Pontiff set to meet Jewish leaders

Press, 14 June 1984, Page 11

Pontiff set to meet Jewish leaders

NZPA-AP Fribourg Pope John Paul II yesterday planned to meet students and faculty members of the University of Fribourg, called “the ’ university of Swiss Catholics,” as his six-day visit to Switzerland continued.

After spending two hours at the university, the Pontiff was to celebrate in a nearby park the second outdoor Mass of the trip. He was also scheduled to hold a brief meeting with leaders of the Swiss Jewish community. The meetings come on the second day of the Catholic leader’s six-day pastoral visit to the alpine nation. The Pope opened the visit with a ringing defence of papal authority, in a country where the papacy remains a bitter point of disagreement between Protestants and Catholics. The University of Fri-

bourg was founded in 1889 and now has about 5000 students, one-quarter of them foreigners. About 20 per cent of the students are non-Catholic.

Critics are likely to recall the Vatican sanctions against Professor Stephan Pfurtner, who lost his chair

in the university in 1972 after maintaining in his theses on sexual ethics that a happy sex life was a basic human right.

Fribourg gave the Pontiff his most stirring welcome yet, on a trip marked by subdued reception and several critical comments in local newspapers. A headline in the popular “Blick” daily newspaper criticised the cost of the visit and asked: "Who pays?” Security was extra tight, as it has been from the start of the trip. The Pontiff is making his twenty-second trip abroad since becoming Pope in October, 1978. The visit was delayed for three years after the Polishborn Pontiff was shot by a would-be assassin in St Peter's Square on May 13, 1981.