VATICAN CITY: The new barracks of the Vatican Swiss guards will be built to accommodate female members if Pope Francis or his successors allow women to join the elite and colorfully dressed force.
Officials of the Swiss foundation that is raising the estimated $46 million (45 million Swiss Francs) to replace the current 150-year-old barracks signed a memorandum of understanding with the Vatican’s Secretary of State on Wednesday.
“The project includes single rooms with private bathrooms,” Riccardo Boscardin, an executive of the foundation, said in the courtyard of the barracks after the signing.
“There are two reasons. One is because COVID-19 hit when the project started and the second is the possibility of integrating women into the guard,” Boscardin said.
“But this decision is not ours, but exclusively that of the Vatican and the pope,” he said.
The force, whose principal mission is to protect the pope, has been exclusively male since its founding in 1506. The men are all Swiss citizens.
Francis, 85, has named women to a number of senior posts and management positions in the Vatican administration and in March he introduced a landmark new constitution that will allow any baptized lay Catholic, including women, to head most Vatican departments.
The Foundation of the Pontifical Swiss Guard, which supports the guard financially, has already raised about 37 million francs and needs to raise about 7.5 million more, Boscardin told Reuters.
He said work was due to start in January, 2026 so the guards would not be displaced during the 2025 Holy Year, when millions of pilgrims are expected to visit the Vatican.
Because of building restrictions involving historic buildings, the side of the barracks that faces Rome, which surrounds the sovereign Vatican city-state, will be kept or rebuilt exactly as it now.
Constructing a totally new, ecologically friendly and energy-saving building, even if it resembles the old one externally, would cost much less than renovating the existing one, Boscardin said.
Vatican preparing for possibility of women Swiss Guards
https://arab.news/vphcd
Vatican preparing for possibility of women Swiss Guards
- The force, whose principal mission is to protect the pope, has been exclusively male since its founding in 1506
NATO wants ‘automated’ defenses along borders with Russia: German general
- That zone would act as a defensive buffer before any enemy forces advanced into “a sort of hot zone,” said Lowin
- The AI-guided system would reinforce existing NATO weapons and deployed forces, the general said
FRANKFURT: NATO is moving to boost its defenses along European borders with Russia by creating an AI-assisted “automated zone” not reliant on human ground forces, a German general said in comments published Saturday.
That zone would act as a defensive buffer before any enemy forces advanced into “a sort of hot zone” where traditional combat could happen, said General Thomas Lowin, NATO’s deputy chief of staff for operations.
He was speaking to the German Sunday newspaper Welt am Sonntag.
The automated area would have sensors to detect enemy forces and activate defenses such as drones, semi-autonomous combat vehicles, land-based robots, as well as automatic air defenses and anti-missile systems, Lowin said.
He added, however, that any decision to use lethal weapons would “always be under human responsibility.”
The sensors — located “on the ground, in space, in cyberspace and in the air” — would cover an area of several thousand kilometers (miles) and detect enemy movements or deployment of weapons, and inform “all NATO countries in real time,” he said.
The AI-guided system would reinforce existing NATO weapons and deployed forces, the general said.
The German newspaper reported that there were test programs in Poland and Romania trying out the proposed capabilities, and all of NATO should be working to make the system operational by the end of 2027.
NATO’s European members are stepping up preparedness out of concern that Russia — whose economy is on a war footing because of its conflict in Ukraine — could seek to further expand, into EU territory.
Poland is about to sign a contract for “the biggest anti-drone system in Europe,” its defense minister, Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz, told the Gazeta Wyborcza daily.
Kosiniak-Kamysz did not say how much the deal, involving “different types of weaponry,” would cost, nor which consortium would ink the contract at the end of January.
He said it was being made to respond to “an urgent operational demand.”
