Pope’s address to world’s Christian Democrat politicians

(September 22, 2012) The serious global financial crisis is provoked by the absence of moral and ethical foundation, Pope Benedict XVI said on Saturday. His remarks came in an address to the around 110 members of the executive committee of Christian/Centrist Democrat International, the global international political group dedicated to the promotion of Christian democracy. Although the group gathers political parties from around the globe, its members are drawn mainly from Europe and Latin America. Talking to them at the papal summer residence of Castel Gandolfo, near Rome, Pope Benedict said that in the face of the current situation, Christians are called to act and express themselves with a prophetic spirit that is capable of seeing in these transformations the unceasing and mysterious presence of God in history. “In this way, with confidence not resignation, civil and political activity must be given new incentives to seek solid ethical foundations, the lack of which in the economic field has helped to create the current global financial crisis,” he said. The Pope told the democrats that their political and institutional commitment must not be limited merely to “responding to the requirements of market logic.” “Rather, its central and indispensable goal must remain the search for the common good, correctly understood, and the promotion and protection of the inalienable dignity of the human person.” In this regard he said it is the duty of governments and the international community to protect and promote life and the family based on an indissoluble marriage between a man and a woman. “The commitment to respecting life in all its phases from conception to natural death - and the consequent rejection of procured abortion, euthanasia and any form of eugenics - is, in fact, interwoven with respecting marriage as an indissoluble union between a man and a woman and, in its turn, as the foundation for the community of family life.” The family, the basic cell of society, founded on marriage and open to life, is the root which nourishes not only the individual human being, but the very foundations of social coexistence, the Pope added.