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Skriven 2007-02-13 06:49:30 av Marc Lewis (1:396/45)
Ärende: Vatican Information Service (Press Release)
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                               VIS-Press releases

FORMATION OF CONSCIENCES IN FUNDAMENTAL VALUES

VATICAN CITY, FEB 10, 2007 (VIS) - Today in the Vatican, Benedict XVI received
a delegation from the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of France, led by
their secretary Michel Albert. During the course of the ceremony, the Pope
received a medal commemorating his admittance to the academy as a foreign
associate member.

Having expressed his thanks for the medal, the Holy Father recalled how the
academy "is a center for exchange and debate, offering citizens and legislators
the opportunity to reflect, and to discover forms of political organization
more favorable to the common good and to individual development."

In the modern world, it is more urgent than ever "to call our contemporaries to
pay heed to these two questions" said the Pope, observing that "the growth of
subjectivism, which leads each individual to consider himself as the sole point
of reference and to believe that what he thinks is true, must encourage us to
form consciences in those fundamental values that cannot be disdained without
endangering human beings and society itself."

Benedict XVI continued his address by evoking the figure of Andrei Sakharov, a
member of the academy whose place on the academy he himself had taken following
Sakharov's death, saying his example reminded us "of the need in personal and
public life to have the courage to speak the truth and to follow it, to be free
from one's environment which often tends to impose particular points of view
and forms of behavior."

"One of the challenges facing our contemporaries, and particularly young
people," he continued, "consists in not living merely for the exterior world,
but in developing an interior life." This inner life is "the place that unifies
being and action, the place to recognize our dignity as children of God called
to freedom. ... What brings joy to the human heart is knowing oneself to be a
child of God, this is a good and beautiful life, ... this is the victory over
death and falsehood."

The Pope again returned to the example of Sakharov, saying: "If under the
communist regime his exterior freedom was fettered, his interior freedom, which
no one could take away from him, authorized him to speak out firmly to defend
his compatriots in the name of the common good. Today too it is important that
human beings do not let themselves be fettered by external chains such as
relativism, the search for power and profit at all costs, drugs, disordered
personal relationships, confusion over marriage, and the failure to recognize
human beings at every stage of their existence from conception to natural
death, as if it were thinkable that there could be stages [of life] in which a
human being does not truly exist."

"We must have the courage to remind our contemporaries what human beings and
humanity are," the Holy Father concluded, and he invited "civil authorities and
people charged with the transmission of values to be courageous in affirming
the truth about human beings."
AC/ACADEMY OF MORAL:POLITICAL SCIENCES/...VIS 070212 (510)

SUMMARY

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