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| Pope Francis has died. | ||
| The pontiff was 88 years old. | ||
| His death comes a few weeks after he was discharged from an extended hospital stay for pneumonia and other health issues. | ||
| His last public appearance was yesterday when he greeted thousands in St. Peter's Square who were gathered for Easter Mass. | ||
| Up next, a look back at Pope Francis in 2014 when he addressed the European Parliament and referred to the European continent as a quote, grandmother. | ||
| The Pope and Parliament President both spoke through translators. | ||
| Mr. President, Vice Presidents, Members of the European Parliament, all of you working in various capacities in this House, | ||
| friends, I'm grateful to you for inviting me to address this institution which is fundamental to the life of the European Union. | ||
| And I thank you also for giving me this opportunity to speak through you to the more than 500 million citizens in the 28 member states whom you represent. | ||
| I'm especially grateful to you, Mr. President, for your warm words of welcome in the name of the whole House. | ||
| My visit comes more than a quarter of a century after that of Pope John Paul II. | ||
| A great deal has changed since then in Europe and in the whole world. | ||
| They are no longer the opposing blocs which then divided the continent in two. | ||
| And gradually the hope is being realized that Europe endowed with sovereign and free institutions will one day reach the full dimensions that geography and even more history have given it. | ||
| As the European Union has expanded, the world itself has become more complex and ever-changing, increasingly interconnected and global. | ||
| It has, as a consequence, become less and less Eurocentric. | ||
| Despite a larger and stronger union, Europe gives the impression of being aged and weary, feeling less and less a protagonist in a world which frequently looks on it with aloofness, with mistrust and even at times with suspicion. | ||
| As I speak to you today, I would like as a pastor to offer a message of hope and encouragement to all the citizens of Europe. | ||
| It's a message of hope based on the confidence that our problems can become powerful forces for unity in working to overcome all those fears which Europe, together with the entire world, is experiencing at the moment. | ||
| It's a message of hope in the Lord, who turns evil into good and death into life. | ||
| It's a message of encouragement to return to the firm conviction of the founders of the European Union who wanted a future based on the capacity to work together in bridging divisions and in fostering peace and fellowship between all the peoples of this continent. | ||
| At the heart of this ambitious political project was confidence in man, not so much man as citizen or as economic agent, but in man, in men and women as persons endowed with transcendent dignity. | ||
| I feel bound to stress the close bond that exists between these two words, dignity and transcendence. | ||
| Dignity was the key word in the process of rebuilding which followed the Second World War. | ||
| Our recent past has been marked by the concern, unquestioned, to protect human dignity in contrast to the manifold instances of violence and discrimination which, even in Europe, occurred over the centuries. | ||
| Recognition of the importance of human rights came about as the result of a long process entailing also a great deal of suffering and sacrifice, which helped shape an awareness of the unique worth of each individual human person. | ||
| This awareness was grounded not only in historical events, but above all in European thought characterized by an enriching encounter whose distant springs are many, coming from Greece and Rome, from Celtic, Germanic and Slavic sources and from Christianity, which profoundly shaped them, thus forging the very concept of the person. | ||
| Today, the promotion of human rights is central to the commitment of the European Union to advance the dignity of the person, both within the Union and in its relations with other countries. | ||
| This is an important and praiseworthy commitment because there are still too many situations in which human beings are being treated as objects whose conception, whose configuration and whose utility can be programmed and who can then be thrown away when they are no longer useful because they are weak, because they are sick or because they are old. | ||
| What kind of dignity can there be without the possibility of freely expressing one's thought or professing without limit one's own religious faith? | ||
| What dignity can there be without a clear juridical framework which limits the rule of force and enables the rule of law to prevail over the power of tyranny? | ||
| What dignity can there ever be if men and women are subjected to all kinds of discrimination? | ||
| And what dignity can a person ever hope to find when he or she likes food and the bare essentials for survival and worse yet doesn't have the work which confers dignity. | ||
| Promoting the dignity of the person means recognizing that he or she possesses inalienable rights which no one may take away arbitrarily. | ||
| much less for some economic interest's sake. | ||
| At the same time, however, care must be taken not to fall into certain errors which can arise from a misunderstanding of the concept of human rights and from its paradoxical misuse. | ||
| There is today a tendency to claim ever broader individual rights and I am tempted to say individualistic rights. | ||
| And underlying this is a conception of the human person detached from all social and anthropological context as if this person were a monad, a monad increasingly unconcerned with other surrounding monads. | ||
| The equally essential and complementary concept of duty no longer seems to be linked to such a concept of rights. | ||
| And as a result, the rights of the individual are upheld without regard for the fact that each human being is part of a social context in which his or her rights and duties are bound up with those of the others and with the common good of the society itself. | ||
| So I think it's vital to develop today a culture of human rights which intelligently links the individual or rather the personal dimension to the dimension of the common good, the dimension of the all of us made up of individuals and families and intermediate groups who together constitute society. | ||
| Unless the rights of each individual are harmoniously subordinated to the greater good, those rights will end up being considered limitless and consequently will become a source of conflicts and of violence. | ||
| To speak of transcendent human dignity thus means appealing to human nature, to our innate capacity to distinguish good from evil and to that compass deep within our hearts which God has impressed upon all creation. | ||
| Above all, it means regarding human beings not as absolutes but as beings in relation. | ||
| One of the most common diseases in Europe, if you ask me, today, is the loneliness, the loneliness of those who have no connection with others. | ||
| this is especially true of the old who are often abandoned to their fate and in the young who lack clear points of reference and opportunities for the future It can also be seen in the many poor who live in our cities and in the lost gaze of the migrants have come here seeking a better future. | ||
| This loneliness has been made worse by the economic crisis, whose effects continue to have tragic consequences on society. | ||
| In recent years, it can be seen that as the European Union has expanded, there has been a growing mistrust on the part of citizens towards institutions which they regard as loose engaged in laying down rules which they perceive as insensitive to individual people's concerns, if not actually harmful. | ||
| In many quarters we gain a general impression of weariness, of aging, of a Europe as grandmother, no longer fertile and lively. | ||
| As a result, the great ideas which once inspired Europe seem to have lost their power of attraction and been replaced by the bureaucratic technicalities of Europe's institutions. | ||
| Together with this come certain rather selfish lifestyles marked by an opulence which is no longer sustainable and which is frequently indifferent to the world around us and especially to the poorest. | ||
| To our dismay, we see technical and economic questions dominating political debate to the detriment of any genuine concern for human beings. | ||
| The human being risks being reduced to a mere cog in a machine that treats them as items of consumption to be exploited with the result that, as is so tragically apparent, whenever human life no longer proves useful to the machine, it is discarded with few qualms, as in the case of the terminally ill, | ||
| The old who are abandoned and uncared for, and the children who are killed before they're born. | ||
| This is the great mistake that happens when technology is allowed to take over. | ||
| The result is a confusion between ends and means. | ||
| It's the inevitable consequence of a throwaway culture and of uncontrolled consumerism. | ||
| If, on the other hand, we uphold the dignity of the person, that means that we are acknowledging the value of human life, which is freely given us and hence cannot be an object of trade or of commerce. | ||
| And you, as Members of Parliament, are called to a great mission, which may at times seem an impossible one to tend to the needs and the fragilities of individuals and of peoples to tend to those in need that takes strength and tenderness. | ||
| It takes effort and generosity In the midst of a functionalistic and private mindset, which inexorably leads to this throwaway culture to care for individuals and peoples in need means protecting memory and hope, | ||
| it means taking responsibility for the present with its situations of marginalization and anguish, and it means being capable of bestowing dignity upon that. | ||
| So, how can hope be restored in the future so that beginning with the younger generations there can be a return of that confidence that is needed to pursue the great ideal of a united and peaceful Europe, a creative and resourceful Europe, one that is respectful of rights and conscious of its duties. | ||
| To answer that question, I'm going to use an image. | ||
| One of the most famous frescoes by Raphael in the Vatican depicts the so-called school of Athens. | ||
| In the centre are Plato and Aristotle. | ||
| Plato's finger is pointed upward to the world of ideas, to the sky, to heaven, as one might say. | ||
| Aristotle holds his hand out in front of him towards the viewer, towards the world, towards concrete reality. | ||
| I think it's a very apt image of Europe and Europe's history, made up of a constant interplay, as it is, between heaven and earth, where heaven indicates openness to the transcendent, to God, which has always distinguished the peoples of Europe, and the earth represents Europe's practical concrete ability to face situations and problems. | ||
| The future of Europe depends on the recovery of the vital connection, the inseparable connection between these two elements. | ||
| A Europe which is no longer open to the transcendent dimension of life is a Europe which risks slowly losing its own soul and that humanistic spirit which it yet loves and defends. | ||
| Taking as a starting point this opening to the transcendent, I would like to reaffirm the centrality of the human person, which otherwise is at the mercy of the fashions and the powers of the moment. | ||
| I consider fundamental not only the legacy that Christianity has offered in the past to the social and cultural formation of the continent, but also, and above all, the contribution which Christianity has to offer today and in the future to Europe's growth. | ||
| That contribution doesn't represent a threat to the secularity of states or to the independence of the institutions of the Union, but rather an enrichment to them. | ||
| This is clear from the ideals which shaped Europe from the beginning, such as peace, subsidiarity and reciprocal solidarity and a humanism based on respect for the dignity of the human person. | ||
| So I should like to reiterate the readiness of the Holy See and the Catholic Church through the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of Europe to engage in a meaningful, open and transparent dialogue with the institutions of the European Union. | ||
| I am likewise convinced that a Europe which is capable of appreciating its religious roots and of grasping their fruitfulness and their potential will be all the more able to resist the many forms of extremism which are spreading in today's world, | ||
| not least as a result of the great vacuum of ideals which we are currently seeing in the West, since it is precisely man's forgetfulness of God and his failure to give him glory which gives rise to violence. | ||
| I cannot fail to recall in this connection the many instances of injustice and persecution which daily afflict religious minorities, and particularly Christians, in various parts of the world. | ||
| Communities and individuals are today subjected to barbaric acts of violence. | ||
| They are driven away from their homes and native lands, they are sold as slaves, they are killed, beheaded, crucified or burnt alive amid the shameful and complicit silence of many. | ||
| The motto of the European Union is United in Diversity. | ||
| But unity doesn't mean uniformity of political, economic and cultural life or of ways of thinking. | ||
| In point of fact, all real unity draws from the rich diversities which make it up. | ||
| And in this sense it's like a family which is all the more united when each of its members is free to be fully himself or herself without fear. | ||
| I consider Europe as a family of peoples who will sense the closeness of the institutions of the Union when these institutions are able, if these institutions are able wisely to combine the desired ideal of unity with the diversity proper to each people, cherishing particular traditions, acknowledging past history and its roots, | ||
| liberated from the many manipulations and the many phobias. | ||
| Affirming the centrality of the human person means, above all, allowing that person to express freely their individuality and their creativity, both as individuals and as peoples. | ||
| At the same time, the specific features of each person represent an authentic richness to the degree that they are placed at the service of all. | ||
| It always needs to be remembered that the proper configuration of the European Union is based on the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity so that mutual assistance can prevail and progress can be made on the basis of mutual trust. | ||
| Within this dynamic of unity and particularity, you, ladies and gentlemen of the European Parliament, bear the responsibility of keeping democracy alive for the peoples of Europe. | ||
| It's no secret that a conception of unity seen as uniformity strikes at the vitality of the democratic system, weakening the rich, fruitful and constructive interplay of organizations and political parties. | ||
| This leads to the risk of living in a world of ideas, of mere words, of images, of sophistry, and to end up confusing the reality of democracy with a new political nominalism. | ||
| Keeping democracy alive in Europe requires that we avoid the many globalizing trends that dilute reality, angelic purism, dictatorial relativism, ahistorical fundamentalism, ethical systems with no kindness, and intellectualism with no wisdom. | ||
| Keeping democracies alive is a challenge at this historic moment. | ||
| The true strength of our democracies, understood as expressions of the political will of the people, must not be allowed to collapse under the pressure of multinational interests which are not universal, which weaken them and turn them into uniform systems of economic power at the service of unseen empires. | ||
| This is one of the challenges which history places you before today. | ||
| To give Europe hope means more than simply acknowledging the centrality of the human person. | ||
| It also implies nurturing the gifts of each man and woman. | ||
| It means investing in individuals and in those settings in which their talents are shaped and flourish. | ||
| The first such area is certainly that of education, beginning with the family, the fundamental cell and most precious element. | ||
| The family, united, fruitful and indissoluble possesses the elements possesses the elements which are fundamental for fostering hope in the future. | ||
| Without this solid basis, the future ends up being built on sand with dire social consequences. | ||
| Then it's also important that stressing the importance of the family should mean not only helping to give direction and hope to new generations, but also to many of the old who often have to live alone and abandoned because there's no longer the warmth of a family home that can accompany and support alongside the family there are the various educational institutes, | ||
| schools and universities. | ||
| Education cannot be limited to providing technical expertise alone. | ||
| Rather it should encourage the more complex process of assisting the human person to grow in his or her totality. | ||
| Young people today are looking for a suitable complete education which can enable them to look to the future with hope rather than disenchantment. | ||
| There is so much creative potential in Europe in the various fields of scientific research, some of which are yet to be fully explored. | ||
| need only think, for example, of alternative sources of energy, the development of which will greatly assist the protection of the environment. | ||
| Europe has always been in the vanguard of efforts to promote ecology. | ||
| Our Earth needs constant concern and care and attention. | ||
| Each of us has a personal responsibility to care for this creation, this precious gift which God has entrusted us. | ||
| This means, on the one hand, that nature is at our disposal to enjoy and to use properly. | ||
| But it also means that we are not its masters. | ||
| We are stewards but not masters. | ||
| We need to love and to respect nature, but instead, we are often guided by the pride of domination, of possession, of manipulation, and of exploitation. | ||
| We don't preserve the earth, we don't respect it, we don't consider it as a freely given gift that we should be looking after. | ||
| Respect for the environment, however, means not just not destroying it, it also means using it for the good. | ||
| I'm thinking above all here of agriculture, which provides sustenance and nourishment to the human family. | ||
| It's intolerable that millions of people around the world are dying of hunger while tons of food each day are thrown away from our tables. | ||
| Respect for nature also means recognizing that man himself is a fundamental part of nature. | ||
| Along with an environmental ecology, there's also a need for a human ecology consisting in respect for the person. | ||
| And that's what I've tried to evoke in addressing you today. | ||
| The second area in which people's talents flourish is that of work. | ||
| It's time to promote policies which create employment, but above all, there's a need now to restore dignity to work by ensuring proper working conditions. | ||
| This implies, on the one hand, finding new ways of combining market flexibility and the need for the stability and security of workers that are indispensable for their human development. | ||
| It also implies a suitable social context geared not to the exploitation of persons, but to ensuring through labour that they can create a family and bring up their children. | ||
| Equally, there needs to be a united response to the question of migration. | ||
| We cannot allow the Mediterranean to become a vast graveyard. | ||
| The boats landing daily on Europe's shores are filled with men and women who need acceptance and assistance. | ||
| The absence of mutual support within the European Union runs the risk of encouraging particularistic solutions to this problem, solutions which don't take into account the human dignity of the migrants and thus contribute to slave labour and continuing social tensions. | ||
| Europe will be able to confront the problems associated with immigration only if it is capable of clearly asserting its own cultural identity and enacting proper legislation that protects at the same time the rights of European citizens and ensures the acceptance of immigrants only if it is capable of adopting fair, | ||
| courageous and realistic policies which can assist the countries of origin in their own social and political development and in their efforts to resolve internal conflicts, the principal cause of this phenomenon. | ||
| Rather than adopting policies motivated by self-interest which increase and feed such conflicts, we need to act on the causes and not only on the effects. | ||
| Mr. President, Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, awareness of one's own identity is also necessary for a positive dialogue to occur with the states which have asked to be part of the Union in the future. | ||
| I think especially of those in the Balkans for which membership of the European Union could be a response to their desire for peace in a region which has greatly suffered from conflicts in the past. | ||
| Awareness of one's own identity is also indispensable for relations with other neighbouring countries, particularly with those bordering the Mediterranean, many of which are suffering from internal conflicts, from the pressure of religious fundamentalism and from that of global terrorism. | ||
| You, as legislators, have the task to protect and nurture Europe's identity so that its citizens can experience renewed confidence in the institutions of the Union and in its project of peace and friendship that underlies that Union. | ||
| Knowing that the more the power of men and women increases, the greater is their individual and collective responsibility. | ||
| I encourage you to work so that Europe rediscovers the best of itself. | ||
| An anonymous second century author wrote that Christians are to the world what the soul is to the body. | ||
| The function of the soul is to support the body to be its conscience and its historical memory. | ||
| A 2,000-year-old history links Europe and Christianity. | ||
| It is a history not without conflict and error, And one constantly driven by the desire to work for the good of all. | ||
| We see this in the beauty of our cities and even more in the beauty of the many works of charity and constructive cooperation throughout this continent. | ||
| This is a history in large part still to be written. | ||
| It's our present and it's also our future. | ||
| It's our identity. | ||
| Europe urgently needs to recover its true features in order to grow as its founders intended in peace and harmony so that it can be itself and since it is not yet free of conflicts. | ||
| Dear members of the European Parliament, the time has come to work together to build a Europe, a Europe which revolves not around the economy but around the sacred nature of the human person and around inalienable values. | ||
| in building a Europe which courageously embraces its past and confidently looks to its future in order fully to experience the hope of its presence. | ||
| The time has come for us to abandon the idea of Europe fearful and self-absorbed in order to revive and encourage a Europe of leadership, a repository of science, art, music, human values and faith, a Europe which looks to the heavens and pursues ideals, a Europe which cares for, which defends and which protects every man and woman, a Europe which moves on safe ground, |