Ccee: “Christians at university”The annual meeting of the European Coordinating Committee of the Europe’s Bishops’ Conferences’ Catechesis, school and university Commission (CSU, a body of the Council of the Bishops’ Conferences of Europe) took place in Djursholm (Stockholm, Sweden) from April 17 to 19. The meeting was attended by some twenty national delegates for university pastoral work coming from Belgium, Germany, United Kingdom, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden. The works were presided over and co-ordinated by Mgr Marek Jedraszewski, Auxiliary Bishop of Poznan (Poland) and Vice-president of the CSU university section; by Father Ferenk Janka, CCEE Vice-secretary general; and by Mgr Lorenzo Leuzzi, secretary of the CSU university section. Father Emilio Bettini, from the university pastoral care’s office of the Rome vicariate, took stock of the Pauline Jubilee of university students (Rome, 12-15 March 2009). Saturday 18 and Sunday 19 were mostly dedicated to the preparations for the European meeting of university students to be held in Rome at Tor Vergata University (9-12 July) on “Disciples of Emmaus. Acting as Christians in Universities”.During the recent meeting of the CCEE (Council of European Bishops’ Conferences), Don Emilio Bettini of the Office for University Pastoral Work of the Vicariate of Rome summed up the results of the Pauline jubilee of university students (Rome, 12-15 March) in which students and 600 professors from every continent participated. This was followed by a wide-ranging review of the various experiences of university pastoral work coordinated by the delegates of the various European nations. The national delegates agreed to meet again at Porto (Portugal) from 25 to 27 September.Italy: Benedict XVI with the earthquake victimsOn Tuesday 28 April Benedict XVI will visit the earthquake zones of the Abruzzo, where he will meet the mayors and parish priests of the towns and villages most badly damaged by the quake, local Catholic communities and the personnel involved in the rescue work (volunteers, civil protection, military, etc.). The Vatican Press Room has published the official programme of the visit. The Pope will leave by helicopter from the Vatican’s heliport and land at the helicopter pad near the tent city of Onna, the little town in the province of L’Aquila that was completely razed to the ground by the devastating earthquake that struck the zone on the night of 6 April. Benedict XVI will visit the tent site, speak to the victims and pray for the dead. At ten o’clock the Holy Father will then travel the short distance to L’Aquila by car: here he will visit the badly damaged medieval basilica of Collemaggio. Later the Pope will visit the site of what was one the Students’ Hostel (another symbolic place of this earthquake, because it disintegrated and collapsed in a pile of rubble following the quake) and meet a group of students. At 10.45 he is due to arrive at the headquarters of the Guardia di Finanza at Coppito, the site where all the emergency and rescue work is being coordinated and where the funerals of the victims have been held. Here Benedict XVI will have a meeting with the mayors and parish priests of the communities most badly struck by the quake. Here, too, again at the barracks of the Guardia di Finanza, he will meet the faithful and the personnel involved in the rescue work. The meeting will be opened by the Archbishop of L’Aquila, Monsignor Giuseppe Molinari, and by the Mayor of the city, Massimo Cialente. Then, the Pontiff will give an address and recite the prayer of the Regina Coeli. At this meeting, explains the press release of the Vatican Press Room, “the statue of the Madonna of Roio, Our Lady of the Cross, will also be present; the Holy Father will place a golden rose before her”. After this meeting, the Pope will depart for Rome by helicopter, but before returning to Vatican City he will fly over some of the zones most badly damaged by the quake. Spain: WYD, occasion of “prime importance” World Youth Days are “a privileged occasion for the meeting of youth with Christ”. “They are now an apostolic means of prime importance”, said Cardinal Antonio Maria Rouco Varela, Archbishop of Madrid and President of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference, in his opening address at the 93rd plenary assembly of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference (Madrid, 20-24 April). The cardinal spoke of World Youth Days and their importance because the next one is due to be held in Madrid in 2011, following the previous such event already held at Santiago di Compostela in Spain in 1989. In his address Cardinal Rouco Varela also referred to the tragedy of abortion which is on the increase in Spain. “One of the fields of social life in which a new evangelization is desperately needed – he said – is the conscience of the inestimable gift of life of each and every human being and the right of everyone to live, from the conception of a new individual of the human species to that person’s natural death”. “Preaching the Gospel of life and the family and putting it into practice in personal and social life – he added – is not engaging in politics in the strict sense of the term. It is instead a way of achieving through legitimate means the effective recognition of those fundamental ethical values that transcend, precede and sustain political action itself, in particular, when life in society is claimed to be shaped in conformity with the principles of a democratic constitutional State”.
