Pope Recalls Stalin's Holocaust in Ukraine

VATICAN INFORMATION SERVICE, Dec. 5 — Commemorating the 70th anniversary of the terror famine inflicted upon the people of Ukraine by Joseph Stalin, Pope John Paul II wrote to Ukrainian Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, Byzantine archbishop of Lvov, and Latin-rite Archbishop Marian Jaworsky of Lvov, the Vatican Information Service reported.

The famine was intended to destroy the independent farmers of the region and reduce all agricultural production to state-controlled collective farms. Soviet authorities seized all grain, cattle and food from millions of Ukrainians, leaving millions to starve in an atrocity that was widely denied in the West until recently.

The New York Times has refused to return the Pulitzer Prize won by Walter Duranty, a communist-sympathizing reporter whose false dispatches from Ukraine in the 1930s helped cover up the crime; the board that awards the Pulitzer Prize recently refused to revoke Duranty's award.

The Pope wrote that he wished “to spiritually join everyone in the Ukraine in recalling the victims of this tragedy and inviting young people to remember past events so that similar suffering is never repeated again.”

Lost Poetry Discovered in Vatican Library

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, Dec. 6 — The Church has for centuries guarded the texts of antiquity, preserving cultural treasures that would otherwise have been lost. Now it appears that one such treasure did get lost amid the Vatican's cavernous, massive libraries.

The Associated Press reported that a scholar working in the Vatican Library uncovered 200 previously unknown verses by the Greek playwright Menander in a manuscript recopied by monks in Syria in the ninth century. The verses were included in a document containing part of Menander's comedy The Grouch, but they might form part of another work.

The fourth-century B.C. Athenian playwright is known to have completed more than 100 plays, but many of them are considered lost.

Do Changes Herald Shifting Vatican Stance on War?

CHIESA.COM, Nov. 28 — The Italian Web site Chiesa.com recently speculated that changes within the Vatican reflected a shifting in its stance toward the U.S. war in Iraq and relations with the Islamic world.

The Web site noted that former Vatican foreign minister Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, who had called the U.S. war a “crime against humanity,” had been removed from that post this fall and named as chief Church archivist last month, after being made a cardinal Oct. 21. He was replaced by Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, a trained diplomat.

Another critic of the war, Archbishop Renato Martino, was shifted late last year from his post as the Holy See's permanent observer to the United Nations and named president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and elevated to the rank of cardinal this fall. He was replaced by Archbishop Celestino Migliore, whom Chiesa.com considers more of a pragmatist.

Chiesa.com suggested the changes could signal a rapprochement between the Holy See and the Bush administration, which provides key support to Church initiatives on abortion and population issues at the United Nations and which recently pushed through a ban on partial-birth abortion.