Pope urges peace in Myanmar, speaks on rich/poor divide, Korea

(Oct. 1, 2007) Pope Benedict XVI appealed on Sunday for a peaceful solution to the "extremely serious" events in Myanmar and expressed his solidarity with the country's impoverished population in their painful trial". He made the call in his address to a large crowd gathered at his summer residence of Castel Gandolfo, just outside Rome, during the weekly midday ‘Angelus’ prayer. State-run media said at least 10 people were killed after Myanmar's ruling junta clamped down on mass protests by Buddhist monks against 45 years of military rule. The junta also responded by arresting hundreds of monks, putting troops on the streets and barricading off central Yangon. "I follow with great trepidation the extremely serious events in Myanmar in these days and want to express my spiritual closeness to its dear population in this painful trial that it is going through," the Pope said. "While I offer my firm and intense prayers and invite the whole Church to do the same, I sincerely hope that a peaceful solution will be found, for the good of the country," the Pope added.
In his Sunday angelus discourse, Pope Benedict also encouraged the rich who indulge in luxury to hear the cry coming from countries plagued by hunger. Giving a social twist to Sunday’s Gospel reading on the rich man and Lazarus, the Pope said, “The hungry nations of the world cry out to the peoples blessed with abundance." He quoted extensively from Pope Paul VI’s social encyclical, Populorum Progressio, which looked forward to “building a human community where men can live truly human lives . . . where the needy Lazarus can sit down with the rich man at the same banquet table." That encyclical, the Pontiff said, points out that “many situations of misery come ‘from servitude to other men or to natural forces which they cannot yet control satisfactorily.’
Pope Benedict also called on people to pray for “the situation in the Korean Peninsula where, he said efforts towards reconciliation and peace between the two Koreas were being worked out. The six-nation talks in Beijing were starting up again involving the two Koreas, the United States, China, Russia and Japan. The Pope also drew attention to situation in sub-Saharan Africa, “affected these days by serious flooding,” saying, “we cannot forget many other humanitarian emergencies in different regions of the world where conflict over political and economic power is exacerbating already seriously degraded environments.”