Vatican City, 19 November 2015 (VIS) –
This morning Pope Francis received in audience the participants in
the international conference “The culture of salus and welcome in
the service of man and the planet”, organised by the Pontifical
Council for Health Care Workers (for Health Pastoral Care), currently
being held in the Vatican, which coincides with the thirtieth
anniversary of the dicastery and the twentieth anniversary of the
publication of St. John Paul II's encyclical letter “Evangelium
vitae”.
In this document, said the Holy Father,
we find “the constitutive elements of the 'culture of salus':
hospitality, compassion, understanding and forgiveness. They are
Jesus' habitual attitudes towards the many people in need He
encounters every day: people suffering sicknesses of every type,
public sinners, the possessed, the marginalised, the poor and
outsiders. … These attitudes are those that the encyclical calls
the 'positive requirements' of the commandment regarding the
inviolability of life, which with Jesus are revealed in all their
breadth and depth, and today can, or indeed must characterise
pastoral care in relation to health: 'they range from caring for the
life of one's brother (whether a blood brother, someone belonging to
the same people, or a foreigner living in the land of Israel) to
showing concern for the stranger, even to the point of loving one's
enemy'”.
“This closeness to the other, to the
point of feeling that he is someone who belongs to me, overcomes
every barrier of nationality, social extraction and religion … as
the good Samaritan of the Gospel parable teaches us. It also
overcomes that culture in a negative sense in which, both in rich and
poor countries, human beings are accepted or refused according to
utilitarian criteria, especially in terms of social or economic
utility. This mentality is the parent of the so-called 'medicine of
desires': an increasingly widespread custom in rich countries,
characterised by the search for physical perfection at all costs, in
the illusion of eternal youth; a custom that leads indeed to the
rejection and marginalisation of all that is not 'efficient', that is
seen as a burden or a hindrance, or is simply ugly”.
Similarly, being a neighbour to others,
as Francis mentions in his encyclical “Laudato si'”, means also
taking on binding responsibilities towards creation and our common
home, which belongs to all and is entrusted to the care of all, also
for generations to come. … This conversion … to the 'Gospel of
creation” requires us to “make our own and become interpreters of
the cry for human dignity, raised above all by by poorest and the
excluded, as those who are sick and who suffer so often are”.
“I hope that in these days of study
and debate, in which you also consider the environmental aspect in
its aspects most closely linked to physical, mental, spiritual and
social health of the person, you may contribute to a new development
of the culture of salus, understood in its fullest sense. I encourage
you, in this regard, always to keep in mind, in your work, the real
situations faced by those populations who suffer as a result of the
damages caused by environmental degradation, whose impact on health
is often serious and permanent”, concluded the Pope.
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