To the People of Gabon (18 February 1982)

Author: Pope John Paul II

On Thursday, 18 February 1982, the Holy Father addressed the People of Gabon in Libreville, advising them that “ the time has come to come together to defend and promote fundamental ethical values, without which the stability and prosperity of a people are doomed in the more or less long term.”

Dear friends, sons and daughters of Gabon,

1. Please be very cordially thanked for your numerous and warm presence, and for the sentiments which you have just expressed to me through the voice of your delegates! You therefore represent the main sectors of national life, marked in your country – as in most African countries in a state of economic and cultural change – by certain successes and by persistent difficulties, by hopes and by risks. It is in this context that I would like to help you face your personal and collective responsibilities. I know that most of you are members of the Catholic Church, but I deeply respect all those who, without sharing the Christian faith, are committed to serving their compatriots without the slightest discrimination. My ardent desire is that this meeting of friendship and reflection leaves in all of us a luminous and stimulating memory for the tasks that fall to us. And mine, you will allow me to point out, is not the least heavy.

Without following an order of preference – because you are all equally entitled to my esteem and friendship – I will first address the world of executives and liberal professions. Your professions, different and complementary, place you at the service of your country.

Each of you currently has a key to the development of Gabon, and together, you bear responsibility for the quality of this development. The Church, you know it. well, don't ignore the evolution of societies. It suffers from seeing too many nations still underdeveloped or assisted for obvious purposes of ideological influence or economic profit. In a famous encyclical, which retains its full value today, the Church, through the voice of Paul VI, proclaims that “development cannot be reduced to simple economic growth. To be authentic, it must be integral, that is to say, promote every man and the whole man”. For you, in a booming Gabon, the problem is not only to ensure the continuity of this development process, but also and above all to ensure control. In speaking this way, I believe I agree with your concerns about the type of society that is being born in your growing cities and your depopulating countryside. Fearing or deploring one's shortcomings is not enough. The time has come to come together to defend and promote fundamental ethical values, without which the stability and prosperity of a people are doomed in the more or less long term. Ancient history and contemporary history provide blinding proof. And these fundamental and permanent values are called the sacred respect for life, the inviolable dignity of every person, freedom of thought, conscience and religion, the sharing of wealth in justice, the sense of effort and professional conscience, fraternity and solidarity between social groups and between nations. These values, present or dormant in the consciousness of individuals and peoples, always and everywhere need to be awakened, re-expressed, better lived. Moreover, the rising generations are beginning to feel the emptiness and even the absurdity of a civilization that allows itself to be locked up in the sad paradise of production and consumption. This alarm bell is providential. Men and women who occupy important positions in Government and Administration, in the economy and industry, in law and justice, in the world of health and education, you especially the Christians who have received at the start of your life the precious teachings of faith on the value of man created in the image of God and on the meaning of all individual and collective history which is construction of the world with God, give yourself all the hand to build the new Gabonese society, in a truly human and united way! I even hope that you organize from time to time conferences of friendship and reflection, around competent personalities and at least spiritualist if not Christian inspiration, to deepen your convictions and guide your action.

2. My remarks earlier were able to resonate among the Members of the State University present here and among their students. However, I would like to send them particular encouragement.

Your delegation reminds me of the very happy time when I was student chaplain and holder of the chair of morality at the Catholic University of Lublin, and in Krakow. So I experienced problems similar to yours. This is why, in total respect for your convictions, I allow myself to share some of mine. A country cannot develop without a university. I wish good luck to yours, which certainly bears promise. But any university, worthy of its name, must attach itself to what is always and everywhere the essential part of its mission, which is to teach and not to indoctrinate, to manifest the truth and not to silence it, to promote the free confrontation of ideas and not giving in to the constraint of ideologies. This is how universities gain respect in the States and people who maintain them. Can I still deliver a deep conviction? The aim of university studies cannot be reduced to the acquisition of knowledge, to obtaining diplomas, to the conquest of lucrative positions. They must – under penalty of failure – lead the student to total maturity of the mind, of conscience: that is to say, make him a loyal and passionate seeker of the truth about man, about the real problems of man, on the “why” and the “how” of his existence.

It is this growth in truth, this maturation of the most interior regions of the person, which most surely allows us to assume the responsible commitments that the service of the common good demands today. I deeply believe that it is this type of man that societies need most – in Africa as elsewhere – and it is the honor and responsibility of the university to help prepare them for them. It is also such men who will contribute a stone, if not several, to the culture of your country; culture that you want to be authentically African, open, coherent, integral, and therefore “that by which man as man becomes more man, “is” more, accesses more “being””. This is a theme that I had the opportunity to present at UNESCO during my visit to France on June 2, 1980 . Dear Masters and students, all my best wishes accompany you in your respective tasks!

You will also allow me to greet and encourage in a special capacity the leaders, teachers and students of Catholic education. For more than one hundred and thirty years, the educational work accomplished on Gabonese soil by numerous religious congregations is considerable. Here, you are all in perfect agreement on this historical fact, so much so that I see you ready to applaud all these deserving educators of the past and today...
Following my predecessors, and Paul VI in particular, I have often recalled clearly and serenely that the problem of education has always been linked to the mission of the Church. It gave rise to universities in the four corners of Europe, from the Middle Ages and well after. It developed small schools and colleges, as a service linked to its mission, especially from the sixteenth century onwards. Even today, it is committed to ensuring the same contribution wherever its activities are requested and respected. It is so true that we cannot dispute the fundamental right belonging to every family to educate their children in schools that correspond to their conception of life and the world. Here and there, it happens that the coexistence of denominational teaching and state teaching is periodically called into question. Let us all hope that the wisdom of those responsible, concerned with a true democracy, will continue to triumph over the mirages of a leveling which could well be an impoverishment. Let us all hope for the advent of understanding, dialogue and collaboration between two institutions which, without losing their particular identity, can very well be complementary. Here again, we should not project onto contemporary youth crises and quarrels which go against its astonishing capacities for fraternity and novelty. I fervently hope that your schools and colleges will be places of solid human and Christian formation.

3. To all of you, who work in factories and on construction sites, in mining and forestry or in the countryside, I extend my most cordial greeting. Many of those who are here come from Port-Gentil, Moanda, Bakumba, Mounana and all the provinces of Gabon. Many others, who were unable to come, hear and see us thanks to audio-visual means of communication. To them too, my very friendly greeting.

When I meet manual workers, I cannot help but confide to them with emotion that a very great grace of my life has been to work in a quarry and in a factory for almost four years. Forty years ago, I remember it like yesterday. This experience of working life, of all its positive aspects and its miseries, as well as, on another level, the horrors of the deportation of my Polish compatriots to the death camps, had a profound impact on my existence. Since that time, the mystery of man has invaded the field of my reflections and I have felt irresistibly impelled to plead for respect for all men, supported in this action by the Mystery of Christ, He who is at the same time our God and our brother to save us. This is why, at the beginning of my service in the Roman see of the Apostle Peter, in the encyclical “ Redemptor Hominis ”, I was very keen to present to Christians and all men of good will the face integral part of man so often disfigured by reductive humanisms. In the name of the Church faithful to its Founder, I proclaimed the truth about man by restoring to him a constitutive dimension of his own being: his search for the infinite, his capacity for the absolute, his mysterious magnetization towards the Christ the Redeemer, who reveals man to himself. The Man-God is, so to speak, the mirror where every man can find the features of his dignity, the value of his activities, the deep meaning of his life. This is why, in a more recent document and following the great Popes who dealt with the question of work in our modern industrialized societies, I tried to bring to the world of work - while so many workers are unfortunately so often sacrificed, in their dignity and their rights, to the imperatives of economic growth – the light and support of Christ and his Church. I want to talk about the encyclical “ Laborem Exercens ”.

Without losing sight of the injustices that workers suffer, I wanted to remind them that there was “Good News”, a “Gospel of Work”, namely that the vocation of man is to dominate the earth, and to realize himself as a man in this way. We will never stop admiring across the centuries and continents the works, modest or grandiose, of men, inventive, courageous, passionate about their work, eager to share the fruit of their work.

There is yet another absolutely astonishing aspect of this “Gospel of Work” that together we must look at. It is its mysterious value of participation in the redemptive work of Christ, through the silent offering of the fatigue inherent in work. The believing worker who joins Christ the Redeemer in spirit reaches with Him, through Him and in Him the level of suffering offered out of love for God and other men, suffering which generates life.

Without this human and Christian vision of work, it is impossible to understand why hard work is a virtue. It is, however, which allows man to become more of a man, makes him capable of founding and maintaining a family, and allows him to increase the heritage of his own country and of all men living in the world.

That said, it remains that the advent of industrial civilization with all its consequences has led workers to join hands to curb the factors of dehumanization conveyed by the new socio-economic structures that are too, and even sometimes only, focused on profit. If the Church is not afraid to encourage workers to fulfill their duties, she is not afraid to help them obtain the satisfaction of their legitimate rights: respect for every worker, whether indigenous or migrant worker, the right to employment, to safety and hygiene, to human rates of output, to sufficient rest time, to fair wages, to social protection, to respect for political and religious opinions, to freedom of trade union associations, etc. The Church must be with the poor and the oppressed. Certainly, she understands that less essential requests cannot be satisfied immediately and fully. We must take into account real, current possibilities, and solidarity with the entire nation, the pace and maturity of each developing country.

And in all cases, the Church remains convinced that methods of violence cannot provide an effective solution to the social question. This is why, without wanting to ignore the tensions or even the conflicts in the world of work, the Church recommends and will always recommend the ways of meeting partners, of dialogue, of the loyal and persevering search for agreements that are often partial but bearers of new hopes. These are the reasonable ways, and even more so the evangelical ways, which can profoundly modify relationships between man and man. I fervently hope that, in your young nation, workers and labor leaders will always progress along the paths of mutual understanding and consultation so that the promotion of man truly accompanies the development of the country.

4. Finally, I address you, dear young people! You were patient! I even noticed that you were interested in everything I said to the other groups; Congratulations!

I have always really liked young people. When I was your age, but still throughout my priestly and episcopal ministry, and now that the Lord has asked me to serve at the head of the Church. I love young people, because they are like the spring that dawns on the world and on each country in particular, with its light and its rich promises. The young people I met gave me the certainty that our world had a future thanks to them. I felt this in Italy, in Mexico, in Poland, in Ireland, in the United States, in France, in Brazil, in Germany, in the Philippines, in Japan, and in you in Africa during my first visit. Why did I perceive this? Because so many young people appeared to me to be healthy and generous and happily concerned – as you are – about the limits of a civilization of permissiveness, waste, and inequalities. If young people succumb to it for a while, following their natural tendency to want to experience everything, to follow the dominant trend, many come back. Almost everywhere, small communities of young people are currently flourishing who reflect and pray to have the courage to go against the tide of ways of thinking and living that are certainly destructive of the human person and of society.

Young Gabonese people, who belong to the school world or already work in a profession, who have – at least some of you – joined apostolate movements such as the JEC, the JOC, scouting, GEN, Cœurs Vaillants and Ames Valiant, I trust you to the point of daring to call you, each and every one, to follow Christ again. It is possible that your baptized life will be fervent, and I rejoice in that. It is also possible that it is mediocre or even completely neglected. The past is the past. Jesus always called people to follow him by making a clean slate of their past, giving them back his confidence and thereby all their chances. Christian history is fortunately full of such examples. We know what Jesus made of Peter, the renegade, of Paul, the persecutor of the first Christians, of Augustine, prisoner of a philosophical system and even more of his passions; of Francis of Assisi, already embraced by the business world and marrying Lady Poverty... And, in our time, the number of young people who return to Christ, after a moment or years of indifference, if not cowardice, is impressive. Prayer groups, youth “marches” or pilgrimages are often the place for such decisions.

Will you take the step, freely, generously? Do not be afraid! Christ is not a “captor”, but a Savior! He came so that you might have life.

It is he who holds the real answers to the real questions about the meaning and use of life. Your life is so precious! Your country needs healthy, conscious and courageous youth! You parish communities and your youth movements need your joyful and dynamic presence. The centers of preparation for the ministerial priesthood and religious life need subjects determined to “leave everything to follow Christ”. Truly, I hope a lot from the young people of Gabon, and it is to Christ himself and to his most holy Mother that I recommend you.

To the People of Gabon (18 February 1982)

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