UN should remove obstacles for HIV and AIDs sufferers
The Vatican has called in the United Nations for more attention to systemic obstacles that prevent people living with HIV and AIDs from vindicating their rights to health care, treatment and support. Addressing the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Msgr Richard Gyhra said “among the challenges experienced by member states is the predominant emphasis on profitability of medicines and diagnostic tools, resulting in prohibitive price structures”, continuing, “furthermore, insufficient attention has been given to research and development of ‘child friendly’ medications and diagnostic tools for use by children living in low-income and low technology settings”.
Despite international legal commitments to ensure people have access to healthcare and medicine, Msgr Gyhra said, much remains to be done to realise people’s rights. “Certain health issues,” he said, quoting Pope Francis, “require urgent political attention, above and beyond all other commercial or political interests.”
Pope to visit shrine and former concentration camp
The Pope intends to visit both the shrine of Czestochowa and the former Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz when in Poland for World Youth Day, the Vatican has revealed. According to a provisional schedule, he will be in Poland between July 27 and 31, spending July 27 in Krakow where he will greet the crowds from a window used often by St John Paul II, and visiting and saying Mass at the Jasna Gora monastery, home to the icon known as the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, the following day.
He will visit Auschwitz on July 29, later celebrating the Way of the Cross in Krakow, and on July 30 will visit Krakow’s Divine Mercy Shrine, passing through its Holy Door and visiting the chapel where St Faustina Kowalska is buried. He will participate in the World Youth Day prayer vigil that evening, and will say Mass for World Youth Day on July 31. Roughly 2.5 million people are expected to attended the event.
Need to draw attention to violence against women
While sensitivity to women’s issues seems in many ways greater than ever, there remains an urgent need to draw attention to violence against women, the Holy See has said. In an address to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Msgr Janusz Urbańczyk said crimes against women and girls “cannot anymore go unheard, unseen, overlooked or treated as an inevitable consequence in the horrible reality of armed conflict”. Welcoming progress that has been made in favour of women’s advancement, Msgr Urbańczyk lamented how “the world is still confronted with old and new forms of violence and slavery directed at women”.
Among these, he said, are “the use of rape as a weapon of war during conflicts; the trafficking of girls (who are treated as merchandise); the abuse of domestic workers (that remains, at times, unpunished); kidnapping of young women, forced marriage, forced conversion and forced abortion”.
Pope feeds bereaved
Pope Francis offered lunch on Saturday, March 12 to the friends of a homeless man after his funeral Mass in the Church of Santa Maria in Traspontina on the Via della Conciliazione, just outside St Peter’s Square.
Fr Federico Lombardi, Director of the Holy See Press Office, said the deceased was a 57-year-old man of Polish extraction named Boris. Bureaucratic complications had delayed the funeral until about a fortnight after the man’s death.