GIFFORDS SHOOTER SENTENCED; SHE AND HER HUSBAND MEET WITH THE POPE............

One day after Jared Loughner, who shot and seriously wounded former Tucson, Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, while also killing six persons and wounding twelve others, pleaded Guilty to 19 counts and was sentenced to life imprisonment, the recovering and rehabilitating, resigned House of Representatives member and her astronaut husband Mark Kelly, met with Pope Benedict XVI today following his Wednesday General Audience.  Speaking after the plea and sentencing on Tuesday, Giffords' husband said, "The pain and loss caused by the events of January 8, 2011 are incalculable.  Avoiding a trial will allow us - and we hope and we hope the whole Southern Arizona community - to continue with our recovery and move on with our lives".  The Giffords-Kelly brief meeting with His Holiness at the papal summer residence Castel Gandolfo, outside Rome came as a result of their first traveling to Switzerland for a visit to the European Center for Nuclear Research.  At the conclusion of the Pope's General Audience, at which he spoke of the liturgical Saint of the Day, Dominic, Priest, who founded the religious order, the Dominicans, officially known as the Order of Preachers, and how Dominic taught us about the power of Prayer, through his preaching.  The Pope said those who personally knew him are quoted as recalling Dominic was always, "speaking to God, or about God".  Benedict XVI went on to encourage family prayer, especially while on vacation; which I have preached for years about summer and holidays, "We do not take a vacation from God". (or prayer and worship).  In what seems to be a link to the tribulations faced by the former Congresswoman and other victims of the Arizona mass shooting  a year and a half ago, the Pope also said in his remarks at his weekly Wednesday Audience, "St. Dominic prayed on his feet bowing to express humility, prostrate on the ground to ask forgiveness of his sins, on his knees to do penance in order to share in the Lord's suffering, with his arms open gazing upon the crucifix, to contemplate the supreme love, of God expressed through Christ's sacrifice", Benedict XVI proclaimed.  Today's meeting with the Pope was the second in the past eleven months for Mark Kelly, who joined his colleagues from the American Space Shuttle Endeavor and the International Space Station, who were welcomed to Castel Gandolfo last Sptember.  The gun violence exacted upon those assembled for a Meet and Greet Representative Giffords event last year, is one of three on that scale to occur in the United States, the other two, occurring in the past three weeks in Aurora, Colorado; and Oak Creek, Wisconsin............Fr.  Troy