Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - Sunday 29 January is the annual World Leprosy Day dedicated this year to the theme ‘Leprosy: a Forgotten Disease’. The Day was instituted in 1954 at the insistence of Raoul Follereau.
According to the World Health Organisation in August 2006 in the world an annual number of 219,826 new cases of leprosy (circa 602 cases a day) were reported: Africa 40,830 - America 32,904 - South East Asia 133,422 - Eastern Mediterranean 4,024 - West Pacific 8,646. Leprosy affects about 10 million people in the world today.
The missionary Church has a long tradition of caring for people suffering from leprosy, often outcast from family and society, offering them medical care and spiritual assistance and concrete hope of rehabilitation in society. In many countries people with leprosy are discriminated against due to presumed incurability of the disease and the terrible mutilation it causes.
According to the Church’s Book of Statistics, the Catholic Church runs 648 Leprosy Centres.
In a Message for World Leprosy Day Cardinal Lozano Barragán president of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Pastoral urges Catholics to “take fraternal part in the great service to treat these sick bodies, as authentic witnesses to announce ‘Christ the Doctor’, and with them and for them for the global salvation of every Person”.
“On this 54th World Leprosy Day, Cardinal Barragán continues, we cannot fail to recall in this year which marks the 30th anniversary of his death Raoul Follereau who convinced the United Nations to institute the first World Leprosy Day 1954, as a confirmation that God’s Love involves even those who humbly confess ‘I do not know God but I am known by Him: and this is hope’ (R. Follereau, Le livre d’amour, I.M.E, septembre 2005, p. 59 n. 35). Follereau was a man who prayed in this way: ‘Lord I want to help others to live, all others, my brothers and sisters who suffer without knowing why, waiting for death to set them free (id. p. 58 n. 30)”.
The Cardinal’s message of hope concludes: “To you, brothers and sisters afflicted by leprosy, and to those who bear on your bodies the painful signs left by this disease, I wish to repeat the words of the Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris of John Paul II: ‘on this Cross is the “Redeemer of man”, the Man of Sorrows, who has taken upon himself the physical and moral sufferings of the people of all times, so that in love they may find the salvific meaning of their sorrow and valid answers to all of their questions…And we ask all you who suffer to support us. We ask precisely you who are weak to become a source of strength for the Church and humanity’(n. 31)”.
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(AP) (25/1/2007 Agenzia Fides; Righe:38 Parole:497)
