(Vatican Radio) While world attention is focused on the President Donald Trump’s first weeks in office, the U.S. government’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations is continuing its work behind the scenes to help prevent conflict and promote long term peace and development in countries around the world.Deborah Ann Maclean is acting director of the office of Partnerships and Strategic Communications for the U.S. government’s bureau of conflict and stabilization operations.Listen to her interview with Susy Hodges: She explains that it is a challenging political endeavour which works after the military and defence operations have acted to stop fighting and before the development and humanitarian agencies come into a country. Maclean describes these stabilization efforts as the ‘sweet spot’, in the middle between ending conflicts and beginning development aid programmes. She says there is a limited budget but the main resource is the peop...
(Vatican Radio) While world attention is focused on the President Donald Trump’s first weeks in office, the U.S. government’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations is continuing its work behind the scenes to help prevent conflict and promote long term peace and development in countries around the world.
Deborah Ann Maclean is acting director of the office of Partnerships and Strategic Communications for the U.S. government’s bureau of conflict and stabilization operations.
Listen to her interview with Susy Hodges:
She explains that it is a challenging political endeavour which works after the military and defence operations have acted to stop fighting and before the development and humanitarian agencies come into a country. Maclean describes these stabilization efforts as the ‘sweet spot’, in the middle between ending conflicts and beginning development aid programmes. She says there is a limited budget but the main resource is the people on the ground who can work towards ending conflicts in “as peaceful and least destructive way as possible”.
Maclean says there is “quite a good track record” on diplomacy which goes on quietly all the time and is “not something that you hear unless you ‘re listening for it”. Disagreements are OK in diplomacy, she says, but “misunderstandings are not OK” as they lead to conflict, which is what her office is working to resolve.
On the question of conflict prevention, Maclean says there are many examples, beginning with the Marshall plan in the wake of World War II. Also today, she says, her office is working in many areas where conflicts are either ongoing or contained, such as the Chad Basin in central Africa. While there are a lot of problems, she says, the region is “committed to try to resolve those conflicts and to try to end the threats from Boko Haram and other extremists”.
A patient at the new Misky María Palliative Care Hospital located on the outskirts of Lima, Perú. / Credit: Asociación de las Bienaventuranzas (Association of the Beatitudes)ACI Prensa Staff, May 4, 2024 / 08:00 am (CNA).In the context of the recent news of the death of Ana Estrada, the first person to request and receive euthanasia in Peru, there is a contrasting story to tell on care for the dying in that country: that of a new Catholic hospital on the outskirts of Lima that provides palliative care, which extends the love of Christ to those in extreme poverty who are in the final stages of their lives.The beginning of the 'Misky María' HospitalIn 2021, Father Omar Sánchez Portillo, a priest known for his extensive charitable work in the district of Lurín (south of Lima) and founder of the Association of the Beatitudes, had the dream of building a center to serve, with the "sweetness of Mary," people in situations of abandonment and extreme poverty who have terminal illnesses...
President Joe Biden presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jesuit Father Greg Boyle on May 3, 2024. / Screenshot/public domainCNA Staff, May 3, 2024 / 15:30 pm (CNA).The White House on Friday announced that Jesuit Father Greg Boyle, the founder of a prominent ministry dedicated to rehabilitating gang-affiliated youth, will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom alongside 18 other recipients this afternoon. Boyle, ordained a priest in 1984, founded Homeboy Industries in 1992 while pastor of Dolores Mission, a Catholic church and school in an area that at one time had one of the highest concentrations of gang activity in Los Angeles. Today, Homeboy Industries claims to be the largest gang-intervention program in the United States.The successful ministry, which now operates nationwide, offers training and job skills to those formerly involved in gangs or in jail, as well as case management, tattoo removal, mental health and legal services, and GED completion.Wh...
Father Roger Landry, Catholic chaplain at Columbia University, discusses the protests at Columbia University in New York City on EWTN's "The World Over with Raymond Arroyo" on May 2, 2024. / Credit: EWTN News The World Over / ScreenshotWashington, D.C. Newsroom, May 3, 2024 / 17:05 pm (CNA).Father Roger Landry, a Catholic chaplain at Columbia University, said on Thursday that the protests making national headlines at the New York City school are being organized in part by "explicitly communist" outside forces. "There is an instrumentalization of what's going on in Gaza to advance an agenda," he said. "And that is to deconstruct our present world order at which the United States is considered the top of that order."Speaking on EWTN's "The World Over with Raymond Arroyo," Landry said that he had been walking through the encampment nearly daily, conversing with student protesters and other "outside agitators." While he said he believes that many of the protesters we...