Benedict calls for globalization of solidarity

Social justice news
July 2006

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Benedict calls for globalization of solidarity
Emphasising that "the vast problem of poverty and marginalization is an urgent challenge," Pope Benedict XVI has called on political leaders to weave "a network of understanding and solidarity among peoples."

Zenit reports that the pope made the comments to Mario Juan Bosco Cayota Zappettini, the new Uruguayan ambassador to the Vatican, who presented his credentials last Friday.

"Today, the vast problem of poverty and marginalization is an urgent challenge for political leaders and heads of public institutions," said Benedict in his address during the ceremony.

After expressing his well wishes to the president of Uruguay, Tabaré Vázquez Rosas, Benedict said that "the so-called process of globalization has created new possibilities but also new risks, which must be addressed in the wider concert of nations."

"It is an opportunity," he continued, "to be weaving a network of understanding and solidarity among peoples, without reducing everything to merely mercantile or pragmatic exchanges, in which there will also be room for the human problems of every place and, in particular, of emigrants forced to leave their land in search of better conditions of life, which sometimes entails serious consequences in the personal, family and social realms.

"The Church, considering the exercise of charity as an essential dimension of her being and mission, develops in an abnegated way valuable care of the needy of any condition or provenance, and collaborates in this task with the different public entities and institutions in order that no one who is in need of support will lack a friendly hand to help him overcome his difficulty."

The pope added that the Church "offers her personal and material resources, but especially human closeness which tries to rescue from the saddest poverty, loneliness and abandonment, knowing that love, in its purity and gratuitousness, is the best testimony of the God in whom we believe and who impels us to love."

Source: Catholic News

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