Geneva, Switzerland, Apr 23, 2009 / 08:59 am
Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Holy See's permanent observer to the United Nations, delivered a speech yesterday at the Geneva conference on racism, emphasizing the need for education to include “ethical and spiritual values” to combat racism and intolerance.
The archbishop affirmed that those who are different are often “rejected to the point that barbarous acts are committed against them, including genocide and ethnic cleansing,” and also recalled that “old forms of exploitation give way to new ones: women and children are trafficked in a contemporary form of slavery, irregular immigrants are abused, persons perceived to be or who in fact are different become, in disproportionate numbers, the victims of social and political exclusion."
One area that receives little attention, but that Archbishop Tomasi said the Vatican is “alarmed by,” is the “still latent temptation of eugenics." He warned that eugenic practices could lead to "the elimination of human beings that do not fulfill the characteristics predetermined by a given society."
To combat these extreme acts of intolerance, said Archbishop Tomasi, education systems must be reviewed “so that every aspect of discrimination may be eliminated from teaching, textbooks, curricula and visual resources." Media, he went on, "should be accessible and free of racist and ideological control as this leads to discrimination and even violence against persons of different cultural and ethnic background."