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.”