Vatican reaches out to travelers, plans for mobile chapels on European highways

Vatican City, Jan 18, 2007 / 12:02 pm

The Catholic Church intends to reach out to those who make their living by traveling the roads and highways and to provide them with pastoral support.

The Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant Peoples recently published the final document of the second International Meeting on the Pastoral Care of the Road. The meeting was held at the Vatican on Dec. 1-2, 2006.
 
The document urges Church leaders to make suggestions for “sustainable mobility”, which respects life, human persons and their dignity, and it proposes that spiritual “places and occasions of meeting” be created along the highways for these traveling professionals.

Such meetings, the document suggests, should "be held in places considered by the people involved as 'their own,' like big parking areas and highway stops," so as to create "moments of a more intense spiritual life, with the possibility of growing in the faith."

According to ANSA, Msgr. Agostino Marchetto, head of the department, said "human mobility" is one of the characteristics of the modern age and so the Catholic Church must make sure it is present there.

During the conference, some Church officials had proposed that roadside chapels or spiritual centers be created; others promoted the idea of a mobile chapel that would move from one motorway service to another.