Focusing on the need to preserve the environment, the Holy Father he related his appreciation of “the majestic splendor” he saw from his plane flight to Australia.
However, he noted “There are also scars which mark the surface of our earth, erosion, deforestation, the squandering of the world’s mineral and ocean resources in order to fuel an insatiable consumption.”
The Pope also warned that “something is amiss” in the social environment of the world we “fashion for ourselves.”
“We can encounter a hostility, something dangerous; a poison which threatens to corrode what is good, reshape who we are, and distort the purpose for which we have been created.” He cited alcohol, drug abuse, violence and sexual degradation passed off by the media as “entertainment” as examples.
The lure of relativism and secularism was also directly touched on by the Pope.
“Relativism, by indiscriminately giving value to practically everything, has made ‘experience’ all-important. Yet, experiences, detached from any consideration of what is good or true, can lead, not to genuine freedom, but to moral or intellectual confusion, to a lowering of standards, to a loss of self-respect, and even to despair.”
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“Life is not just a succession of events or experiences, helpful though many of them are. It is a search for the true, the good and the beautiful. It is to this end that we make our choices; it is for this that we exercise our freedom; it is in this- in truth, in goodness, and in beauty- that we find happiness and joy.”
“Christ offers more! Indeed he offers everything. Only he who is the Truth can be the Way and hence also the Life” told the Pope to pilgrims as the sun set upon Barangaroo.
Emphatically, the Pope called on pilgrims not to leave God on the sidelines.