HOLY FATHER REMEMBERS BLESSED JOHN XXIII, "POPE OF DIALOGUE"

VATICAN CITY, APR 7, 2001 (VIS) - This morning John Paul II received members and students of the John XXIII International Cultural Center, which houses youth from over fifty countries.

"Your House," the Pope said in his discourse, "is dedicated to my venerated predecessor, Blessed John XXIII. He was the Pope of dialogue and peace, of goodness and love towards all. During his brief but intense pontificate, he began an "updating" which imprinted a vast and significant renewal upon the Church. With the Second Vatican Council he then prepared the Church for the challenges of the third millennium."

The Holy Father went on to affirm that the Center, where youth of different cultures, races, and nations live together, has become a place of dialogue between various cultures. "Dialogue brings us, in effect," the Pope emphasized, "to recognize the richness of diversity and prepares souls for reciprocal acceptance, in the perspective of an authentic collaboration, responsive to the original vocation to unity of the entire human family."

"In a world where the dominant interests seem to be material," the Holy Father concluded, "I exhort you to seek 'first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness'. ... Furthermore, the experience of faith, in a multicultural context, will help you to not submit to easy approvals, to cultural models inspired by a secularized and practically atheist conception of life, such as forms of radical individualism. It will urge you rather to acquire a more mature relationship with the values of your culture, to enrich them in comparison with other traditions and verify them with the lived experience of encounter with Christ."

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