Pope lunches with poor
Lasagne, veal and cake were on the menu today as Pope Benedict XVI invited about 250 poor people to join him for a post-Christmas lunch and denounced as "absurd" new attacks on the faithful around the globe.
Joining the Pope and his guests were some 250 nuns, seminarians and priests of Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity order, which runs soup kitchens around Rome.
Last year, Benedict travelled to a Rome soup kitchen to join the poor but this year's meal was held inside the Vatican's main audience hall.
The feast included lasagne with homemade Bolognese sauce; veal chunks with roasted potatoes, traditional yellow Christmas cake with chocolate bits and Chantilly cream, and coffee.
Before the meal, Benedict delivered his traditional Sunday blessing from his studio window, denouncing Christmas Day attacks on the faithful in the Philippines and Nigeria and a suicide bombing in Pakistan that killed 45 people at an aid centre.
"Once again, the earth is stained by blood," he lamented.
A bomb exploded during Christmas Mass at a police camp chapel in the southern Philippines, wounding a priest and 10 churchgoers. Also six people died in attacks by Muslim sect members on two churches in northern Nigeria.
"I express my heartfelt condolences to the victims of this absurd violence and once again repeat my appeal to abandon ways of hatred and find peaceful solutions to conflicts" so that people can live in peace and security, he said.
Benedict noted that the Sunday after Christmas traditionally celebrates the family, taking the birth of Jesus as its cue. Underlining his rejection of gay marriage and abortion, the pope stressed that every child deserves a mother and a father who will love them and welcome them as a gift.
"This is what gives children security, and as they grow, lets them discover the sense of life," he said.
