NEW CHRISTIAN HUMANISM IN A NEW MILLENNIUM

VATICAN CITY, NOV 19, 1999 (VIS) - Pope John Paul's Message to the participants in the plenary assembly of the Pontifical Council for Culture, now underway in the Vatican on the theme "For a New Christian Humanism, On the Threshold of a New Millennium," was published this morning.

The Pope writes that, on the threshold of the Jubilee Year 2000, "the Church's mission to announce Christ becomes more pressing; many of our contemporaries, especially young people, have great difficulty in perceiving what they truly are, submerged and disoriented by the multiplicity of the concepts of man, life and death, the world and its meaning."
These concepts, he says, too often "have become systems of thought which have a tendency to turn away from the truth and to exclude God, believing thus to affirm the primacy of man. ... This profound mutilation becomes today a true threat for man, because it leads one to think of man without any relation to transcendency. It is one of the basic tasks of the Church in her dialogue with cultures to lead our contemporaries to the rediscovery of a healthy anthropology."

"It is our duty," the Holy Father writes, "to propose today a Christian philosophy and anthropology which prepare the way for a rediscovery of the greatness and beauty of Christ, the Word of God. And it is certain that the attraction of the beautiful, the aesthetic, will lead our contemporaries to ethics, that is to say, to leading a beautiful and worthy life."

"Christian humanism," John Paul II observes, "is capable of integrating the best acquisitions of science and technology for the greatest happiness of man. It wards off, at the same time, their threats against his dignity as a person, the subject of rights and duties, and against his very existence, so seriously called into question today, from conception up to the natural end of his earthly existence."

In concluding remarks on "the plurality of anthropological processes," the Pope writes: "The Church does not fear legitimate diversity. ... On the contrary, she leans on this diversity to inculturate the Gospel message."

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