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Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) – “Unite our efforts in order to better express Justice and Love to people suffering from Hansen’s disease.” This is the title of the Message of Archbishop Zygmunt Zimowski, President of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers (for Health Pastoral Care), for the World Leprosy Day 2011, to be celebrated this coming Sunday, 30 January. Fides received a foretaste of the message and publishes it here.
A recurrence, which launched 58 years ago by Raoul Follereau and supported with determination by the Foundation that carries on his work, is still today of enormous importance, despite the progress made, thanks to the efficient medical therapies. “In the first place,” observes Archbishop Zimowski in his message, “the access to timely diagnostic control, remains in fact, critically insufficient. The result is that Hansen’s disease begins, undisturbed, its destructive work on the body of the affected person, who besides the suffering due to the disease ends up being disfigured in an unmistakable and irreversible way; this also implies a 'condemnation', often along with his/her entire nuclear family, to social exclusion and poverty.
“This is an umpteenth example of how 'in our day on the one hand we are witnessing an attention to health that borders on pharmacological, medical and surgical consumerism, almost a cult of the body, and on the other, the difficulty of millions of people in achieving a basic standard of subsistence and in obtaining the indispensable medicines for treatment',” highlighted the President of the Pontifical Council, reiterating the Message of the Holy Father, Benedict XVI to the participants in the 25th International Conference of the Dicastery, held last November in the Vatican on the theme: “Caritas in Veritate: Toward an Equitable and Human Health Care.”
An inequality amplified in the daily life of the person who is physically affected by leprosy. Even when one is cured and is no longer a vehicle of infection, he/she is not readmitted by the social structure, does not find work and is rendered incapable of guaranteeing a dignified existence to him/herself and to their own family.
That is why as Christians or simply as men and women of good will we are called upon to intervene. Like the Good Samaritan, so emphasized the Holy Father in his Message to the participants in the Conference, we are urged to bend down “over the wounded man left by the roadside” fulfilling that “greater justice” which Jesus asks of his disciples and practised in his life, because the fulfilment of the Law is love.” (SL) (Agenzia Fides 29/1/2011)
