Letters: Marian devotion

Sydney
4 August 2002

Pope tells young: Don’t be put off by priests’ sins

Papal honour to war rape heroine

Stem-cell research

Painting of St Edith Stein to be blessed

Maternity leave focus may cloud other issues

Central Coast businesses help Vinnies care for needy

Columbans end a 43-year tradition

Sydney festivals follow in wake of World Youth Day

Need for audio loops so faithful can hear services

‘Reprehensible’ decision

Editorial: Sanctions on Iraq

Letters: Marian devotion

Conversation: Swimmers offered to teach Pope John - Kevin Berry, Olympic champion, writer, speaker

Reflections: John Paul touches hearts of young

Challenge for Catholics to defend their faith

Hitting the high Cs on Toronto stage

Comment: Stem-cell research? Surplus or not, it’s a matter of life and death for embryos

Education: Freedom to have a happy childhood

Inspirations: Mercy Sisters open up Sacred Spaces

Letters: Marian devotion

Prevention is better than cure. May I suggest that all priests should return to Marian devotion, i.e. the wearing of the brown scapular and the recitation of the daily Rosary.

If we clothe ourselves with Mary’s holiness and purity, with her name in our hearts, in our minds and on our lips, Satan cannot enter and his evil will not overcome us.

Ideally, all families should say the Rosary together. But let us start with the children in the classroom. All boys and girls need Mary’s protection. “O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to Thee!”

Margaret Noonan
North Rothbury, NSW

PAPAL PRISONERS

It is interesting that Severino Milazzo (Prisoner of the Vatican, Letters, CW 28/7) should reproach me with “a mild sense of trepidation”. I sincerely trust that the trepidation or mental perturbation my article caused is dispelled by this reply.

First – I repeat what I wrote: “On September 2, 1870, Italian troops occupied Rome and Pope Pius IX, no longer possessing Papal States, declared himself ‘the Prisoner of the Vatican’, which he remained until his death on February 7, 1878.

“Succeeding popes until Paul VI continued the role of ‘Prisoner of the Vatican’.”

Second – Pius IX imposed the ‘Prisoner of the Vatican’ title and condition upon himself.

Third – “The Italian Law of Guarantees of May 31, 1871, assured the Pope of personal inviolability and left him with the Vatican and other buildings. But Pius IX refused to accept the arrangement (which did not have the status of international law) and never again set foot outside the Vatican, considering himself a prisoner therein. He calmly and steadfastly viewed the events as a form of the ever raging battle between God and Satan, in which Satan’s defeat was inevitable.” – Richard P. McBrien Lives of the Popes (San Francisco 1997) pp 345 -346.

Fourth – Benedict XV (1914-22) took the first steps to regularise relations with the Italian State by first allowing and encouraging Catholics to participate fully in Italian politics and secondly by lifting a ban Pius IX had imposed on official visits to the Quirinale Palace in Rome by Catholic heads of state.

The palace had been the summer residence of the popes but was taken over in 1870 and became the residence of the King of Italy.

Benedict also authorised a seceret meeting between Mussolini and Cardinal Gaspari to begin the process which finally resulted in Gaspari, as Secretary of State to Pius XI, signing the Lateran Treaty in 1929.

Fifth – Pius XI’s Concordat with Mussolini in 1929 and the resulting Lateran Treaty of 11 February 1929, in which the Vatican for the first time recognised the kingdom of Italy and Rome as its capital, and the Vatican City State was established as a sovereign state independent of Italy, had nothing to do with the personal movements of the pope.

Last: It was Paul VI who finally put an end to the ‘Prisoner of the Vatican’ idea when in 1964 he made his historic visit to the Holy Land and again in 1965, immediately after Vatican II, he attended a session of the United Nations in New York.

John Paul II with his globe-trotting pastoral visits to almost every country on earth has buried once and for all that self-imposed incarceration by Pius IX.

John XIII was the first to go outside the Vatican, but his visits were confined to hospitals and prisons in Rome.

Dr Joe Morley
Lane Cove

CHILD ABUSE

In recent weeks there has been much discussion about child abuse.

All contributors have been scathing in their condemnation of such behaviour and rightly so.

However, one avenue of child abuse that has been ignored, or soft-pedalled, is the treatment of children in our detention centres.

Keeping adults behind barbed wire for lengthy periods, such as two years and more, calling them by numbers, and traumatising them in conditions that one social worker described as “a cross between a prison and a lunatic asylum” is bad enough.

Where children are involved it is barbaric.

Christianity’s founder said “suffer the children to come to me ...” not “let the children suffer to come to me…”.

The best that can be said for our federal leader and his crew is that they have misread the Gospel message.

The worst is that they are perfecting the art of child abuse by traumatising children whose lives might be permanently scarred, if not destroyed.

Kevin Coen
Thornleigh, NSW

A RIGHT TO LIVE

Children in detention centres are being denied basic human rights.

They have a right to freedom, a right to live and grow and mature. But because of their circumstances today they are suffering.

Does anyone love or care for them?

These children have a right to live, to find a loving, caring new home.

Michael Francis Filippini
Hawthorn, Vic

HEROES AND HELL?

Margaret Noonan concludes her letter (Relics of heroes, CW 19/5) thus: “... therein lies the difference between a saint and a hero”.

She seems to imply that a soldier who has taken a life cannot be a saint because that would put him at odds with St Thérèse of Liseux who did not take a life.

In the same issue, the Pope is recorded as having given an arm bone of St Dasius, a Roman soldier, to the Bulgarian Orthodox Patriach Maxim.

Are we to presume that St Dasius never took a life in the course of his soldiering and that every soldier who took a life is in hell?

David Bannerman
Rouse Hill, NSW