ROME, Italy — Pope Francis praised “authentic religiosity” Wednesday, insisting that on the contrary “fundamentalism defiles and corrupts every creed.”
Addressing participants in a Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions in Nur-Sultan, the capital of Kazakhstan, the pontiff underscored “humanity’s need for religion,” asserting that human beings “do not exist so much to satisfy earthly interests or to weave purely economic relationships” as to walk together as wayfarers “with our eyes raised to the heavens.”
The pope sharply criticized the “state-imposed atheism” of the former Soviet Union, urging his hearers to jettison “the kind of talk that for all too long, here and elsewhere, has led to distrust and contempt for religion, as if it were a destabilizing force in modern society.”
The decades of state-imposed atheism in the U.S.S.R gave rise to an “oppressive and stifling mentality for which the mere mention of the word ‘religion’ was greeted with embarrassed silence,” Francis said.
And yet, he continued, religion “is not a problem, but part of the solution for a more harmonious life in society.”
“We need religion, in order to respond to the thirst for world peace and the thirst for the infinite that dwells in the heart of each man and woman,” he declared.
The “pursuit of transcendence,” he said, can inspire and illumine the decisions that need to be made amid the deep crises that many modern institutions are presently experiencing.
The centrality of the religious experience for human existence highlights “an essential condition for genuinely human and integral development,” the pope stated, namely “religious freedom.”
“Religious freedom is a basic, primary and inalienable right needing to be promoted everywhere, one that may not be restricted merely to freedom of worship,” he said, and each person “has the right to render public testimony to his or her own creed, proposing it without ever imposing it.”
“To relegate to the private sphere our most important beliefs in life would be to deprive society of an immense treasure,” he added.
Significantly, given the ongoing conflict in nearby Ukraine, Francis also insisted that God “guides us always in the way of peace, never that of war.”
“May we never justify violence,” he urged. “May we never allow the sacred to be exploited by the profane. The sacred must never be a prop for power, nor power a prop for the sacred!”
Let us unite our efforts “to ensure that the Almighty will never again be held hostage to the human thirst for power,” he said.
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