Word: vaticans
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MARSAXLOKK BAY, Malta--President bush urged Mikhail S. Gorbachev on the eve of their super-power summit yesterday to help mold "a future free of both tyranny and fear." The Soviet leader concluded a historic Vatican visit with a pledge of new religious freedoms back home...
Beyond promising religious tolerance, Gorbachev said the Kremlin will establish diplomatic ties with the Vatican. He invited the Pope to pay a visit to the Soviet Union--officially an atheist nation--although no date was announced...
...Normally, international conferences at the Vatican are carefully staged and well modulated. Such was the expectation last week as 1,000 theologians, church officials, health workers and top-flight scientists gathered in Rome for the first Vatican meeting on AIDS. But the script was quickly ripped up as the three-day conference was disrupted by a sign-wielding protester, dissident caucuses and angry charges and countercharges. At one point the conference's organizer, Archbishop Fiorenzo Angelini, had a tense confrontation with an AIDS victim who had sought to speak to the group...
...conference's trouble began after the sponsoring Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers refused to allow a speech by militant Peter Larkin of England, one of several AIDS sufferers who were invited by the Vatican. Frustrated by the council's tight control of the agenda, some 50 dissidents accused it of hindering open discussions, then set up their own lunch-hour conference. On the sidelines, some medical professionals defended the use of condoms; others accused the church of homophobia. John White, a priest who contracted the virus while in Kenya and now runs an AIDS treatment center...
...bishop, warned that the strong tradition of Sunday Mass could be undermined "if we bless this monster." Bishop Raymond Lucker of New Ulm, Minn., urged a study of the priest shortage that would face such issues as "Why can't we ordain people other than celibate males?" For the Vatican, however, that is a question not open to discussion...