(Vatican Radio) Irish rocker and anti-poverty campaigner Bono was back in the Vatican
on Friday to thank the Catholic Church for its support of the Drop the Debt campaign
a decade ago and to discuss further ways of working together on aid and development. Vatican
Radio’s Philippa Hitchen met up with the lead singer of U2 as he was coming out of
a meeting with the president of the Vatican’s Justice and Peace Council, Cardinal
Peter Turkson….
Listen:
During an
almost hour long meeting the cardinal and the rock star turned activist talked about
the huge success of the Jubilee 2000 campaign to free the poorest countries from their
burden of foreign debts. Thanks to the success of that popular movement, Bono told
me, World Bank figures show that “there are an extra 52 million children going to
school” as governments have been able to invest in education instead of debt repayments.
Bono said he was encouraging the cardinal to communicate to ordinary people in
the pews the extraordinary impact they’d made by turning out on the streets in support
of that campaign. He said the Church deserves “incredible credit for being in
the vanguard of that movement.……it was an interfaith movement and it was also what
you might call inter-disciplinary because you had priests and nuns walking alongside
punk rockers and musicians and sports people and soccer mums… it was a great panoply
of characters…..but I just think the Church hasn’t done a good job yet of telling
people what they’ve achieved and we were just trying to figure out how best to do
that.” The U2 front man, who met with Pope John Paul II to seek support for his
humanitarian work, said he’d “be delighted” to meet with Pope Benedict XVI. During
his private audience with the former elderly pontiff, Bono’s famously gave him his
blue fly-shades to try on. He also received from the Pope a silver crucifix which
he pulled out from under his shirt to show me – I still wear it, he said with a smile.
And he still clearly believes very much in the Catholic Church as an important partner
in the struggle to improve the lives of the poorest of the poor. Watch this space!