Pope warns Church against closing in on itself
VATICAN CITY |
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Francis warned the Catholic Church to not close in on itself at a Mass to mark Pentecost Sunday attended by more than 200,000 people, urging the faithful to be open and present in a new and changing world.
The Church should ask itself daily whether it is resisting new challenges and remaining “barricaded in transient structures which have lost their capacity for openness to what is new,” he said.
“Newness always makes us a bit fearful, because we feel more secure if we have everything under control,” Francis said in his homily in front of a packed St. Peter’s Square, adding that change can bring fulfillment.
The Pentecost Mass marks the day the Church says the Holy Spirit descended on Christ’s apostles, or disciples, and is regarded as the birthday of the Church.
Francis warned of the threat of an institution which is “self-referential, closed in on herself,” and spoke of the courage to “take to the streets of the world” and reach “the very outskirts of existence”.
Later he toured the square in an open-top white vehicle, greeting cheering crowds and kissing young children.
Since his election in March as the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, Francis has been urging Church leaders to go out into their communities and help the poor and suffering, rather than focusing on internal politics.
Morale among the faithful has been hit by a widespread child sex abuse scandal involving Catholic priests and in-fighting and careerism in the Church government or curia.
The 76-year-old former Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires has given clear signs he will bring a new broom to the papacy, favoring humility and simplicity over pomp and grandeur.
He has set up an advisory board of cardinals from around the world to help him reform a Vatican administration which has been held responsible for some of the mishaps and scandals that plagued the eight-year reign of his predecessor Benedict.
At a vigil on Saturday evening, Francis said Catholics must become courageous and seek out the people who need help the most rather than sitting around, dissecting theology.
(Reporting by Catherine Hornby; Editing by Jon Hemming)
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Germans blame euro zone crisis for Eurovision debacle
BERLIN |
BERLIN (Reuters) – Germans lamented their unexpectedly poor showing at the Eurovision Song Contest, blaming Chancellor Angela Merkel’s tough stance in the euro zone crisis for their failure to win any points from 34 of the 39 countries voting.
Denmark’s Emmelie de Forest won the event, watched by around 125 million people across Europe, with 281 points while German act Cascada was 21st out of 26 countries, getting just 18 points from Austria, Israel, Spain, Albania and Switzerland.
“There’s obviously a political situation to keep in mind – I don’t want to say ‘this was 18 points for Angela Merkel’,” said Germany’s ARD TV network coordinator Thomas Schreiber. “But we all have to be aware that it wasn’t just Cascada up there on stage (being judged) but all of Germany.”
Merkel is popular in Germany for her firm position during the euro zone crisis. But she is loathed in parts of Europe for her insisting on painful austerity measures in countries such as Greece, Spain and Italy in exchange for rescue packages.
“It’s unexplainable,” said ARD expert commentator Peter Urban on Sunday after Cascada singer Natalie Horler was 21st even though German media had touted her as a favorite. More than 8 million Germans watched, a 44 percent market share.
“Is it that people just don’t like us?” Urban was asked on ZDF TV. “There’s some truth to that,” he said.
“There will be two German soccer teams in the Champions League final next week and maybe people didn’t want Germany to win Eurovision too.”
(Reporting by Erik Kirschbaum; Editing by Alison Williams)
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Amid frenzy over map apps, new focus on 16th century world view
WASHINGTON |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – As online titans compete to deliver instant maps to smartphones, the Library of Congress in Washington is focusing attention on an antique “cosmology” printed in 1507 that serves as America’s birth certificate.
The black-and-white map created by Martin Waldseemuller, a French cleric, was the first time the name America had appeared on any map.
Waldseemuller was prescient enough to show the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean at a time when no one else in Europe thought they were there.
The map, purchased a decade ago at a cost of $10 million, is the centerpiece of an exhibit at the Library of Congress running through June 22 that features a collection of artifacts from Waldseemuller and his colleagues.
It includes later maps that lose faith in Waldseemuller’s vision of America. In a 1516 world map, the Americas are called “Terra Ultra Incognita” – a faraway unknown country.
Still, the Library of Congress had pursued Waldseemuller’s mammoth map for more than a century.
It shows two continents across the ocean from Europe, with a skinny isthmus between them, an embryonic Florida peninsula, a western mountain range on the northern continent, and on the southern continent, a clearly lettered name: “America.”
These maps are essential for the same reason a smartphone is better with satellite images of Earth, according to Ralph Ehrenberg, chief of the library’s geography and map division: people want to know where they came from.
Waldseemuller’s maps came at a time of geographic exploration, technological advance, societal ferment and expanding communication – a time much like our own, Ehrenberg said in an interview.
The new way of communication in 1507 was printing with mechanical type, he said, while “now we have Google Earth, which is a new way of looking at the world today.”
This week, Google unveiled a map application that the search engine giant said will customize the known world for every user. This competes with Apple’s iMap app and possibly with Facebook, which is creating a map app of its own, as reported by USA Today.
“We have a universal need to know where we are on the globe and where we are in the world; it’s one of the things that transcends time and space,” said John Hessler, a library map curator and Waldseemuller expert.
OUT OF THE GEOGRAPHIC COMFORT ZONE
That geographic comfort zone was unsettled in Waldseemuller’s day. His best-known maps were made between 1492, when Christopher Columbus arrived at what he thought was Asia, and 1543, when astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus rocked the Renaissance with his theory that Earth revolved around the Sun, instead of the other way around.
Waldseemuller chose the name America to honor Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci, who explored the east coast of what is now known as South America. Because other known continents had feminine endings in Latin – Africa, Asia and Europa – he feminized Amerigo to America, said John Hessler, a curator in the library’s geography and map division.
Also on this map, six years before Vasco de Balboa encountered it and 15 years after Columbus’ seminal voyage, is an ocean east of Asia, now known as the Pacific.
So how did Waldseemuller know? He talked about new Portuguese sailing charts, and according to one theory, may have heard the Chinese claim that they had already discovered the Americas. Hessler discounted this.
“He knows it’s a really radical geography,” Hessler said. A map notation reassures viewers that his was an unusual and forward-looking world view.
Mariners, clerics, scholars and noble folk were the only map consumers in Waldseemuller’s time, and maps were rare because they had to be laboriously printed. Waldseemuller wrote that there were 1,000 copies of his 1507 map; the Library of Congress has the only one known to survive.
Digital technology, satellite navigation and easy data availability now has made maps ubiquitous, said Joseph Kerski, a geographer at Environmental Systems Research Institute in Broomfield, Colorado.
“We’re at a moment in time now where all of a sudden everything we know, everything we touch is being geo-enabled,” Kerski said by telephone. Still, the role of maps is essentially unchanged.
While most of Earth’s terrain has already been explored, Kerski said, mapping continues into such diverse areas as social networks and microbial activity in soil.
“We may not be exploring new lands per se, but we’re still exploring and maps are still powerful, just as they always have been,” the geographer said.
(Editing by Marilyn W. Thompson and Christopher Wilson)
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France’s Hollande signs gay marriage law
PARIS |
PARIS (Reuters) – French President Francois Hollande has signed into law a bill allowing same-sex marriage, making France the 14th country to legalize gay weddings.
France’s official journal announced on Saturday the bill had become law after the Constitutional Council gave it the go-ahead on Friday.
The bill, a campaign pledge by the Socialist president, has been for months hotly contested by many conservatives in France, where allowing gay marriage is one of the biggest social reforms since abolition of the death penalty in 1981.
Opponents have staged huge and often violent demonstrations against the bill and have called yet another protest on May 26. The leader of opposition to gay marriage, a political activist and humorist who goes under the name of Frigide Barjot, has said the protest would draw millions into the streets.
Montpellier mayor Helene Mandroux, who is due to celebrate France’s first gay marriage in the southern city on May 29, said the law marked a major social advance.
“Love has won out over hate,” she said, while voicing concerns the first gay wedding could attract violent protests.
France, a predominantly Catholic country, follows 13 others including Canada, Denmark, Sweden and most recently Uruguay and New Zealand in allowing gay and lesbian couples to wed. In the United States, Washington D.C. and 12 states have legalized same-sex marriage.
Unlike former president Francois Mitterrand’s abolition of the death penalty, which most French people opposed at the time, polls showed more than half the country backed gay marriage.
Nonetheless, with Hollande’s popularity ratings at record lows a year into office, the law has proved costly for the president with critics saying it has distracted his attention from reviving the recession-hit economy.
After lawmakers adopted the bill in late April, opponents had sought to scupper it with a last-ditch appeal to the Constitutional Council.
(Reporting by Leigh Thomas; editing by Mark John)
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Gaucho exhibition at Vatican a tribute to pope’s homeland
VATICAN CITY |
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Gauchos, the legendary Argentine cowboys from the vast Pampas of Pope Francis’s homeland, are being celebrated in a rare exhibition in no less a place than St. Peter’s Square.
Called “Argentina – The Gaucho, Tradition, Art and Faith,” it opened on Friday in the Braccio Carlo Magno exhibition space under the square’s left colonnade.
But the pope, who is expected to visit it privately, had nothing to do with bringing a taste of his homeland’s celebrated cowboy culture to the Vatican.
“It was providence that an Argentine pope was elected in March,” said Maria Pimentel, one of the Argentine curators. “It was decided in August, 2012, before Pope Benedict resigned.”
“But we are so happy to have an Argentine pope. He knows all about the gauchos,” she said at the opening.
The exhibition includes more than 200 paintings, drawings, ponchos, textiles, photographs, musical instruments and artefacts – many more than a hundred years old – recounting the lives and frontier culture of the horsemen and cattle herders.
“Most of these are from private collections and many have never left Argentina before,” Pimentel said.
The collection abounds with silver, fittingly so because Argentina derives from “argentum,” the Latin word for silver which inspired the European explorers who named it when they heard the area was rich in the precious metal.
One section of the exhibition looks like it descended from equestrian heaven. There are intricately carved silver bridles, silver spurs, silver stirrups, silver bits, silver reins and silver headgear.
There are silver Madonnas and gold chalices, a testimony to the popular religious culture of the area.
One section hosts a collection of “facons,” the large, all-purpose silver knives with intricately carved sheaths which the gauchos kept tucked into colorful sashes behind their backs as they rode.
Also displayed are intricate silver and gold “mate,” cups with silver straws from which the gauchos would drink a tea made from yerba leaves rich in caffeine and nutrients.
Argentine President Cristina Fernandez gave Pope Francis a silver mate when she met him at the Vatican several days after his election.
Original photographs, many from the late 1800s, document the daily lives of the gauchos – from herding, to playing guitars to passing the long nights, to posing in their Sunday best with silver-laden horses and multi-colored ponchos.
The exhibition will remain at the Vatican until June 16 and then move to the city of Loreto in Italy’s central Marche region, where it will open on July 4 and close on September 1.
(Reporting By Philip Pullella, editing by Paul Casciato)
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