Pope speaks on Hansen's disease, Lebanon, Palestine territory, faith and reason

(Jan. 29, 2007) Pope Benedict XVI, speaking on the World Day for Leprosy, Sunday, expressed his closeness with all those suffering from Hansen's disease or leprosy. After praying the midday Angelus from the window of his study, the Holy Father expressed the hope that those suffering from leprosy will be cured, and that they will receive "adequate treatments" and live in "worthy conditions." Addressing the crowd gathered below his window in St. Peter's Square, the Pope encouraged health care workers and volunteers who assist people affected by leprosy, as well as all those who combine their efforts in different ways to overcome something that is not only a sickness, but a social plague."
Before reciting the Angelus, Pope Benedict called on Sunday for an end to violence in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, saying it was "unacceptable" to take up arms to promote political motives. He said he felt immense sadness for the beloved people whose sense of hopelessness he could well gauge. The Pope invoked the help of God so that all Lebanese without distinction might be able and willing to work together to make of their homeland an authentic common home, surmounting those egoistic attitudes that prevent them from being truly dedicated to their country. He released two doves with the aid of two Roman youths, as a symbolic gesture of peace to close the month that began with the World Day for Peace.
However, Pope Benedict began his Sunday midday angelus address recalling the liturgical feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, the great philosopher and theologian of the Church of the 13^th century. Describing today’s tendency to separate faith from reason as a cultural "schizophrenia", the Pope said the charism of the great doctor of the Church offers a valid model of harmony between faith and reason, dimensions of the human spirit, which are fully realized when they meet and dialogue. When man limits himself to think only of material and experimental objects, the Pope warned, he closes himself to the questions of life, about himself and about God, impoverishing himself. The Pope however acknowledged the countless positive effects that modern development of the sciences brings, but warned that the tendency to consider true only that which can be experienced constitutes a limitation for human reason and produces a terrible schizophrenia, evident to all, because of which rationalism and materialism, and hypertechnology and unbridled instincts, coexist. What is needed, the Pope said, is to rediscover in a new way human rationality open to the light of the divine, whose perfect revelation is Jesus Christ… "When Christian faith is authentic it does not mortify freedom or human reason,” the Pope added.