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ADDRESS OF THE HOLY FATHER PAUL VI
TO THE NEW AMBASSADOR OF URUGUAY
TO THE HOLY SEE
*

Saturday, 21 December 1974

 

Mr. Ambassador,

Receiving from Your Excellency’s hands the Letters that accredit you as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Uruguay to the Holy See, we are happy to bid you a sincere and hearty welcome.

You have expressed in noble words, Your Excellency, the desire to maintain and consolidate, on a basis of mutual respect and collaboration, the good relations that exist between Uruguay and the Apostolic See. It is a desire that we fully share, moved by the love and deep esteem we feel for the sons of your beloved country, of deep-rooted Christian traditions.

Your Excellency referred in particular to the happy coincidence between the beginning of your mission and the imminent opening of the universal Holy Year. This is a propitious moment, in which the Church proposes to intensify her saving presence in the midst of the human community, for the purpose of fulfilling the divine plan to construct a new dwelling place and a new earth where justice will abide, and whose blessedness will answer and surpass all the longings for peace which spring up in the human heart" (Gaudium et spes, 39)

It is a call, therefore, to understanding, love, and collaboration, individual and collective, in order to transform hearts, imbuing them with a new mentality, a renewed Christian view of the word and society. In this view there will be no place for discrimination and hostile tension, and where an atmosphere of growing brotherhood and equality will be manifested in concrete form.

The Church, on her side, will continue to give her disinterested assistance – as is clearly testified by the dedicated commitment with which she attends to so many works entrusted to her in Uruguay – in order to promote the harmonious development of her sons and make them increasingly aware of their responsibility as citizens and Christians. That means that they will be capable of taking their place as qualified agents in a dynamic society which will contribute to enriching the collectivity more and more intensely and completely, in agreement with the dictates of justice and the essential requirements of the dignity of the human person.

Mr Ambassador, we wish to assure you at once of our good wishes for the successful accomplishment of your lofty mission. With our gratitude for the respectful greeting that you brought to us from the President of the Republic, we as Your Excellency to transmit our best wishes to the authorities and all our beloved sons in the Uruguayan nation, on which we invoke abundant divine blessings.


*ORa 1975 n.1 p.10.

 



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