Good Friday : Pope takes part in TV question and answer session
Mtoday/ Mail
Vatican, April 23: Pope Benedict answered questions from around the world in his first televised dialogue yesterday.
The German-born pontiff broke new ground by using TV to speak to the world’s 1.2billion Roman Catholics.
The programme, called ‘In His Image’, was shown on Italian public TV in mid-afternoon, around the time Christ is traditionally believed to have died on Good Friday.
Pope Benedict broke new ground by using TV to speak to the world’s 1.2billion Roman Catholics yesterday
It included recorded responses from the 84-year-old Pope to seven questions from selected participants.
Sitting at his desk, he told the mother of an Italian man in a long-term coma that her son’s soul was still in his body and that he could feel the presence of love.
‘The situation, perhaps, is like that of a guitar whose strings have been broken and therefore can no longer play,’ the Pope told the woman, who was filmed sitting beside her son.
To a seven-year-old girl in Japan asking him to explain the suffering in her country after the disastrous March 11 earthquake and tsunami which killed some 28,000 people, he said suffering was not in vain. ‘We do not have the answers but we know that Jesus suffered as you do,’ the Pope said.
Responding to a request for advice from a Muslim woman in Ivory Coast, which is emerging from a conflict in which at least 1,500 died and a million were forced to flee, he said people should look to Christ as an example of peace.
‘Violence never comes from God, never helps bring anything good, but is a destructive means and not the path to escape difficulties,’ he said.
Later he presided over the traditional Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) procession around Rome’s Colosseum, commemorating Christ’s crucifixion and death at a site associated with early Christian martyrs.