He also hoped for greater religious freedom and equality for the citizens of all nations, especially in developing nations throughout the world.
The ambassador quoted Pope Paul VI to say that there is no greater structure than “human responsibility” to generate genuine development in the world.
Australia’s Ambassador Timothy Fischer also decried the “artificial gender tilting” taking place in some countries. Such a campaign, he said, “will lead to the death of a nation.”
He highlighted the same “fault lines” existing in the income gap between rich and poor and the “time bomb” of illiteracy in some places in Asia, but also in inner-city America.
Mr. Fischer also proposed the idea of the measure of “Gross national happiness,” which the Asian Kingdom of Bhutan has been advocating. Happiness, he said, depends on man's well-being and there are "fault lines" today that threaten greater good in blocking proper wealth distribution and the availability of education.
Discussion followed in which the ambassadors proposed historic points of interaction and solidarity. One ambassador asked for a consultation on how to approach the bureaucracy of international aid organizations, another expressed interest in promoting a world with fewer national borders and greater solidarity.
Cardinal Ravasi told CNA afterward that encounter was particularly significant because it was “a look to the continent of Asia where the emergent cultures are asserting themselves not only on economic and social levels ... but also because they come carrying a great tradition with them made of culture, wisdom, poetry and also and most importantly of ethics.
“We in the West must look at this new world and its language,” he said.
This is relevant to the Church because it lends to a new reflection on the concept of ethics, not only for new techniques to approach financial systems, but also to examine the social dimension of how cultures live together, he said. It is also necessary for keeping the human element at the center of the process of scientific development.
“Finally,” he said, “it is a way to ensure that dialogue between cultures—interculturality—permits peoples not only to coexist beside each other as occurs with multiculturalism but to meet, speak, (and) dialogue, but most of all to conserve self identity without fundamentalisms and without syncretisms without isolationism and without confusion.”
The Pontifical Council for Culture expects greater collaboration and cooperation from the ambassadors through meetings such as this one. African ambassadors will be meeting with the council in October 2011 and those from Latin America will likely be invited for a similar encounter in December.
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