IN DEFENSE OF LIFE AND THE FAMILY
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Benedict XVI and Ruini in unison:
This the policy of the Church
In his opening address to the permanent council of the Italian bishops conference on March 20,
Cardinal Camillo Ruini re-stated “to the voters and to future elected officials the irrenounceable contents” which, using words Benedict XVI had used recently, are not “norms peculiar to Catholic morals alone” but rather are “elementary truths about our common humanity.” Among these “elementary truths” he ranked life and family at the very top.
Two days earlier, on March 18, Benedict XVI had indicated the very same priorities in a meeting with the heads of the Vatican Secretariat of State offices and representatives of the Holy See to various international organizations, urging them to “raise their voices” in defense of life and the family:
“The relations between states and within the states are just in the degree in which they respect truth. Nonetheless, when truth is disregarded, peace is threatened, law is endangered and then, as a logical consequence, injustices are unleashed. These are the boundaries that divide countries in a much more profound way than the limits drawn up on the geographical maps and frequently are not only external boundaries but also internal to the states.
”
These injustices also take on new faces. For example, the face of disinterest and confusion that comes to damage the structure of the family, the fundamental cell of society. Or the face of authoritarianism or arrogance which can even become authorized, silencing those who have no voice or strength to be heard, as happens in the case of the injustice which, perhaps today is the gravest of all injustices, that which does away with incipient human life.
"’God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong’ (1 Corinthians 1:27). May this criterion of divine action, still in vigor today, encourage you not to be surprised, and less still to become discouraged, in the face of difficulties and misunderstandings.
"In fact, you know that through them you authoritatively participate in
the prophetic responsibility of the Church, which strives to continue speaking up in defense of man, even when state politics or the majority of public opinion moves in the opposite direction. The strength of truth, in fact, is found in truth itself, not in the number of approvals it receives."
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 26/03/2006 1.14]