VATICAN - The Pope addresses Meeting of Aid Agencies for the Eastern Catholic Churches (ROACO): “The Holy Land, Iraq and Lebanon are present, with urgency and constancy they deserve in the prayer and activity of the Apostolic See and the whole Church ”

Thursday, 21 June 2007

Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - “The presence of the venerable Eastern Bishops allows me to share the pain and concern for the delicate situation in vast areas of the Middle East. Peace, so implored and longed for, is still widely outraged. It is outraged in individual hearts and this jeopardises interpersonal and community relations. The frailty of peace is aggravated further by old and new injustices. So it is quenched leaving space for violence which often degenerates into wars more or less declared and becomes in our day a besetting international problem.” Pope Benedict XVI said this when he received in audience on 21 June the participants at a Meeting of Aid Agencies for the Eastern Catholic Churches (ROACO) in the Vatican. Faced with the grave situation the Pope said: “I wish to knock again at the heart of God, our Creator and Father, to request with immense confidence the gift of peace. I knock at the heart of those with specific responsibilities that they may fulfil the grave duty to guarantee peace to all, indistinctly, freeing peace from the mortal malady of religious, cultural, historical or geographical discrimination.”
The Holy Father then said “ the Holy Land, Iraq and Lebanon are present, with urgency and constancy they deserve in the prayer and activity of the Apostolic See and the whole Church” and he renewed his condolences to the Chaldean Patriarch for the barbaric killing of a priest and three sub-deacons on 3 June in Iraq. “The whole Church accompanies with affection and admiration all her sons and daughters and sustains them in the hour of martyrdom for the sake of Christ's name” the Pope said. He concluded by encouraging the members of ROACO to continue their work, “so that your indispensable contribution of ecclesial charity may find full development in the community form of its exercise”, and he stressed that the urgency of the ecumenical choice and the inescapable nature of interreligious one draw nourishment from the movement of ecclesial charity: “These choices are none other than expressions of the same charity, which alone can lead to steps of dialogue and open unexpected for horizons”. (S.L.) (Agenzia Fides 21/6/2007 - righe 25, parole 372)


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