By John-Henry Westen
SAO PAULO, May 15, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Speaking Sunday to a gathering of Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, Pope Benedict XVI said “The family, the ‘patrimony of humanity’, constitutes one of the most important treasures of Latin American countries.”
The Pope said that the family “is currently suffering a degree of adversity caused by secularism and by ethical relativism, by movements of population internally and externally, by poverty, by social instability and by civil legislation opposed to marriage which, by supporting contraception and abortion, is threatening the future of peoples.”
Presiding at the inaugural session of the Fifth General Conference of the Episcopate of Latin America and the Caribbean which lasts until May 31, the Pope said that the “Christian life is not expressed solely in personal virtues, but also in social and political virtues.” He added also that the Christian faith must be spread, not only by “homilies, lectures, Bible courses or theology courses, but we must have recourse also to the communications media: press, radio and television, websites, forums and many other methods.”
Concluding the meeting with prayer, the Holy Father prayed for openness to life. He prayed imploring Christ to “remain in our homes, so that they may continue to be nests where human life is generously born, where life is welcomed, loved and respected from conception to natural death.”
See the full Papal address here:
https://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2007/may/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20070513_conference-aparecida_en.html