POPE BENEDICT XVI made a little history yesterday when he became the first pontiff to subject himself to a televised question-and-answer session.
To mark Good Friday, Italy's state broadcaster RAI transmitted a programme, In His Image, in which the Pope answered seven questions relative both to the suffering of Christ on the cross and to the overall question of pain and suffering.
To a certain extent, the programme followed the classic Italian current affairs chat-show format, with a presenter, expert panel and studio audience. However, the star attraction, Pope Benedict, was not in studio.
His answers to questions put to him on a video link by a young Japanese girl, a Muslim woman from Ivory Coast, seven Christian students in Iraq and four Italians, had been recorded in the pontifical library in the apostolic palace on Friday of last week.
Thus there was no unseemly televisual sparring, no cross-examination of anything said by the pope in his seven answers. Nor were there any awkward questions about issues like clerical sex abuse, stem cell research or condoms. While the pope offered a sombre, somewhat stiff public face, sitting at his library desk, the programme nonetheless was not without touching moments of papal compassion.
The first question came from a seven-year-old Japanese girl, Elena, who said in the wake of the recent devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, she was very frightened. “Why do I have to be so afraid, why do children have to be so sad?” she asked the pope
He responded: “I also have the same questions: why is it this way? Why do you have to suffer so much while others live in ease? . . . Be aware that one day, I will understand that this suffering was not empty, it wasn’t in vain, but behind it was a good plan, a plan of love. It is not chance. Be assured, we are with you, with all Japanese children who are suffering.”
Perhaps even more poignant was the second question from Italian woman Maria, mother of Francesco, a multiple sclerosis sufferer who has been in a coma for two years. Sitting beside her stricken adult son, she asked if his soul had left his body, given that he was no longer conscious.
“Certainly his soul is still present in his body. The situation, perhaps, is like that of a guitar whose strings have been broken and therefore can no longer play . . . He feels the presence of your love. Your presence, therefore, dear parents, dear mother, next to him for hours and hours every day, is the true act of a love of great value because this presence enters into the depth of that hidden soul.”
In other answers, he expressed his solidarity with the people of Iraq, condemned the use of violence in Ivory Coast and elsewhere, while he also dealt with the death and resurrection of Christ.
The full text of the Pope’s answers can be found in English at radiovaticana.org