VATICAN CITY
Boston Globe
By John L. Allen Jr. | GLOBE STAFF MAY 10, 2014
When Pope Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople meet this month in Jerusalem, the buzz probably will be about two milestones from the past: 1054, when Eastern and Western Christianity split, and 1964, when Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras embraced in the Holy Land to begin healing the division.
That historic meeting 50 years ago helped launch the modern ecumenical movement for Christian unity. …
Vatican diplomats shed caution
The Vatican boasts the world’s oldest diplomatic corps, and its members take their tradecraft extremely seriously. They pride themselves on being the soul of discretion, never burning bridges, never shutting down lines of communication, and always having the big picture in view.
The result is that Vatican diplomats rarely engage in public crossfire, so when they do, you know something extraordinary is going on.
That’s relevant in light of the dust-up following an appearance Monday and Tuesday by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s envoy to the United Nations in Geneva, before the UN’s Committee against Torture. As happened earlier this year in a date with the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Vatican’s record on the child sexual abuse scandals once again was put under a microscope.
Even before the hearing, Tomasi had come out swinging in an interview with the Globe in which he complained that some people seem deliberately “deaf and blind” to the progress the Catholic Church has made in the fight against child sexual abuse.
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