The Pope once again warned this Thursday about the “increasing threat of a world war,” and called for dialogue with everyone, even the most uncomfortable interlocutors, in his annual address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Vatican.
Francisco, 88 years old, had to interrupt the speech barely begun and asked an assistant to read the text. “I don’t feel in a position to continue,” he stated, affected once again by a strong cold and cough. The pontiff, with a congested voice, had begun to speak, greeting the ambassadors gathered in the Blessings Room of the Apostolic Palace.
The Pope suffers from a long cold that actually hides bronchial problems that always attack him in winter.
His voice seemed congested like other times. The doctors who assist him are attentive to these problems that afflict him. When he was young in Argentina he had to undergo lung surgery.
just finished an exhausting Christmas period in which he inaugurated the celebrations of the Holy Jubilee Year of 2025.
“Break the chain of hate and revenge”
In his speech, the pontiff pointed out that “dialogue is the only way to break the chain of hatred and revenge that imprisons us and to deactivate bombs of selfishness and pride.”
Before 184 ambassadors from the countries with which the Holy See has diplomatic relations, in his speech he listed the crises that threaten peace, he said that “the multilateral institutions that emerged for the most part at the end of the Second World War, eighty years ago, have already “They do not seem to be capable of guaranteeing peace and stability, nor the fight against hunger and the development for which they had been created, nor of responding in a truly effective way to the challenges imposed by the artificial economy.”
The Argentine pontiff hoped that the entire international community would make an effort “to put an end above all to the war that has been bathing the afflicted region in blood for almost three years.” Ukraine and that has caused many victims.”
He also did a call for a ceasefire and the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza, where “there is a very serious and ignoble humanitarian situation” and asked “that the Palestinian population receive all the necessary aid.”
The Pope lamented “the horrible slavery of drug dependence that especially affects young people.”
He denounced trafficking in human beings and stressed that “it is necessary to take care of the victims of this trafficking, who are the same migrants, forced to travel thousands of kilometers on foot in Central America as in the Sahara desert, or having to cross the Mediterranean or the English Channel in improvised and overcrowded boats, only to end up rejected or find themselves clandestine in a foreign land.
Francis reiterated to the representatives of the States his call “to May the death penalty be eliminated in all nations.”
He asked the richest nations to “forgive the debts of countries that could never pay them.” This is not an act of solidarity or magnanimity, but above all of justice, also burdened by a new form of iniquity of which today we are increasingly aware: the ecological debt, particularly between the north and the south.