Vatican City, 17 September 2015 (VIS) –
This morning in the Clementine Hall the Holy Father received the
participants in the International Symposium on the Pastoral Care of
the Street, organised by the Pontifical Council for Migrants and
Itinerant Peoples. The aim of the meeting was to draw up a plan of
action to respond to the phenomenon of women and children – and
their families – who live mainly on the streets.
Among the often sad causes of the
phenomenon, the Pope lists indifference, poverty, family and social
violence, and human trafficking. “They involve the pain of marital
separations and the birth of children out of wedlock, frequently
doomed to a life of 'vagrancy'. Street children and street women are
not numbers, or 'packets' to be traded; they are human beings, each
with his or her own name and face, each with a God-given identity”.
“No child chooses to live on the
streets. Sadly, even in our modern, globalised world, many children
continue to be robbed of their childhood, their rights and their
future. Lack of legal protection and adequate structures only
aggravates their state of deprivation: they have no real family or
access to education or health care. Every child abandoned or forced
to live on the streets, at the mercy of criminal organisations, is a
cry rising up to God, Who created man and woman in His own image. It
is an indictment of a social system which we have criticised for
decades, but which we find hard to change in conformity with criteria
of justice”.
He also spoke about the troubling
increase in the number of young girls and women forced to earn a
living on the street by selling their own bodies, victims of
exploitation by criminal organisations and at times by parents and
family members. “This is a shameful reality in our societies, which
boast of being modern and possessed of high levels of culture and
development. Widespread corruption and unrestrained greed are robbing
the innocent and the vulnerable of the possibility of a dignified
life, abetting the crime of trafficking and other injustices which
they have to endure. No one can remain unmoved before the pressing
need to safeguard the dignity of women, threatened by cultural and
economic factors”.
He asked, “please: do not be
disheartened by the difficulties and the challenges which you
encounter in your dedicated work, nourished as it is by your faith in
Christ, Who showed, even to death on the cross, the preferential love
of God our Father for the weak and the outcast. The Church cannot
remain silent, nor can her institutions turn a blind eye to the
baneful reality of street children and street women. The Christian
community in the various countries needs to be involved at all levels
in working to eliminate everything which forces a child or a woman to
live on the street or to earn a livelihood on the street. We can
never refrain from bringing to all, and especially to the most
vulnerable and underprivileged, the goodness and the tenderness of
God our merciful Father. Mercy is the supreme act by which God comes
to meet us; it is the way which opens our hearts to the hope of an
everlasting love”.
The Holy Father concluded by offering
to the participants in the congress “prayerful good wishes for the
fruitfulness of your efforts, in your various countries, to offer
pastoral and spiritual care, and liberation, to those who are most
frail and exploited; I likewise pray for the fruitfulness of your
mission to advance and protect their personhood and dignity”.
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