The Evangelical Pope | Never Again!

Each week we let Saint Pope John Paul II share meaningful signposts to spark socio-economic resolves through justice and righteousness combined with mercy and compassion; in short, love.

               ¹⁰ For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

               __ Ephesians 2: 10 (New International Version)

New York – 5 October 1995 | To ensure that the new millennium is approaching, it will witness a new flourishing of the human spirit, mediated through an authentic culture of freedom. Men and women must learn to conquer fear. We must learn not to be afraid. We must rediscover a spirit of hope and a spirit of trust.

Hope is not empty optimism from a naive confidence that the future will necessarily be better than the past. Hope and trust are the premise of responsible activity and are nurtured in that inner sanctuary of conscience where "man is alone with God" (Gaudium et Spes, 16), and he thus perceives that he is not alone amid the enigmas of existence, for the love of the Creator surrounds him!

Hope and trust! Are these matters beyond the purview of the United Nations? They are not. The politics of nations, with which your Organization is principally concerned, can never ignore the transcendent, spiritual dimension of the human experience and could never forget it without harming the cause of man and the cause of human freedom. Whatever diminishes man — whatever shortens the horizon of man's aspiration to goodness — harms the cause of freedom. To recover our hope and trust at the end of this century of sorrows, we must regain sight of that transcendent horizon of possibility to which the soul of man aspires.

Because of the radiant humanity of Christ, nothing genuinely human fails to touch the hearts of humanity. Faith in Christ does not impel us to intolerance. On the contrary, it obliges us to engage others in a respectful dialogue. Love of Christ does not distract us from interest in others. Instead, he invites us to take responsibility for them, to the exclusion of no one, and indeed, if anything, with a particular concern for the weakest and the suffering.

Ladies and Gentlemen! I come before you as a witness: a witness to human dignity, a witness to hope, a witness to the conviction that the destiny of all nations lies in the hands of a merciful Providence.

We must overcome our fear of the future. But we will not be able to overcome it completely unless we do so together. The "answer" to that fear is neither coercion nor repression nor the imposition of one social "model" on the entire world. The answer to the fear that darkened human existence at the end of the twentieth century was the joint effort to build a civilization of love founded on the universal values of peace, solidarity, justice, and liberty. The "soul" of the society of love is the culture of freedom: the freedom of individuals and nations lived in self-giving solidarity and responsibility.

We must not be afraid of the future. We must not be fearful of man. It is no accident that we are here. Every human has been created in the "image and likeness" of the One who is the origin of all that is. We have within us the capacities for wisdom and virtue. With these gifts, and with the help of God's grace, we can build a civilization worthy of the human person, an authentic culture of freedom in the next century and the next millennium. We can and must do so! And in doing so, we shall see that the tears of this century have prepared the ground for a new springtime of the human spirit.

Excerpted from:

APOSTOLIC JOURNEY OF HIS HOLINESS JOHN PAUL II TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

THE FIFTIETH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE UNITED NATIONS ORGANIZATION ADDRESS OF HIS HOLINESS JOHN PAUL II*

United Nations Headquarters (New York) Thursday, 5 October 1995

https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/speeches/1995/october/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_05101995_address-to-uno.html