Pope witnesses to the world's martyrs

From Bruce Johnston, Rome correspondent
THE POPE shrugged off damp and windy weather last Sunday in Rome to lead a torchlight procession and ceremony at the Colosseum in memory of more than 12,000 20th-century Christian martyrs, including the victims of Nazism, Communism, the Mafia and terrorism.
But in the celebration, which was strongly ecumenical in nature and which also commemorated some nonCatholics, only 17 martyrs were named, as being symbolic of the persecution around the world.
Among them was Bishop Philip Strong, an Anglican who had preferred to enter a Japanese concentration camp rather than abandon his mission in New Guinea.
The names of the 5,343 priests and seminarians, 4,872 nuns, 126 bishops, and 2,351 lay people chosen by a Vatican commission that has worked for five years on the list will only be made public after the summer.
It is said to include the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, and Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador, who was killed 20 years ago as he said Mass, despite earlier rumours that his was not among the more than 12,600 names.
In Sunday's unprecedented ceremony, the Pope took turns praying with Anglican and other Protestant representatives, and those of the Russian and a number of other Orthodox churches. Thousands of faithful turned out for the commemoration.
The Pope, who looked well despite his almost 80 years, said: "The generation to which 1 belong knew of the horrors of war. In my country during the Second World War, priests and Christians were deported to death camps."
The choice of the venue of what was being seen as another highpoint in the Church's Jubilee millennium celebrations, after the mea culpa two months ago, reportedly the Pope's own, and in his own words ahead of the commemoration, "spoke for itself'.
Appeal to Buddhists
Tim VATICAN has urged Buddhists to be open to Christ's saving message in a letter marking the religion's main feast.
The letter, written by Cardinal Francis Arinze, president
of the Pontifical Council for lnterreligious Dialogue, said the 2000th anniversary of Christ's birth was "a fitting time for each individual religious tradition as well as for all religious traditions together to take stock of the past and face the future with renewed vigour."
"We Christians and Buddhists, together with the followers of other religions, and all men and women of good will, have something to receive from the message of Jesus: a message of compassion and forgiveness, of charity and fraternity, of justice and peace," the cardinal wrote to the world's 354m Buddhists on the feast of Vesakh.
Our pain and the Trinity
DEAR Brothers and Sisters, Especially in this Eastet season, we see that in the darkness of the last hours of Jesus the glory of the Trinity shines forth in all its fullness.
The Gospels present the Lord's journey from the Uppet Room to Calvary as a loving dialogue between the Fathei and the Son. At the Las! Supper Jesus says: "I am in the Father and the Father is in me" (Jn 14:11).
And in the Garden of Olives, he prays: "Abba. Father! . . . remove this cup from me; yet not what I will. but what you will" (Mk 14:36).
In reply to the High Priest. Jesus says of himself: "You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power' (Mt 26:64).
Then in the deep darkness of Calvary, he cries out: "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" (Mt 27:46).
But the dialogue betwees Father and Son ends with his trusting words: "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit." (Lk 23:46).
The Holy Spirit too is intimately involved in this dialogue. On the Cross, Chrisi opened his heart completely to the Spirit, so that his deatf became a perfect offering tr the Father.
For us, the revelation of ths glory of the Trinity in ths Passion of Jesus becomes E promise — that our pain me darkness too can become a dialogue of love, in whiclthere shines forth in our lives the glory of the Trinity.