Time.news – Not only against religious wars, but also against war religions: Pope Francis’ appeal at the opening of the Plenary session of the Congress of leaders of world and traditional religions it is to “never justify violence”.
The Pontiff asked the participants to “purge ourselves of the presumption of feeling righteous and to have nothing to learn from others; let us free ourselves from those reductive and ruinous conceptions that offend the name of God through rigidity, extremism and fundamentalism, and profane it through hatred, fanaticism and terrorism, also disfiguring the image of man “.
“God is peace and always leads to peace, never to war” Francis added in his speech “Let us commit ourselves even more to promoting and strengthening the need for conflicts to be resolved not with the inconclusive reasons of force, with weapons and threats , but with the only means blessed by Heaven and worthy of man: meeting, dialogue, patient negotiationswhich are carried out thinking in particular of children and the younger generations “.
We “need religion to respond to the world’s thirst for peace and the thirst for the infinite that inhabits the heart of every man”, he added, “The search for transcendence and the sacred value of fraternity can in fact inspire and illuminate the choices to be made in the context of crises geopolitical, social, economic, ecological but, at the root, spiritual that run through many today’s institutions, including democracies, jeopardizing security and harmony among peoples “.
“Let us not allow the sacred to be exploited by what is profane. The sacred is not a prop of power and power does not prop itself up with sacredness”, the Pope said, “Brothers and sisters, the world expects from us the example of awake souls and clear minds awaits authentic religiosity to wake up from that fundamentalism that pollutes and corrodes every creed, the time to make the heart clear and compassionate. But it is also time to leave only to the history books the discourses that for too long, here and elsewhere, have instilled suspicion and contempt towards religion, as if it were a factor of destabilization of modern society “.
“In these places it is well known – he recalled – the legacy of state atheism, imposed for decades, that oppressive and suffocating mentality for which the mere use of the word ‘religion’ created embarrassment. In reality, religions are not problems, but part of the solution for a more harmonious coexistence “.