JOURNEY TO INDIA

ADDRESS OF POPE PAUL VI
TO THE MEMBERS
OF THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA

Thursday, 3 December 1964

Mister President,

We come to repay Your Excellency’s exquisite kindness in welcoming Us personally upon Our arrival in India. We repeat Our profound thankfulness for this thoughtful and generous gesture, as well as for all the gracious favours which Your Excellency, and the Government of India, have so considerately granted, both on the occasion of the International Eucharistic Congress, and of Our pilgrimage to this great religious and spiritual assembly.

With respect and homage, We express Our admiration of the Indian Nation. We salute it in the person of Your Excellency, Head of State and President of India. We salute it in the persons of the Right Honourable Prime Minister, and the Honourable Members of the Government of India. Under such wise guidance, India is advancing towards greater prosperity, and ever more cordial relations with the other nations of the world. We pray that true peace, founded on justice and love and so ardently desired and promoted by the Indian people, may reign between individuals, between families and communities, and between the peoples of the earth.

Permit Us, finally, to express the wish that the moral and civic virtues, which the world has admired in the great modern Indians such as Gandhi and Nehru, may be those which ensure the prosperity, the concord and the honour of the Indian people, which will always nobly characterize its human countenance, and which will make it exemplary and celebrated throughout the whole world.

We ask God to recompense the countless kindnesses shown to Us with His choicest favours and most abundant graces.