NEWS STORY: Pope: The”river of human pain”is widening despite scientific advances

c. 1999 Religion News Service VATICAN CITY _ Pope John Paul II said Friday (Aug. 6) that despite impressive scientific advances, the”river of human pain”has widened in the 20th century because of war, drug addiction, AIDS, inequality and hedonism. In a strongly worded message for the World Day of the Sick, which will be observed […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ Pope John Paul II said Friday (Aug. 6) that despite impressive scientific advances, the”river of human pain”has widened in the 20th century because of war, drug addiction, AIDS, inequality and hedonism.

In a strongly worded message for the World Day of the Sick, which will be observed on Feb. 11, 2000, the pope contrasted the lack of life-saving medicines for millions who live in the Third World with the selfish behavior of those in rich nations who indulge in a”cult of the body”and consider life a commodity that can be subjected to abortion or euthanasia.


Although the Roman Catholic pontiff has often stated his views on the sanctity of human life and condemned the inequality between North and South, he wrote with unusual dramatic force, linking his message to the new millennium.

The Vatican will mark the eighth World Day of the Sick as part of Holy Year celebrations. The date coincides with the church’s memorial of Our Lady of Lourdes, the apparition of the Virgin Mary that appeared in the French countryside in 1858 and produced a natural spring credited with miraculous cures.

John Paul said that as the second millennium of Christianity draws to a close, the church can”look with admiration at the road traveled by humanity in the cure of the suffering and the promotion of health.””Nevertheless,”he said,”at the sunset of the second millennium it cannot be said that humanity has done what is necessary to alleviate the immense weight of suffering that lies heavily on individuals, families and the whole of society.”Indeed it seems that, especially in this last century, the river of human pain has widened.”The pope said much of the suffering has been”inflicted by the bad choices of individuals and states.””I think of the wars that have bloodied this century, perhaps more than any other of the too-tormented story of humanity,”John Paul said.”I think of the forms of illness widely diffused in society like drug addiction, AIDS, illness due to the degradation of great cities and the environment. I think of the aggravation of small and large criminality and of euthanasia.”I have before my eyes not only the hospital beds where so many patients lie ill but also the sufferings of refugees, of orphan children, of so many victims of social evils and of poverty,”he said.

The pope attacked the”unjust inequality”that denies adequate medical care to”vast areas of the planet, above all in the countries of the south of the world.””Entire populations do not have the possibility of making use even of medicines of immediate and urgent necessity while elsewhere they abandon themselves to the abuse and waste of just as costly pharmaceuticals,”he said.”And what to say of the immense number of our brothers and sisters who, lacking what they need to feed themselves, are victims of every sort of illness; not to speak of so many wars that bloody humanity, sowing not only death but also physical and psychological trauma of every kind.” Reiterating the church’s opposition to genetic manipulation, John Paul said that in some cases”economic, scientific and technical progress is not accompanied by an authentic progress centered on the person and on the inviolable dignity of every human being.””The very conquests in the field of genetics, fundamental for the care of health and, above all, for the protection of newborn life, becomes the occasion for inadmissible selections, unfeeling manipulation, antipathetic to authentic development, with often shocking results,”he said.”On one side,”the pope said,”enormous forces are registered to prolong life and also to procreate it in an artificial way; but on the other side, the birth of a child already conceived is not permitted and the death of those who are not held to be useful anymore is accelerated.” John Paul said it was right to value health and try to promote it but not to the point of”a sort of cult of the body and the hedonistic search for physical effectiveness, contemporaneously considering life a simple commodity of consumption, causing new marginalization for the disabled, old and terminally ill.”All these contradictions and paradoxical situations,”he said,”can be reduced to a lack of harmonization between the logic of well-being and the search for technological progress on one side and on the other of the ethical values founded on the dignity of every human being.” John Paul’s meditation on sickness and health could well have been taken from personal experience. A vigorous 58 when he became pope in 1978, he is now 79, suffers from a neurological disorder believed to be Parkinson’s disease and often walks haltingly with the aid of a cane.

DEA END POLK

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