Vatican City, Jul 17, 2010 (CNA).- On Friday, Pope Benedict XVI appointed a member of the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor (O.F.M.), Fr. Francis Xavier Yu Soo-il, to the post of Korean military ordinary. He will be in charge of the pastoral care of soldiers in South Korea, where military service is mandatory for all men.

Roland Bainton, who died in 1984, was a fixture at the Yale Divinity School for more than four decades and remained an influential Church historian over during two decades of retirement. His most popular book was Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther; but Luther scholarship has gone far beyond Bainton since Here I Stand was published in 1950. Bainton’s Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, however, which was first published in 1960, continues to exert a significant influence on Christian thought today. The question is whether that influence is helpful, or baleful.