2024-07-04 07:38:24
(ANSA) – ROME, JULY 3 – “The Encyclical Fratelli tutti offers us a concrete, possible, attractive, shared horizon. A single people. Therefore, we look with concern at the danger of populisms that, if we do not remember the past, can deprive us of democracy or weaken it!”. This was stated by Cardinal Matteo Zuppi during the opening ceremony of the 50th Social Week of Italian Catholics, in Trieste, in the presence of President Sergio Mattarella. The President of the CEI underlined that “from 1907 to today, Italian Catholicism has not remained idle, has not closed itself in the sacristy, has not allowed itself to be reduced to individualistic intimism or to the cult of individual well-being, but has felt social issues as its own, has allowed itself to be wounded by them in order to progress towards a social and political order whose soul is social charity”. “The too many deaths warn us not to accept the old and new seeds of hatred and prejudice – he then continued -. We do not want borders to be walls or, worse, trenches, but hinges and bridges! We want it because this is the testament of those who lost their lives on the borders. We also want it for those who, at the cost of terrible suffering, have become migrants and ask to be considered what they are: people!”. According to Zuppi, “peace and development are not goods achieved once and for all. They require a ‘political love’ that must take unity as an objective to pursue, defend and grow, because unity is never static, but always dynamic!”. “How many resources were wasted, how many opportunities were lost, how many areas where greater solidarity is urgently needed!”, warned the president of the bishops: “Let us think of the elderly whose fragility we must protect, of the disabled, of the young people who feel they have no future but in reality are looking for one, of women who are victims of male violence, of those who work in unacceptable conditions, of the home without which there is no integration and not even family and future”. And “solidarity is towards everyone, and does not look at the passport because everyone becomes our neighbor and part of our future”. Much applauded was the passage in which Cardinal Zuppi remembered Satnam Singh, who “dreamed of the future and worked to obtain it: he is one of us, we remember him with emotion and his story is a warning that reveals the hypocrisy of many words that unfortunately remain such and, therefore, mocking”. “We are happy when Catholics get involved in politics at all levels and in institutions, everywhere,” he concluded: “Catholics in Italy want to be protagonists in building an inclusive democracy, where no one is discarded or left behind.” (ANSA).
2024-07-04 07:38:24