{"id":4752,"date":"2006-02-10T00:12:47","date_gmt":"2006-02-10T00:12:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/02\/on-the-vaticans-statement.html"},"modified":"2006-02-10T00:12:47","modified_gmt":"2006-02-10T00:12:47","slug":"on-the-vaticans-statement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/02\/on-the-vaticans-statement.html","title":{"rendered":"On the Vatican’s statement"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Mirror of Justice, Robert Araujo, S.J., has a rather lengthy post on the Vatican Press Office’s statement on the Mohammed cartoons:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Clerics, men and women religious, and many laity have been physically targeted, sometimes with deadly force. Why? Because of their faith. The Holy See\u2019s diplomatic service is well aware of this and, in its typically discreet way, tries to alleviate matters in dangerous, hostile environments. Sometimes this careful and prudential activity has led to the death of papal diplomats as the assassination of Archbishop Michael Courtney, the then papal nuncio in Burundi, demonstrated just a little over a couple of years ago. Early this week a Jesuit priest was assassinated in the same country. Last week another priest was assassinated in Turkey. In sub-Continent countries, Catholics\u2014lay and clerics alike\u2014have suffered harassment, torture, threats of death and death itself, and the reason for this is simple: they are Catholic. In these environments strong diplomatic rebukes uttering outrage and indignation may help but outright condemnations can increase the suffering and intensify dangers rather than curb hostility and bring calm. The papal diplomatic corps found this to be the case in Europe during the 1930s and early 1940s. One\u2019s words must be carefully crafted because good intentions do not always ensure the desired results in this far-from-perfect world of human relations. Put simply, the mission of papal diplomacy in these contexts is simple: try to do good, and avoid evil, to borrow from Thomas Aquinas. The opportunity for criticism for pursuing this task can be manifold.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Mirror of Justice, Robert Araujo, S.J., has a rather lengthy post on the Vatican Press Office’s statement on the Mohammed cartoons: Clerics, men and women religious, and many laity have been physically targeted, sometimes with deadly force. Why? Because of their faith. The Holy See\u2019s diplomatic service is well aware of this and, in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nOn the Vatican's statement - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/02\/on-the-vaticans-statement.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"On the Vatican's statement - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"At Mirror of Justice, Robert Araujo, S.J., has a rather lengthy post on the Vatican Press Office’s statement on the Mohammed cartoons: Clerics, men and women religious, and many laity have been physically targeted, sometimes with deadly force. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4752\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}