The vow of celibacy is a matter of keeping one’s word to Christ and the Church. a duty and a proof of the priest’s inner maturity; it is the expression of his personal dignity.
How can such episodes of such savage cruelty happen? The heart of man is an abyss out of which sometimes emerge plots of unspeakable ferocity capable of overturning in an instant the tranquil and productive life of a people.
The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.
The United Nations organization has proclaimed 1979 as the Year of the Child. Are the children to receive the arms race from us as a necessary inheritance?
In Christ and through Christ man has acquired full awareness of his dignity, of the heights to which he is raised, of the surpassing worth of his own humanity, and of the meaning of his existence.
Man’s life comes from God: it is his image and imprint, as sharing in his breath of life. God therefore is the sole Lord of this life: Man cannot do with it as he wills.
For by his incarnation the Son of God united himself in a certain way with every man. He labored with human hands… and loved with a human heart. Born of Mary the Virgin, he truly became one of us.
Once again, through myself, the Church, in the words of the well-known declaration Nostra Aetate, ‘deplores the hatred, persecutions and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time and by anyone.’ I repeat, ‘By anyone.’
