The Director of the Press Office of the Holy See, Fr. Federico Lombardi, SJ, has published
his weekly editorial, in which he invites people to a careful and unprejudiced reading
of the Message of Pope Benedict XVI marking the upcoming World Day of Peace, 2013.
Please find the full text of Vatican Radio's English translation, below:
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Pope
Benedict XVI has given us a rich and important document in his Message for the 2013
World Day of Peace – a message that many voices within the Italian media, in particular,
have presented in an extremely partial and distorted way. This has happened because
the Pope, in a short passage, returns to the vision of marriage between a man and
a woman as profoundly different from radically other forms of union, and states that
this difference is recognizable by human reason. Along with other fundamental principles
of a correct view of person and society, primarily the dignity of all human life,
we need to defend the institution of marriage if we would build peace on solid foundations
and seek the good of human society with foresight. This is the view that the Church
never tires of stressing, at a time when this point is being challenged and even attacked
from several quarters in many different countries. This is all well known. It is not
in the least surprising. The reaction is therefore lacking in decent composure and
sense of proportion: it consists in shouting, not in reasoning; it is intended to
intimidate those who want to support this view freely in the public arena. Not only:
such a reaction is meant to obscure many of the aspects of the Papal Message, which
are of an extraordinary relevance and strength. These merit careful consideration
and rather deserve to have our attention called to them. In times of rampant unemployment,
the clear statement by the Pope of the right to work as essential to the dignity of
the human person sounds like a cry of alarm, calling for a much deeper and more serious
reflection on the transformation of “models of development” that have brought us to
where we are – models from which those principles of fraternity and solidarity, are
conspicuous by their absence, along with that spirit of grateful generosity, which
alone can ensure that the economic, social and political spheres of life are ordered
to the authentic human good. The Pope also forcefully recalls that the food crisis
is far more serious than the financial crisis: hunger continues to spread in the world
and we forget too easily. Too many people are dying of hunger. Pope Benedict’s encyclical
letter, Caritas in veritate, and John XXIII’s famous Pacem in terris,
which will have its fiftieth anniversary soon, already guided us to engage in these
directions. In essence, the message says something urgent and essential for contemporary
humanity, which should not be forgotten just because it also makes a reasonable case
against and calls for opposition to “legal equivalence” between marriage – always
and of its nature a union of one man and one woman – and “radically different forms
of union”. We invite everyone to read the document in full, and objectively.