Pope: Mercy, love the key to true Catholic culture today

Addressing participants in the 47th Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples at the Rimini Exhibition Centre on August 22, Pope Leo said that to follow Jesus Christ in the modern age “requires a clear awareness that evil is not overcome by evil”.

“As in heaven, so on earth,” he insisted, “love is the law of life and the means of redemption – the way of the crucified Messiah.

“Catholic culture must counter the false realism that rearms minds, words and nations, with the realism of mercy which recognises that there can be no enemies, and that everyone, even those who oppose us, is a brother or sister to be looked in the eye and encountered in truth.”

While he acknowledged that sin certainly exists, he said Christ’s redeeming love is stronger.

Christ’s love, the Pope emphasised, “commits us to purifying our thoughts, interests, habits, associations, plans and investments – indeed, every aspect of our lives – from all that the culture of power has tainted”.

The glory of God that shines forth in the humility of the cave of Bethlehem or in the dishonour of Christ’s cross always surprises, Pope Leo told the gathering.

He urged all the faithful to join in freeing “our lives from suspicion, culture from arrogance, education from ideology, work from the idolatry of profit and technology and finance from the business of death”.

“Beginning with the organisations that we have created and in which we work,” the Pope invited, “let us expose unjust structures of power that lie at the root of poverty, inequality, war and environmental disasters.”

The Pope’s address took place during his pastoral visit to the Republic of San Marino and to the city of Rimini.

Addressing local authorities during a one-day visit to the world’s oldest surviving republic, Pope Leo hailed tiny San Marino as a model of political freedom and civic responsibility, praising its centuries-old republican traditions while warning against political and economic systems that place power above the human person.

FULL STORY

Pope to Rimini Meeting: Our identity as God’s children unites us (By Deborah Castellano Lubov/Vatican News)

Pope Leo praises San Marino as model of freedom and common good (National Catholic Reporter)

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