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Pope Highlights "Educational Emergency" of Passing on Values and Correct Behavior to Youth

By John-Henry Westen

VATICAN CITY, January 2, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In the days leading up to January 1, and on New Year's Day, Pope Benedict XVI stressed the family and morality. Speaking on New Year's Eve, he warned that many people, "especially the young, are attracted by the false exaltation or, more accurately, the profanation of the body and the trivialisation of sexuality".

The Pope spoke of "the difficulty we find in transmitting to new generations the basic values of existence and of correct behaviour" as an "educational emergency."  He said that the emergency must be confronted "Without clamour and with patient trust", and "especially within the family".

The Holy Father also noted "the many challenges ... associated with consumerism and secularism", pointing out how, "even in Rome we notice that deficit of hope and trust in life which constitutes the 'dark' evil of modern Western society". Nonetheless, he noted, "there is no shortage of lights and of reasons for hope" for which we must "implore special divine blessing".

During a morning Mass on January 1, Benedict emphasized a theme in his message for World Day of Peace saying "the close relationship that exists between the family and the construction of peace in the world. The natural family, founded on marriage between a man and a woman, is a 'cradle of life and love' and 'the first and indispensable teacher of peace". For this reason, he went on, the family is "the 'primary agency of peace' and 'the denial or even the restriction of the rights of the family, by obscuring the truth about man, threatens the very foundations of peace'."

Returning to the family stresses in his World Day of Peace message at the noon Angelus he said: "whoever, even unknowingly, circumvents the institution of the family undermines peace in the entire community, national and international, since he weakens what is in effect the primary agency of peace".

Two days before he addressed participants in a Meeting of Families held in Madrid, Spain, telling the gathered pro-family activists: "It is worth working for the family and for marriage because it is worth working for humankind, the most precious beings created by God".

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