Caution by Pope

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 34031, 20 December 1975, Page 15

Caution by Pope

<y.Z. Press Assn —Copyright) ROME, Dec. 19. In a pre-Christmas message, Pope Paul urges Christians to become “the liberators of people suffering from famine, injustices, and economic and cultural neocolonialism.” but he gives a warning against using violence as the path to liberation. The Pontiff says: “The Church cannot accept violence — and especially the force of arms, which is uncontrollable once it is let loose — and indiscriminate death, as the path to liberation, because violence always provokes violence, and. irresistibly, engenders new forms of oppression and enslavement.” In a 13,000-word exhortation on evangelisation; in the modern world, thePope says that he is to re-; move the ambiguity which! the word “liberation” very i often takes on in ideologies, political systems, or groups. ‘The Church is trying, more and more, to encourage large numbers of Christians to devote themselves to the liberation of men,” he says, but, in one of his most forceful denunciations of those who turn Christianity into a political tool, the Pope gives a warning against becoming ensnared by some political option or current of thought, and then to a svstem, even to a partv. “with all the attendant risks of becoming its instrument.”