The Gospel Today: Hopes and Obstacles
6. A number of factors seem to be working
toward making people today more deeply aware of the dignity of the human person
and more open to religious values, to the Gospel and to the priestly ministry.
Despite many contradictions, society is
increasingly witnessing a powerful thirst for justice and peace; a more lively
sense that humanity must care for creation and respect nature; a more open
search for truth; a greater effort to safeguard human dignity; a growing
commitment in many sectors of the world population to a more specific
international solidarity and a new ordering of the world in freedom and
justice. Parallel to the continued development of the potential offered by
science and technology and the exchange of information and interaction of
cultures, there is a new call for ethics, that is, a quest for meaning -- and
therefore for an objective standard of values which will delineate the
possibilities and limits of progress.
In the more specifically religious and Christian
sphere, ideological prejudice and the violent rejection of the message of
spiritual and religious values are crumbling and there are arising new and
unexpected possibilities of evangelization and the rebirth of ecclesial life in
many parts of the world. These are evident in an increased love of the sacred
Scriptures; in the vitality and growing vigor of many young churches and their
ever - larger role in the defense and promotion of the values of human life and
the person; and in the splendid witness of martyrdom provided by the churches
of Central and Eastern Europe as well as that of the faithfulness and courage
of other churches which are still forced to undergo persecution and tribulation
for the faith.( 11)
The thirst for God and for an active meaningful
relationship with him is so strong today that, where there is a lack of a
genuine and full proclamation of the Gospel of Christ, there is a rising spread
of forms of religiosity without God and the proliferation of many sects. For
all children of the Church, and for priests especially, the increase of these
phenomena, even in some traditionally Christian environments, is not only a
constant motive to examine our consciences as to the credibility of our witness
to the Gospel but at the same time is a sign of how deep and widespread is the
search for God.
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