VATICAN CITY, FEB 10, 2007 (VIS) - Today in the Vatican, Benedict XVI received a delegation from the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of France, led by their secretary Michel Albert. During the course of the ceremony, the Pope received a medal commemorating his admittance to the academy as a foreign associate member.
Having expressed his thanks for the medal, the Holy Father recalled how the academy "is a center for exchange and debate, offering citizens and legislators the opportunity to reflect, and to discover forms of political organization more favorable to the common good and to individual development."
In the modern world, it is more urgent than ever "to call our contemporaries to pay heed to these two questions" said the Pope, observing that "the growth of subjectivism, which leads each individual to consider himself as the sole point of reference and to believe that what he thinks is true, must encourage us to form consciences in those fundamental values that cannot be disdained without endangering human beings and society itself."
Benedict XVI continued his address by evoking the figure of Andrei Sakharov, a member of the academy whose place on the academy he himself had taken following Sakharov's death, saying his example reminded us "of the need in personal and public life to have the courage to speak the truth and to follow it, to be free from one's environment which often tends to impose particular points of view and forms of behavior."
"One of the challenges facing our contemporaries, and particularly young people," he continued, "consists in not living merely for the exterior world, but in developing an interior life." This inner life is "the place that unifies being and action, the place to recognize our dignity as children of God called to freedom. ... What brings joy to the human heart is knowing oneself to be a child of God, this is a good and beautiful life, ... this is the victory over death and falsehood."
The Pope again returned to the example of Sakharov, saying: "If under the communist regime his exterior freedom was fettered, his interior freedom, which no one could take away from him, authorized him to speak out firmly to defend his compatriots in the name of the common good. Today too it is important that human beings do not let themselves be fettered by external chains such as relativism, the search for power and profit at all costs, drugs, disordered personal relationships, confusion over marriage, and the failure to recognize human beings at every stage of their existence from conception to natural death, as if it were thinkable that there could be stages [of life] in which a human being does not truly exist."
"We must have the courage to remind our contemporaries what human beings and humanity are," the Holy Father concluded, and he invited "civil authorities and people charged with the transmission of values to be courageous in affirming the truth about human beings."
AC/ACADEMY OF MORAL:POLITICAL SCIENCES/... VIS 20070212 (510)
Having expressed his thanks for the medal, the Holy Father recalled how the academy "is a center for exchange and debate, offering citizens and legislators the opportunity to reflect, and to discover forms of political organization more favorable to the common good and to individual development."
In the modern world, it is more urgent than ever "to call our contemporaries to pay heed to these two questions" said the Pope, observing that "the growth of subjectivism, which leads each individual to consider himself as the sole point of reference and to believe that what he thinks is true, must encourage us to form consciences in those fundamental values that cannot be disdained without endangering human beings and society itself."
Benedict XVI continued his address by evoking the figure of Andrei Sakharov, a member of the academy whose place on the academy he himself had taken following Sakharov's death, saying his example reminded us "of the need in personal and public life to have the courage to speak the truth and to follow it, to be free from one's environment which often tends to impose particular points of view and forms of behavior."
"One of the challenges facing our contemporaries, and particularly young people," he continued, "consists in not living merely for the exterior world, but in developing an interior life." This inner life is "the place that unifies being and action, the place to recognize our dignity as children of God called to freedom. ... What brings joy to the human heart is knowing oneself to be a child of God, this is a good and beautiful life, ... this is the victory over death and falsehood."
The Pope again returned to the example of Sakharov, saying: "If under the communist regime his exterior freedom was fettered, his interior freedom, which no one could take away from him, authorized him to speak out firmly to defend his compatriots in the name of the common good. Today too it is important that human beings do not let themselves be fettered by external chains such as relativism, the search for power and profit at all costs, drugs, disordered personal relationships, confusion over marriage, and the failure to recognize human beings at every stage of their existence from conception to natural death, as if it were thinkable that there could be stages [of life] in which a human being does not truly exist."
"We must have the courage to remind our contemporaries what human beings and humanity are," the Holy Father concluded, and he invited "civil authorities and people charged with the transmission of values to be courageous in affirming the truth about human beings."
AC/ACADEMY OF MORAL:POLITICAL SCIENCES/... VIS 20070212 (510)
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