Vatican City, Dec 7, 2013 / 14:09 pm
On Saturday afternoon Pope Francis met with members of an international organization that promotes human dignity, warning them against a "false model" of humanity.
"Unfortunately, in our time, so full of so many hopes and achievements, there are powers and forces that end up producing a 'throw-away culture'; and this tends to become a common mentality," said the pontiff on Dec. 7. "The victims of this culture are its most weak and fragile humans – the unborn, the poor, the elderly sick, severely disabled…those who risk being 'thrown away,' expelled by a mechanism that must be efficient at all costs."
"This false model of man and of society effects a practical atheism (by) denying, de facto, the Word of God that says, 'let us make man in our image, according to our likeness,'" Pope Francis explained to the members of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute.
Cardinal Renato Raffaele Martino, the insitute's honorary president, said the group was founded in 2008 in the European Parliament "with the goal to protect and promote human dignity based on the anthropological truth that man is born in the image and likeness of God."