Missionary Priest Brings Hope to the Persecuted

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, March 29 — In its weekly Houses of Worship column, the Journal took readers on a tour of the Rome offices of Fides, the Vatican's missionary news service in Rome.

“The magnificent Palazzo di Propaganda Fide, with its 17th-century facade designed by Bernini, sits a stone's throw from the busy Piazza di Spagna and the shopping mecca of Via Condotti. But inside the lavish walls, away from the throngs of tourists, the small, dedicated staff of the Fides News Service sit in spare offices that would not look out of place in an American Catholic School,” the Journal report began.

Founded in 1927 by the Pontifical Society for the Propagation of the Faith, Fides reports on and circulates information about Catholic missionary work for the Vatican. Its director, Father Bernardo Cervellera, has been with the news agency since 1997. Ordained a priest of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions in 1978, Father Cervellera worked as editor in chief of the monthly magazine Mondo e Missione, until leaving for Asia in 1989 to work as a missionary in China and Hong Kong.

It was in Hong Kong, Journal writer Kate Flatley writes, that Father Cervellera developed his interest in the Internet as a tool to let people now about the Hong Kong Mission's activities. This led to Father Cervellera's starting the Fides Web site, www.fides.org. The site has become a valuable tool, Flately said, in making the world aware of the struggles of the persecuted Church worldwide.

Japanese Bishops Say Today's ‘Values’ Destroy Man

FIDES, March 30— Japan will be destroyed not by the threatening economic crisis but by a crisis in spirit, according to the Japanese bishops who visited Rome for their ad limina visit, March 26–31.

Materialism and self-centered values, the bishops warned, are leading Japanese society to self-destruction. Youth suicide is also a growing phenomenon in Japan, where more than 30,000 young people took their own lives in 1999 and many more attempted.

Japanese society today is one of “anxiety and sadness,” Nagasaki Archbishop Shimamoto Kaname, told Fides.

One hundred twenty-six million Japanese, with 440,000 Catholics among them, live in a country in which the myth of materialism, the pursuit of pleasure, productivity and technology has robbed Japan of its soul, the bishops said. They added that “life itself has lost all value,” and that it is “abused and distant from God.”

Pope to Plant Olive Tree in Golan Heights

AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE, March 29 — Pope John Paul II will plant an olive tree as a symbol of peace, on the Syrian side of the divided Golan Heights during his visit to Syria in May, the French news agency reported.

The Golan Heights are a symbol of a still-unresolved conflict between Syria and neighboring Israel, which captured them from Syria during the 1967 Middle East war.

Disagreement over their future is the key sticking point in Israel and Syria reaching a peace agreement.

The Pope will visit Syria May 5–8, as part of a trip that will also take him to Greece and Malta on a pilgrimage in the steps of the apostle Paul.