To the Ambassador of Jamaica to the Holy See, John Paul II, 21 March 1980

ADDRESS OF JOHN PAUL II
TO KEITH JOHNSON
AMBASSADOR OF JAMAICA TO THE HOLY SEE*

Friday, 21 March 1980

Mr Ambassador,

It is with much pleasure that I welcome Your Excellency as the first Ambassador of Jamaica to the Holy See and greet through you your country’s people and government. A new relationship is beginning between the Holy See and Jamaica, one that will make it possible to have closer cooperation both on the local and the international level.

Your Excellency has mentioned the understanding and collaboration that happily already exist between the Catholic Church and your country. With God’s help, your mission will further deepen that understanding and strengthen that collaboration, with fruitful results for the good of the people of Jamaica and of the world.

Your mission, indeed, is intended not only for the benefit of your own country, but also for that of the one human family to which all peoples belong. I look forward to cooperation for the promotion of human rights and freedoms, for the safeguarding of peace, for the advancement of everyone’s possibility to live a life in keeping with human dignity - in short, for the service of man in his wholeness, in the manifold riches of his spiritual and material existence.

I have deep respect for the Christian traditions of the people of Jamaica. Those traditions are a promise of even closer cooperation, in recognition of the preeminence of the spiritual over the material.

They will also ensure, through awareness of the values of the spirit, that developments in the fields of material prosperity, technology and skills are at the service of what really constitutes the human being.

May God make the new relationship between Jamaica and the Holy See prosper. I pray that he may assist Your Excellency in the fulfilment of your high mission and I invoke his blessings on you and on the government and all the people of Jamaica.

*AAS 72 (1980), p. 296-297.

Insegnamenti di Giovanni Paolo II, vol. III, 1 pp. 667-668.

L’Attività della Santa Sede 1980 pp. 179-180.

L'Osservatore Romano 22.3.1980 p.2.

L'Osservatore Romano. Weekly Edition in English n.16 p.16.