The Holy Father Receives Cor Unum Participants

( 29 Feb 08 – RV) Pope Benedict yesterday received the participants in the Plenary session of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum.

The organisation responsible for assisting and co-ordinating the Holy Father’s charitable activities, the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, is currently holding its annual Plenary Session, during which representatives from Catholic charities throughout the world gather with experts and donors to reflect on some aspect of their common mission.

This year, Cor Unum is looking at the Church’s charitable commitment in light of Pope Benedict’s Encyclical Letter, Deus Caritas Est.

The event is also a chance for operators in different fields to share news about their respective projects.

The president of Catholic Relief Services, Ken Hackett is one of the participants.

He has just returned from a four-day visit to the Aceh province in Indonesia to see what the agency has accomplished since a tsunami devastated the province three years ago…


We’ve built over 4,000 homes, bridges, roads, schools, health clinics, a hospita; repaired the only church in the Aceh Province which was damaged. We’re basically coming to the end of our tsunami response. So that’s probably one of the biggest projects we’ve had over the last few years. But it was terrific to see what we were able to do because in the beginning, in December 2004, we weren’t sure what we could do. But the American Catholic public was immensely generous and we took a leap, made a commitment of five years that we would rebuild and help people to live a better life than they did before because they suffered so much during the tsunami. I found when we were out that they we had accomplished what we set out to accomplish: