Vatican
City, 25 January 2013
(VIS) – This Sunday, 27 January, will mark the 60th World Day for
the Fight Against Leprosy. For the occasion, Archbishop Zygmunt
Zimowski, president of the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance
to Health Care Workers, has published a message entitled: "A
Fitting Occasion for Intensifying the Service of Charity". In
the text of the document the archbishop notes that Hansen's disease
is "a malady that is as old as it is grave when we consider the
suffering, the social exclusion and the poverty that [it] involves".
"According
to the most recent data of the WHO," the message states, "about
220,000 people―men, women and
children―contracted leprosy
in 2011 and many of these new cases were diagnosed when the disease
was at an advanced stage. These data demonstrate the
continuation―notwithstanding
the praiseworthy action of international and national, governmental
and non-governmental, institutions, such as the WHO and the Raoul
Follereau Foundation and the Sasakawa Foundation―of
a still insufficient level of access to centres that offer diagnoses
and of a lack of education as regards prevention in communities that
run the risk of contagion, as well as the need for specifically
designed medico-hygienic initiatives. All of this is fundamental in
the case of leprosy, which by now does not lead to death if it is
suitably treated, as it is the case, to a greater extent, of the
other ‘neglected diseases’ ... These are pathologies that
constitute authentic scourges in some parts of the world but which do
not receive sufficient attention from the international community;
amongst these pathologies we find dengue fever, sleeping sickness,
bilharziosis, onchocerciasis, leishmaniasis, and trachoma."
"In
the face of such a health-care emergency, in the light of the Year of
Faith as well, and with the wish to commit ourselves increasingly
intensely, as Catholics, to carrying out what Jesus requested by his
commandment ‘Euntes docete et curate infirmos’ and by our
baptism, I wish to renew my invitation to work to ensure that this
Sixtieth World Leprosy Day constitutes a new ‘fitting occasion for
intensifying the service of charity in our ecclesial communities, so
that each one of us can be a good Samaritan for others, for those
close to us’."
"An
equally important role should also be played by all those people who
are victims of leprosy, who are called to cooperate in the
establishment of a more inclusive and just society that will allow
the integration of those people who have been cured of leprosy; in
spreading and promoting its forms of diagnosis and treatment; in
stressing the need to receive therapies so as to be cured, thereby
contributing to a weakening of the disease; and in distributing those
medico-hygienic criteria that are indispensable to hindering its
further propagation in the contexts to which they belong."
"As
a Christian, a person who has been afflicted by leprosy also has the
possibility of living his or her condition in a perspective of faith,
‘finding meaning through union with Christ, who suffered with
infinite love’, praying and offering up his or her suffering for
the good of the Church and humanity. In awareness that what has been
emphasised is certainly not easy, and requires charity towards
themselves and their neighbours, hope, courage, patience and
determination, I would like to observe, employing the words of St.
Paul, that none of us ‘received a spirit of slavery to fall back
into fear’: we have ‘received a spirit of adoption, through which
we cry, "Abba, Father!"’. And, ‘if children, then
heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if only we suffer
with him so that we may also be glorified with him’. Even in the
most adverse situations, a Christian is certain that ‘nor powers,
nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to
separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’,"
concludes the text.
