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 Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People

People on the Move

N° 96, December 2004

ADDRESS TO THE HOLY FATHER

 

Card. Stephen Fumio HAMAO

President of the Pontifical Council

for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People

 

Most Holy Father,

This is indeed the most beautiful moment of the XVI Plenary Meeting of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People: to be gathered together around Your Holiness in the See of Peter and be able to give witness of our filial love and devotion. It is our ardent desire to live and work especially in communion with you, who are the source of our pastoral solicitude towards migrants and itinerant people.

The Members and Consultors together with us, Superiors and Officials of the Pontifical Council, have come together to dialogue on a theme dear to Your Holiness: “Ecumenical, inter-religious and intercultural dialogue” specifically as is experienced “in the world of migrants and itinerant people”.

As Your Holiness said, ecumenical dialogue is an irrevocable commitment of the Catholic Church, a duty to be done so that “the world may believe”[1]. Interreligious dialogue, too, is “important in establishing a sure basis for peace and warding off the dread spectre of those wars of religion which have often bloodied human history” (NMI 55), while dialogue between cultures is “an intrinsic demand of human nature itself, as well as of culture”[2]. Indeed, we believe that dialogue “protects the distinctiveness of cultures as historical and creative expressions of the underlying unity of the human family”[3].

What better opportunity for dialogue is there than the world of human mobility which brings together, by choice or by force, peoples of all races, creeds, nationalities and cultures? Our new Instruction, that you approved and made public, “Erga migrantes caritas Christi”, in fact states that our “specific pastoral work operates in the context of a phenomenon which, by bringing together persons of different nationalities, ethnic origins and religions into contact, contributes to making the true face of the Church visible” and that also through human mobility God’s saving plan will be realized[4].

Today, when the whole world is yearning for peace, your earnest words, on the occasion of the World Day of Peace in 1983, ring out in our ears: “Dialogue - true dialogue - is an essential condition for such peace. …Dialogue is necessary, not only opportune. It is difficult, but it is possible… It therefore represents a true challenge, which I invite you to take up.” 

In response to your invitation, Most Holy Father, we are taking up that challenge, particularly where there are migrants, refugees, foreign students, gypsies, nomads and circus people, seafarers and their families, civil aviation workers and travelers, pilgrims, tourists or tourism industry workers.

Your Holiness, we await your words that will guide and encourage us in our search for concrete ways to dialogue so as to contribute in making relationships between people guided only by the ideal of a truly universal brotherhood. 

Finally, how can we forget that we are gathered here today on a very special day: the birthday of our Pope who continues to be a “person on the move”, in spite of everything, who gave us an extraordinary magisterial treasure from which we drew our “Erga migrantes caritas Christi”? Allow me then to say, in the name of all of us here present and all those entrusted to our care, “Ad multos annos”, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Most Holy Father. 


[1]Pope John Paul II to the Participants at the Third Phase of The International Dialogue between the "World Alliance of Reformed Churches" and the Catholic Church (18 September 2000).
[2]World Day of Peace, Message 2001.
[3] ibid.
[4]cf . Erga migrantes caritas Christi, 38.
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