To Participants in the Third Meeting for Friendship Between Peoples, Rimini

On Sunday, 29 August 1982, the Holy Father addressed the third “Meeting for Friendship Between Peoples.”  In his speech, the Pope spoke of the encounter with Christ, “which is permanently renewed in the sacramental memory of his Death and Resurrection, [and which] enables and pushes us to encounter our brothers and all men.” 

Dear brothers and sisters.

1. I am very happy to find myself here, among you, to conclude this third "Meeting for friendship between peoples". Just saying these words makes the heart happy: “Meeting”! “Friendship meeting”! “Friendship between peoples”! Words that acquire a particular meaning in these often dramatic hours in the history of the world. I therefore greet you with the joy of the Psalms, it is the very joy of God: "Behold, how beautiful and how sweet it is for brothers to live together!" ( Ps 132 [133], 1).

Today we live in a privileged time, which we need to fully understand. The reasons are many.

2. First of all, we are having an encounter .

Each of you, in these days, has been able to have this experience. He had meetings not only with the hundreds and thousands of other people who crowded the listening rooms, but also with various personalities, who brought the contribution of their reflection and creativity here.

But this meeting was made possible and almost necessary by another meeting . The Meeting was in fact born from the friendship of a group of Christians from this city. As I learned, it was born from the passion for communication, creativity and dialogue that the Christian faith, lived integrally, always brings with it.

Yes, faith lived as a reverberation and in continuity with those first encounters that the Gospel documents, faith lived as certainty and question of the presence of Christ within every situation and occasion of life, makes us capable of creating new forms of life for man , makes you eager to communicate and learn, to meet and value.

The encounter with Christ, which is permanently renewed in the sacramental memory of his Death and Resurrection, enables and pushes us to encounter our brothers and all men. Truly, the words of Saint Paul to the Thessalonians can be taken up here, as a conclusion and teaching of this attempt of yours: "Scrutinize everything, retain what is good" ( 1 Thess 5, 21).

I am pleased that the initiative is an expression of the vitality of the Catholic laity in Italy: such a laity, "aware and active, is an inestimable wealth for every local Church", as I said to the Bishops of Liguria, last 8 January ( John Paul II, Allocutio ad Liguriae episcopos occasion oblata ad Limina visitationis coram admissos , 4, die 8 Jan. 1982 : Teachings of John Paul II , V, 1 [1982] 60). A conscious laity, that is, aware of the communion that binds them to Christ and the Church, and active, that is, eager to express in the freedom of initiatives the beauty and humanity of what they have encountered. This is the beautiful reality of this meeting .

3. This year you have focused your attention on a particularly stimulating theme: "Man's resources". Do we want to think about it together?

In general, man's resource is everything that comes to his aid in his effort to stay alive and dominate the earth. Things, however, truly become man's resources only when man encounters them through work . Through work man dominates nature and places all things at his service. Through work, man takes care of the earth, uses its riches for his own life and at the same time improves and defends the earth. I am therefore pleased to note how your theme has its reference first and foremost to the Church's great and current concern for human work, which also found expression in my recent encyclical Laborem Exercens . In fact, man communicates with external reality only through his interiority. It is the internal resources of his mind and heart that allow him to rise above things and dominate over them. Man is worth not because he "has", but because he "is". For this reason it is necessary to meditate with particular depth on that decisive human resource which is work, to understand the disinterested, pure, non-utilitarian moment that lies at the heart of human work and gives it its meaning.

4. However, this is connected - and we take a step forward - with another fundamental human resource: the family .

The man works to support himself and his family . If working is taking care of being, collaborating in the creative work of God, this general principle becomes evident and existentially concrete for the majority of men in the fact that, by working, man takes care of the person of his loved ones . If it is certainly true that man feels the instinct of self-preservation like all animals, it is also true that it is not right to place a purely utilitarian and selfish intention at the beginning of work. The instinct of self-preservation also exists in man in a specifically human, personalistic form, as the will to exist as a person, as the will to save the value of the person in himself and in others, starting with his loved ones. This fact defines the limit of any utilitarian and economic interpretation of human work.

Work, through which man dominates nature, is the work of the entire human community through all its generations. Each of these generations has the task of taking care of the land to hand it over to future generations, still and increasingly suitable to be man's home. Allow me to remind you, in this context, even if only incidentally, that when the bond of solidarity, which must bind men to each other and to future generations, is broken, this care for the earth disappears . And so, the ecological catastrophe, which today threatens humanity, has a profound ethical root in the forgetfulness of the true nature of human work and above all of its subjective dimension, of its value for the family and social community. It is the Church's task to draw men's attention to this truth.

5. But we need to go deeper. The resources, although sacrosanct and primary, that we have spoken about, still touch man quite superficially. It is necessary to pay attention mainly to the resources that man brings within himself : in his human nature, in the dignity of the image and likeness of God (cf. Gen 1, 27), which man bears imprinted in the essence of his personality of him. The well-known words of the great Saint Augustine whose feast we celebrated yesterday still come to mind: “ Fecisti nos ad te ”: “Lord, you made us for yourself; and our heart is restless until he rests in you ”(St. Augustine, Confessiones , 1, 1).

Yes, brothers and sisters, we are made for the Lord, who has printed in us the immortal footprint of his power and his love. Man's great resources come from here, they are here, and only in God do they find their protection. Man is great due to his intelligence, through which he knows himself, others, the world and God; man is great because of his will, so he gives himself in love, to the point of reaching heights of heroism. Man's irrepressible yearning is based on these resources: that which tends towards truth - this is the life of intelligence - and that which tends towards freedom - this is the breath of will -. Here man acquires his great, incomparable stature, which no one can trample on, which no one can mock, which no one can take away from him: that of "being", which I have already mentioned.

This value, specific to man, whereby every man is truly man, rests on the foundation of culture : it is above all in culture that man's essential resources are manifested: as I said at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, " Man lives a truly human life thanks to culture. . . Culture is that through which man as man becomes more man, "is" more, has greater access to "being". . . Culture is always situated in an essential and necessary relationship to what man is, while its relationship to what he has, to his "having" is not only secondary, but totally relative. . . In the cultural sphere, man is always the first given: man is the primordial and fundamental given of culture. And man always is this: in the integral whole of his own spiritual and material subjectivity . If the distinction between spiritual culture and material culture is correct based on the character and content of the products in which the culture manifests itself, it must at the same time be noted that, on the one hand, the works of material culture always reveal a "spiritualization" of matter , a submission of the material element to the spiritual forces of man, that is, to his intelligence and his will and that, on the other hand, the works of spiritual culture manifest, in a specific way, a "materialization" of the spirit , an incarnation of the spiritual" ( Teachings of John Paul II , III,1 [1980] 1639 ff).

Here, culture thus becomes the foundation of man's ability to discover and enhance all the resources, those granted to his spiritual being and those granted to his material being. As long as he knows how to discover them! As long as he doesn't destroy them! Brothers and sisters, think of the enormous responsibility you have in your hands! Don't waste it, don't neglect it! You need all your strength to do this. But above all you need He who is the strength of God and man: "Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God" ( 1 Cor 1, 24).

6. Here we are therefore at the focal, unstoppable point of the question. Man's greatest "resource" is Christ, Son of God and Son of man. In him we discover the features of the new man, realized in all his fullness: of man for himself. In Christ, Crucified and Risen, the possibility and way of assuming his entire nature in profound unity is revealed to man. Here lies, I would say, the unifying principle of your Meeting, dedicated to man's resources; there is like a common thread between all the different moments of your work program: the Risen Christ, inexhaustible source of life for man. Christ, man's resource: this is how you wanted to announce the celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice.

Of man, he did not disdain to assume the nature, and not in an abstract way, since "he emptied himself, assuming the condition of a servant. . . he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, the death of the Cross” ( Phil 2, 7.8). The humanity of Christ, through the mystery of the Cross and Resurrection, became the place in which man, defeated but not annihilated by sin, rediscovered his humanity.

Strengthened by this unique and unrepeatable experience of its founder, the Church was able to define itself through the mouth of Paul VI as an "expert in humanity". It is in this title, founded on the authority of the Master and consolidated by two thousand years of life, that the Church presents itself today on the scene of history, eager to propose to man the central nucleus of its message: Christ the firstfruits and root of man new.

Moreover, right here in Rimini, you have had the living testimony of people who have given themselves fully to Christ, in the exercise of their profession, and whose example continues to radiate more and more: the engineer Alberto Marvelli, of whom he is the Cause of Beatification started, and Dr. Igino Righetti, collaborator of the future Paul VI of venerable memory, and with him founder and first president of the Catholic Graduates. Two lay people, two apostles, two men who knew how to draw from the " Christ resource ". They drew upon themselves - in interior work, in prayer, in sacramental life - and left a model and a call for others.

7. To speak of Christ as a resource for man is to testify that even today the essential terms of civilization are in fact, consciously and unconsciously, referred to the event of Christ, which has become a daily announcement confessed by the Church.

Today's man is strongly committed to reformulating his relationship with the world around him; with science and technology. He wants to discover ever new resources for his life and for coexistence between peoples; he tends to create a process that everyone would like to be peaceful and to exalt art as an expression of one's free creativity. Despite this, peace today is seriously threatened, science and technology risk generating an imbalance full of negative consequences in the relationship between man and man, between man and nature, between nations and nations. From this contradiction, which seems unstoppable because it is structurally connected to the mystery of evil, it is necessary that our gaze turns "to the architect of our salvation" to generate a civilization that is born from truth and love. The civilization of love! So as not to agonize, so as not to shut down in unbridled selfishness, in blind insensitivity to the pain of others. Brothers and sisters, build this civilization without ever tiring!

It is the delivery that I leave you today. Work for this, pray for this, suffer for this!

And with this wish, I bless you all, in the name of the Lord.

Copyright © Dicastery for Communication - Libreria Editrice Vaticana