On World Day of Peace: Vatican Pope Calls for Enhancing Amity, Peace, Solidarity

 VATICAN, (ST) _ Vatican Pope Francis called for enhancing world peace and reconciliation, halting wars and pains, expressing “concerns not only over the foundation of peace but its concrete realization in inter-personal relations

In his message for the 48th World Day of Peace yesterday, the Pope intended as “an invitation to transform social relations from a relation of dependence-slavery, and of denial of the other’s humanity, to a relation of fraternity lived between brothers and sisters.”

Stressing the implication of “less humanity” and of “rupture of fraternity and rejection of communion,” with which the Pope describes slavery, the message added that the family “in as much as it is the first school of life and primary place of fraternity,” cannot become a “place in which life is betrayed, scorned, negated, manipulated and sold as if one could dispose of this gift according to one’s own interests.”

He stressed commitment against slavery since her origins, “however, this very sad phenomenon has never been eradicated definitively.”

Notwithstanding the numerous agreements signed by the International Community, there are still millions of people who “in different ways are deprived of their freedom and constrained to live in conditions resembling slavery,” stressed the message.

The phenomenon has a thousand facets and declinations that, in extreme synthesis, can be categorized as:

Exploitation of men and women workers, also minors, whose rights are not in keeping with the norms and minimum international standards.

Inhuman conditions in which many migrants are constrained during their tragic trips, undertaken in the hope of a better future, in which often they suffer hunger, are deprived of liberty, are stripped of their goods, and abused physically and sexually.

Exploitation of prostitution, to the point of the phenomenon of little girls given forcedly as wives.

Involvement of minors and adults in practices such as begging, organ transplants, enrolment in various armies, sale of drugs, as well as various masked forms of international adoption.

Kidnapping by terrorist groups in view of ransom, in the case of women, of reducing them to sexual slaves.

Notwithstanding the efforts of the Holy See, of many Governments and a good part of the International Community, “all have the moral imperative to commit themselves profoundly, so that our generation is finally the last one to have to fight the shameful commerce in human lives, the message read.

T. Fateh