Vatican City, Feb 5, 2006 / 22:00 pm
During a Mass celebrated Sunday at the Vatican’s parish of Saint Anne, Pope Benedict warned that a modern-day fog of ideologies and idolatries which ignore God, threatens to damage and distort true respect and dignity for the human person.
During his homily, the Pope commented on the Gospel reading from Mark, in which Jesus goes to the house of Simon Peter and encounters Peter's mother-in-law who has a severe fever.
"Jesus, coming from the Father,” Benedict said, “goes toward the house of humanity, our earth and finds humanity ill, sick with the fever, the fever of ideologies, idolatry, and the forgetting about God.”
“The Lord”, he continued, “gives us His hand, lifts us up and heals us. And as he has throughout the ages; He takes our hand with His Word, and dispels the fog of ideology and idolatry. ... He cures us of the fever of our passions and our sins with the absolution found in the Sacrament of Reconciliation.