VATICAN CITY, MAY 6, 1999 (VIS) - In St. Peter's at midday today the Holy Father received 7,000 participants in the first synod of the Italian Military Ordinariate and, with reference to the war in the Balkans, appealed again for "the gift of a lasting peace, one that respects the rights of all people."
The Pope highlighted the "irreplaceable spiritual and human role of the chaplains who share the life and problems of servicemen offering them the light of the Gospel and divine grace." He recalled Blessed Don Secondo Pollo, who died in a burst of machine-gun fire on the Montenegran front in 1941 "while helping his Alpinist comrades, wounded in an ambush."
John Paul II indicated that with the 1986 Apostolic Constitution, "Spirituali militum curae," he had formed "the Military Ordinariate Church as a distinct territorial and personal Church."
He told the servicemen that, over the three years of the synod, "you have had the opportunity to re-read, in the light of the Word of God, what design the Lord has for your ecclesiastical community, ... a people of God within the military, in the unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. As a result you have asked yourselves how to disseminate the Gospel in the environment of modern military life."
The Pope recalled the numerous missions in which the military have offered their "generous help to people afflicted by natural disasters or humanitarian tragedies" and the sacrifice of so many in "peace keeping work in countries devastated by senseless civil wars."
John Paul II remarked that the synod had also dealt with "the hopes and problems of youth and the challenges that these constitute for your Military Ordinariate Church." He concluded by saying: "I wish to exhort you to look with confidence to the young in the assurance that each word, each concrete gesture, each effort to open their hearts to Christ, will produce abundant and generous good in their spirits."
AC;ITALIAN MILITARY SYNOD;...;...;VIS;19990506;Word: 340;
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