PONTIFICAL COUNCIL FOR CULTURE CELEBRATES 25 YEARS

VATICAN CITY, JUN 15, 2007 (VIS) - At midday today, Benedict XVI received participants in a congress organized for the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the foundation of the Pontifical Council for Culture.

  The Holy Father recalled how Servant of God John Paul II created the council on May 20, 1982 with the aim "of giving renewed impulse to the Church's commitment to ensure the Gospel encounters the plurality of cultures in the various parts of the world."

  After expressing his thanks to Cardinal Paul Poupard, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture since 1988, for the results achieved over this period, the Holy Father recalled that, "in its dealings with the world of culture, the Church always places man at the center, both as the instigator of cultural activity and as its ultimate recipient."

  "As the world has become even more interdependent, thanks to the great development of communications technology and the consequent intensification of social networks," said the Pope, "it is more vital than ever for the Church to promote cultural development, while focussing on the human and material quality of messages and their contents."

  Benedict XVI then recalled that to celebrate its 25th anniversary, the pontifical council has organized this congress "to meditate upon the relationship between evangelization and culture," and "to consider how that relationship presents itself today in Asia, America and Africa."

  "The history of the Church is - also and inseparably - the history of culture and art," said the Pope. "Works such as St. Thomas Aquinas' 'Summa theologiae,' the Divine Comedy, Chartres Cathedral, the Sistine Chapel and the Cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach are syntheses, each peerless in its way, between Christian faith and human expression. But if those are, so to say, pinnacles of the fusion between faith and culture, these qualities also come together every day in the life and work of all the baptized, in that hidden work of art which is the story of love of each of us with the living God and with our fellow man, in the joy and fatigue of following Jesus Christ in our daily lives.

  "Today more than ever," the Holy Father added, "reciprocal openness between cultures is a privileged terrain for dialogue between men and women committed to the search for a true humanism, over and above the differences that separate them. Also in the field of culture, Christianity offers everyone the most powerful force for renewal and elevation: the Love of God that becomes human love."

  "May the Holy See, and in particular thanks to the service of your dicastery, continue to promote throughout the Church the evangelical culture that is leavening, salt, and light of the Kingdom among humanity."
AC/CULTURE/POUPARD                        VIS 20070615 (460)