Expert Comments on Papal Address
VERONA, Italy, MAY 17, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI's message to Brazil's bishops is that the poor need Christ, said the director of a think tank that focuses on the Church's social doctrine.
Stefano Fontana, the director of the Cardinal Van Thuân International Observatory, said this in comments to ZENIT on the Pope's address to Brazil's bishops May 11.
The Holy Father traveled to Brazil to open the 5th General Conference of the Episcopate of Latin America and the Caribbean. He returned to Rome on Sunday.
Fontana said: "There have been many in the past who thought, and some still do today, that poverty, in the sociological and material sense, was a 'theological place,' that is, a point of view from which to understand the Church and Christianity.
"This is not so, there is only one theological place: the apostolic faith in Christ."
Benedict XVI said in his address: "This, and nothing else, is the purpose of the Church: the salvation of individual souls. Whenever faith education and the sacramental life are lacking, the key for solving pressing social and political problems is also missing."
Fontana commented: "Benedict XVI writes in his recent book Jesus of Nazareth: 'Purely material poverty does not save, even if the disadvantaged of this world can surely reckon with God's generosity in a quite special way. But the heart of those who own nothing can be hardened, poisoned, malicious -- it is filled with greed, forgetful of God and craves only material goods.'"
Fontana said that "the Sermon on the Mount is not a social program ... but social justice can grow when the sermon becomes a point of reference for us, living in our thoughts and deeds, and when we find the strength for renunciation and responsibility for our neighbor and all of society."
Fontana added, "The Church as a whole should not lose the awareness that she should be recognizable as the community of God's poor."
Code: ZE07051706
Date: 2007-05-17