Pope Benedict XVI on Social Justice Issues

Today, April 19, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was chosen as pope. This email includes two quotes about social justice by Cardinal Ratzinger and a prayer for the new Pope Benedict XVI.

Quotes and Prayer for Pope Benedict XV

Cardinal Ratzinger on Human Rights:

“All human beings are one because they come from a single father, Adam, and a single mother, Eve, ‘the mother of all the living’ (Gn 3:20). This oneness of the human race implies equality and the same basic rights for all. . . The Universal Declaration of Human Rights itself, signed by almost all the countries of the world in 1948, after the terrible experience of the Second World War, expresses fully, even in its title, the awareness that human rights (the most basic of which is the right to life) belong to [humankind] by nature, that the State recognizes them but does not confer them, that they belong to all human beings inasmuch as they are human beings.”

Vatican News Agency, April, 1999

Cardinal Ratzinger On the United Nations and Iraq:

“The United Nations is the instrument created after the war for the coordination–including moral–of politics. The United Nations, as the community of nations, is the institution that should make the final decision about a military attack on Iraq . . . The concept of a ‘preventative’ war does not appear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.”

Vatican News Agency, September, 2002

Prayer for Pope Benedict XVI

We pray for our new Holy Father:

May God inspire his ministry as Pope in the 21st century.

Grant him the wisdom to lead with compassion

And the vision to create Christ-like community in our global church.

May he stand with those marginalized in poverty everywhere in the world.

May he continue John Paul II’s role as a prophet of justice and peace.

May the Holy Spirit guide him

And fill his heart with the fire of Divine love.

Amen.

web: http://www.educationforjustice.org