To the President and Authorities (15 November 1980)
ShareOn 15 November 1980, the Holy Father addressed the President and authorities in Bonn, Germany, speaking of the “co-responsible and trusting collaboration between State, society and the Church” in their history.
President of the Federal Republic,
Mr President of the Chamber,
Mr Federal Chancellor,
Venerable brothers of the episcopate,
Ladies and gentlemen!
1. It is a particular joy for me to be able to meet you, the highest and most authoritative representatives of the political, cultural, economic and religious life of this nation, during my visit to the Federal Republic of Germany. At the same time, I greet all those in this country who have responsibility for the well-being and destiny of the entire people.
I sincerely thank the President of the Federal Republic for the cordial welcome and all of you who honor me with your presence. Your great kindness is certainly directed less towards my capacity as the externally inconspicuous ruler of the Vatican State than towards the religious mission entrusted to me as supreme pastor of the Catholic Church. This alone induces me to leave the eternal city again for a few days, in the spirit of my great predecessors in the seat of Peter and responding to the new pastoral needs of our times, to make a pastoral visit to the brothers and sisters of my religion in the different local churches and on different continents.
2. My meetings with the highest national and civil authorities during my apostolic journeys are meant not only to be gestures of courtesy and esteem, but are at the same time an expression of the solidarity and co-responsibility to which the Church recognizes herself committed by virtue of her mission - taking into account existing circumstances - together with the state for the common good of citizens. Although the objective set by Christ for the Church belongs to another order, namely the religious one, as underlined by the Second Vatican Council "there arise precisely from this religious mission tasks, light and forces which can contribute to building and consolidating the community of men according to divine law ( Gaudium et Spes , 42).
The history of your people and of the entire Christian West is full of illuminating examples and precious fruits of such co-responsible and trusting collaboration between State, society and the Church. Eloquent testimony of the way in which the strength of faith and the structure of the world are united are not only the splendid cathedrals, the venerable cloisters and the universities with their vast libraries and the many other cultural and social institutions, but also the technical and modern culture themselves, which cannot be understood without the decisive historical, spiritual and moral contribution of Christianity from its origins. Even modern non-religious and anti-religious ideologies still bear witness to the existence and high value of what they strive to deny and destroy by all means.
3. Due to its significant spiritual-religious, cultural and scientific contribution, the German people deserve special recognition in the history of the Church and in the spiritual history of Europe.
In its past there are certainly lights and shadows, as in the life of every nation, examples of extreme human and Christian greatness, but also insurmountable conflicts, trials, deeply tragic events. There are periods in which the life of this nation has corresponded to true human and Christian virtue, but there have also been periods which have found themselves in contradiction with it in civil and international coexistence. But your country has always known how to recover from ruins and mortifications - such as those of the last world war - and reinvigorate itself again. political stability, technical-scientific progress and the proverbial diligence and diligence of citizens have helped the German federal republic to achieve well-being and social peace within its borders in recent decades and to acquire prestige and influence in the international community of peoples. However, the painful division still remains for your people which, I hope, should also find its own peaceful and dutiful solution for a united Europe.
Allow me, ladies and gentlemen, at this time of efforts for peace with which your country is also trying to make a decisive contribution to understanding between peoples on a world level, to highlight with particular joy the ever greater willingness to understand each other your citizens and the Polish people. In this regard no small merit must also be recognized to Christians of the Evangelical faith, as well as to the Bishops and Catholics of the two countries. In all the relationships suffered between peoples, this principle applies: not the accusation of serious wrongs and sufferings mutually caused and suffered, but only the desire for reconciliation and the common search for new ways for a peaceful coexistence can level and ensure for peoples a way to a better future.
It is likewise a particular honor for your leaders in politics, in the Church and in society that they are increasingly aware of the heavy responsibility that affluent countries have towards third world countries, and that they seek to respond to them through programs and initiatives of the State and the Church as well as through concrete aid interventions by the citizens. In this area, too, many commendable things have already happened. However, as I was able to see personally through my recent apostolic journeys to some of these countries, and as the competent North-South commission pointed out with great insistence in its concluding report, far greater efforts still need to be made and take even more decisive measures domestically and internationally to combat, in an even more effective and promising way, hunger and structural poverty in the less privileged countries and continents. If development is a new name for peace, as Pope Paul VI underlined in his encyclical "Populorum Progressio ”, an even stronger and more disinterested common commitment that takes into account the needs of the peoples of the third world is the most urgent imperative of this hour, to ensure lasting world peace. Strong self-restraint of rich nations should not be an unacceptable sacrifice.
4. The many good and positive things that are also happening in today's world despite many prophets of doom, thanks to the new technical successes, with an even greater range of effectiveness, to make the living conditions of the entire human family and those of every single man, are for us a reason for joy and gratitude to God, who is also the Lord of our time.
The Church, by virtue of her mission of salvation, stimulates and supports as much as possible everything that can contribute to raising and developing man in his entirety, as clearly demonstrated precisely by the trusting and full participation collaboration between State and Church in different sectors and at different levels in your country.
However, this recognition of the good and praiseworthy things in modern society must also make us see the shortcomings and dangers to which today's man is increasingly exposed. The brighter the light, the more evidently the shadows and the threatening darkness of wrong developments manifest themselves. "A critical analysis of our civilization today", as I said last year in my speech to the United Nations, "shows that it has contributed as never before, especially in the last century, to the development of material goods, but has produced also in theory and even more in practice a series of behaviors in which the sensitivity for the spiritual dimension of human existence is diminished to a greater or lesser extent.
Any presumed progress is true progress only when it serves man in his totality. This wholeness of man necessarily includes not only material values but also spiritual and moral values. Consequently "we cannot measure human progress only on the basis of the progress of science and technology..., but at the same time and even more on the basis of the primacy of spiritual values and on the basis of the progress of the moral life" ("L 'Osservatore Romano”, editio germanica hebdomadaria, die 5 oct 1979, p. 6). Therefore it is a very deplorable and grave error of consequences that in modern society a justified pluralism is often mistaken for a neutrality of values,
5. This development, the negative effects of which are also observable in life within the Church, is the object of growing attention and concern for the Church herself. Since she was founded by Jesus Christ, who solemnly declared before Pilate and in the imminence of his death that he was born for this and that he had come into the world to bear witness to the truth (cf. Jn 18:37), the Church in virtue of his mission, with the happy news of redemption and his salvation as its essential presupposition, he has always recognised, stimulated and vigorously defended precisely the spiritual-moral dimension of the human person. You do it not only to keep faith with the revealed teaching entrusted to you, but also out of a profound awareness of responsibility for men, to whose service and for whose spiritual good she knows she is sent. The Church professes man's likeness to the image of God and consequently his inescapable dignity. Finally, his inalienable fundamental rights and the fundamental values for a social coexistence worthy of man merge into it. The discussion on fundamental values which has taken place so lively in your country over the last few years underlines the particular timeliness and necessity of this new reminder of the solid foundations of our civilization and of our modern society.
By virtue of the prophetic task handed down to her, the Church can never fail to indicate as a moral fault or as a sin, in the name of truth, everything that clearly contravenes human dignity and God's commandment. In particular, she cannot remain silent when legal goods as lofty as human life, in any form and at any stage, risk being subjected to arbitration.
The Church is sent to bear witness to the truth, and with this she makes a precious contribution to an organization of social and public life worthy of man. Suitably or inappropriately it recalls the lofty dignity and vocation of man as a creature of God. This dignity recognizable to all shines with all its clarity and greatness in Jesus Christ, in the message of his life and in his teaching. In him alone - this is the conviction of the Christian faith - man experiences the whole truth about himself. "Man cannot ultimately understand himself without Christ", as I had occasion to underline in my sermon in Warsaw's Victory Square. "He cannot understand who he is or what his true dignity consists of, nor what is his vocation and his final fate" (cf. "L'Osservatore Romano", editio germanica hebdomadaria, die 8 jun. 1979, p. 5). If Christians take the truth about man revealed by Christ as the basis of their witness of life and their social action, this will be a service for everyone: the dignity of man recognizable by all and which must be recognized by all stands out so much more clearly and completely.
6. I would not like to conclude these brief considerations of mine, ladies and gentlemen, without appealing to you, particularly to those of you who share the same convictions of faith as me, to make yourselves aware again of the Christian foundations of the history of your people and of the constitution of your state today, which bears the Christian imprint. A profound moral renewal of society can only take place effectively from within, from the roots. After the great ideologies and messianisms of the last century, apparently so promising, have failed so miserably and humanity has reached the edge of the abyss, the Church encourages all the more energetically today the peoples and all those who have responsibility for them to remember the man again, of his true dignity and his essential fundamental rights - in a word: of man in Christ, to build starting from him and together with him the present for a better future, in a perspective full of hope. Only from here can opportunities arise not only for individual nations but also for Europe and for all of humanity, so that the dangers that appear ever more menacingly on the horizon of history are overcome in full human dignity, and for a truly fulfilled life of all peoples and all men in truth, justice and peace.
I therefore invoke for you, ladies and gentlemen, and for all your people, light and strength from God, the beginning and end of all history, and I ask that his protection and blessing remain upon you.
* L'Osservatore Romano 19.11.1980 pp. IX, X.
© Copyright 1980 - Vatican Publishing House
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