VATICAN - POPE AT GENERAL AUDIENCE: MODEL OF POLITICAL LEADER SHOULD BE: DIVINE INTERVENTION IN THE GOVERNMENT OF THE WORLD

Vatican City (Fides Service) – After two Wednesday catechesis on the significance of the Liturgical Celebrations of Easter, during the general audience on April 30, in St Peter’s Square, Pope John Paul II resumed his teaching on the Psalms, focussing this week on Psalm 100.
This psalm presents “a meditation which portrays the image of an ideal politician” the Pope said, “ a model of life that should be divine intervention in the governance of the world: behaviour founded on perfect moral integrity and full commitment against injustice. This text is now proposed as a programme of life for the believer who starts his day of work or relationship with neighbour. It is a programme of articulated in two main moral lines. The first is called that is with perfect uprightness of conscience…the second line is developed in the last part of the psalm and it speaks of the importance of most typical public and social gifts. Also in this case there is a list of the essential points of a life which intends to reject evil with rigor and resolution.”
The last verse of the Psalm says: . The Holy Father explained in Italian that the one who speaks is not any sort of individual, he is the king, supremely responsible for justice in the country. With this phrase he expresses in a hyperbolic manner his implacable commitment to fight criminality, a dutiful commitment shared by all who have responsibility for managing public affairs. Evidently this task of avenger does not all to every citizen! Therefore if individual faithful want to apply to themselves this phrase of the psalm they must do so in an analogous sense, decision that is to destroy each day from their own heart and their own behaviour the evil plant of corruption and violence, perversion and evilness a well as every form of selfishness and injustice. SL (Fides Service 2/5/2003 EM lines 23 Words: 334)