Vatican City (AP) – Pope Leo XIV said on Friday that the family is based on “the stable union between a man and a woman” and that children to be born and the elderly enjoy dignity as creatures of God, articulating clear Catholic education on marriage and abortion at the start of his pontificate.
Leo, the first American pope, also called to revive multilateral diplomacy and to promote dialogue between religions in the search for peace, during his first meeting with the Diplomatic Corps of the Vatican. The public was private, but the Vatican published the prepared text of Leo and that of the dean of the diplomatic corps.
The meeting is one of the demands of the protocol after a conclave, allowing a new Pope to salute the representatives of the world governments before his official installation mass this Sunday. The Holy See is a sovereign state in international law, has diplomatic relations with more than 180 countries and enjoys observer status at the United Nations.
Leo, a member of the Augustinian religious order, underlined peace as a priority of his pontificate, of the first words he pronounced on the loggia of the Saint-Pierre basilica after his elections of May 8: “Peace be with you all.”
In his remarks, he said that the search for peace was one of the pillars of the papacy. He insisted that peace is not only the absence of conflict but a “gift” which requires work, from an end to the production of weapons to choose with care the words.
“For words too, not only can weapons hurt and even kill.”
He said it was up to governments to build peaceful societies “especially by investing in the family, based on the stable union between a man and a woman.”
“In addition, no one is exempt from trying to ensure respect for the dignity of each person, especially the most fragile and vulnerable, from the child to the elderly, from patients to the unemployed, citizens and immigrants,” he said.
Pope Francis strongly reaffirmed the central Catholic education opposed to abortion and euthanasia, claiming that they were proof of “disposable culture” of today. But he also returned to the Catholics LGBTQ + a characteristic, insisting that they are welcome in the church. He has never changed the doctrine of the Church defining marriage as a union between man and woman and homosexual acts as “intrinsically disorderly”.
As a head of the Augustinian order, the Reverend Robert Prevost in 2012 criticized the “homosexual lifestyle” and the role of mass media in the promotion of the acceptance of homosexual relations which were in conflict with Catholic doctrine. A decade later, during Francis ‘pontificate, he recognized Francis’ call to a more inclusive church and said that he did not want people to exclude only on the basis of their lifestyle.
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