion, and to discover the common roots
of Christians and their elder brothers.
The initiative of these two institutions is added to the collaboration
of the Israeli Embassies in the Vatican and Italy, and the Jewish
community in Rome, the principal objective being to provide quality
dialogue and collaboration between the believers in the one God, Father
of humanity.
The first event is an exhibition entitled, "From the Temple of Jerusalem
to the Synagogue: Pilgrimage Celebrations and the Western Wall," which
will begin in March 15 at 6 p.m. in the portico of the Pontifical
Gregorian University; it will remain open until April 12, 2000. The
exhibition includes a series of precious objects, on loan from the
Jewish Community in Rome, and 25 photographs of Jerusalem's Western
Wall. The objects, which belong to Five Schools, and the old "ghetto"
synagogues of Rome, are still used on great feasts, such as Succoth
(Feast of Tents), Pesach (Easter) and Shavuoth (Celebration of the Law)
observed in the Diaspora; they substitute pilgrimages to the Temple in
Jerusalem. The pictures are the photographic work of Michal Ronnen
Safdie who for years has photographed the areas surrounding the Western
Wall, what remains of the support structure that encircled the Second
Temple. The photography succeeds in capturing the different facets of
life in Israel and Jerusalem.
The second event is a concert with first class Israeli musicians: Mira
Zakai, mezzo soprano; Jonathan Zak, piano; and Gilad Hildesheim, violin.
They will play a rich selection of music with texts from the Biblical
and Jewish tradition. The concert will be held on Wednesday, March 15,
at 8:30 p.m. in the "Caravita" Oratory.
Finally, a conference is scheduled on "Thirty-five Years of Excavations
in Jerusalem," which will be led by Professor of Archeology Dan Bahat,
of the Bar-Ilan University in Israel. This event will take place in the
main auditorium of the Pontifical Gregorian University on March 20 at 5
p.m. Professor Bahat was superintendent of Jerusalem until 1990, and has
directed numerous excavations, including Masada and the Palace of the
Herods in Jerusalem.
This triple cultural proposal, just two weeks before the Pope's trip to
the Holy Land is "an occasion to discover, behind the metaphors
surrounding the pilgrimage and the Holy City, the universal invitation
to a common road to peace and fraternity among all peoples," the
organizers said.
ZE00022701
Denver's Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, OFM Cap stated in Sunday's edition of the Rocky Mountain News that he strongly opposes same-sex marriages and any legislation tied in to promoting the homosexual agenda. In the same article, the Denver archbishop made clear his position on hate-crime laws, stating that "hatred aggravates the evil of crime." To some his words might seem contradictory, but in essence and spirit, just as Scotland Cardinal Thomas Winning has stressed, is upholding the fundamentals of God's law and the rights of all of His children to be free from violence because of a person's behavior or lifestyle. continued inside.
DENVER (CWNews.com) - The archbishop of Denver said in a
column in Sunday's Rocky Mountain News newspaper that
Colorado's Catholics support new hate-crime legislation and
a proposal to ban same-sex marriages.
Archbishop Charles Chaput said the reason for supporting
the hate-crime measure was because "hatred aggravates the
evil of a crime." He added, "A moral difference exists
between attacking persons for their money, and attacking
them because they're Asian, or Jewish, or homosexual ....
Whatever the content of a person's behavior, he or she
never loses the right to be free from violence motivated by
hatred. The law can legitimately seek to ensure that."
The archbishop then went on to say that the law should
protect the status of marriage and family in society, and
could legitimately exclude other types of relationships
from sharing in that status. "Marriage, as we traditionally
understand it, is the foundation stone of our culture," he
wrote. "It's the fundamental community which gives life to
the rest of society."
"The unique legal status of marriage exists largely to
protect the children who depend on marriage to thrive," he
said, adding that the nature of marriage itself, regardless
of the intent of individual married couples, is
"fundamentally ordered to the bearing and rearing of the
next generation."
Citing the evidence of recent history, Archbishop Chaput
said that when traditional marriages dissolve, children
suffer, and said the well-being and success of children
depends on intact, two-parent families. He added that this
doesn't mean that blended or single-parent families are
doomed to fail. "Our public response should focus on easing
those pressures and reinforcing our support for marriage,
not redefining it or establishing parallel structures which
erode marriage by sapping its special status," he said.
"It will do little good to pay pious lip service to
marriage if we then create alternative arrangements with
similar legal privileges," he added. "Doing so might keep
'marriage' in our cultural vocabulary, but it would
effectively diminish its importance -- maybe not
intentionally; maybe not immediately ... but irreversibly."
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