CNS STORY: Africa needs good Samaritans who bring generosity, pope says in book

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CNS Story:

POPE-BOOK Apr-4-2007 (460 words) xxxi

Africa needs good Samaritans who bring generosity, pope says in book

By John Thavis
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Africa's struggling populations are in need of good Samaritans who bring Christian generosity and not the "cynicism of a world without God," Pope Benedict XVI said in a new book.

The pope examined the modern relevance of Christ's parable of the good Samaritan in a chapter from his upcoming book, "Jesus of Nazareth." The excerpt was published by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera April 4.

The Vatican, meanwhile, announced that the pope's book would be presented at a Vatican press conference April 13, three days before its publication in Italian, German and Polish. An English edition was to be released later this spring.

In his chapter on the good Samaritan, the pope reviewed the New Testament text closely and noted that Jesus was expanding the common understanding of loving one's neighbor to include all people, and not only those in one's specific community.

This universal obligation to help the needy has obvious application in our globalized world, especially for the "populations of Africa who find themselves robbed and looted," the pope said.

"We see how much these populations are our neighbors; we also see that our style of life, the history in which we are involved has deprived them and continues to deprive them," he said.

"Instead of giving them God, the God near to us and in Christ, and thus welcoming from their traditions all that is valuable and great and bringing it to fulfillment, we have brought them the cynicism of a world without God, in which the only things that count are power and profit," he said.

"We have destroyed the moral criteria so that corruption and an unscrupulous will to power become something obvious -- and not only in Africa," he said.

If people look around themselves, he said, they can find victims of drugs, human trafficking, sexual tourism and many others who are empty on the inside even while enjoying material wealth.

The pope said the parable of the good Samaritan is so crucial because it answers the fundamental question about what a person must do to gain eternal life.

While its message is central for the individual, it also represents a more universal parable about man in general, who "throughout the course of history finds himself alienated, tormented and abused," he said.

The pope said Karl Marx described well the alienation of modern man on a material level. An even deeper form of alienation occurs on a spiritual level, the pope said, and that is what Christ responds to in his act of salvation.

In this sense, the good Samaritan is the image of Christ himself, who comes to the aid of suffering humanity, he said.

END

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