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STEADFAST IN FAITH AND MISSION
Final manifesto of the Catholic Congress and public life 2010

For your interest, we offer the final manifesto of the XII Congress "Catholics and Public Life", which has been held in Madrid, with personalities from the European catholic world. Organized by the Spanish Foundation San Pablo-CEU


Author: Organized by the Spanish Foundation San Pablo-CEU | Source: Source: Zenit.org



Final manifesto of the Catholic Congress and public life 2010 
Final manifesto of the Catholic Congress and public life 2010 
For your interest, we offer the final manifesto of the XII Congress "Catholics and Public Life", which has been held in Madrid, with personalities from the European catholic world. 

 
STEADFAST IN FAITH AND MISSION
 
The University Foundation San Pablo-CEU, work of the Catholic Association of Propagandists and organizer of the Congresses "Catholics and Public Life", at the end of the twelfth of these, celebrated under the slogan Firm in the Faith and in the Mission, expresses its satisfaction by the joyful atmosphere of fraternal coexistence in which this meeting has developed, gives thanks to God for the good fruits of these days and wishes to offer to all the following considerations. 
 
This twelfth Congress of Catholics and Public Life has been clearly and happily wrapped in the wake of the pastoral visit that the Holy Father has made so a few days ago to Spain, as well as projected towards the horizon of his expected new presence among us, on the occasion of the ever-closer celebration of the next World Youth Day. 
 
Rooted in Christ, confirmed by Peter once again in faith and mission, we are especially called to the new evangelization that we all need in strongly secularized western pluralist societies. We are Christians today, in this culture that seems forgotten by God, from our encounter with Christ. Our contribution, as Christians, to Spain, to Europe, to the world, is only that of the Church itself and "it focuses on reality as simple and decisive as this: that God exists and that it is he who has given us life. Only he is absolute, faithful and unwavering love, an infinite goal that transshines behind all the goods, truths and admirable beauties of this world; admirable but insufficient for the heart of Man." In this affirmation of the absolute God that is given to us in Christ is included and has its ultimate foundation the affirmation of the dignity of every person from his conception until his natural death. This statement implies an incorruptible commitment to the culture of life and the family founded on marriage, a union of generous and indissoluble love between a man and a woman. 
 
Here and now, given the strong secularism of the environment, our testimony must be made present at the level of relations, of the encounter, in the dialogue that leads to "overcome the scission between human consciousness and Christian conscience, between existence in this temporal world and openness to an eternal life, between beauty of things and God as Beauty", between secularism and faith. We affirm the secularity of the State that is righteously understood as the natural autonomy that corresponds to it in its civil and political sphere, in the face of religious and ecclesial matters (never concerning the moral order!). The true positive secularism not only does not constitute an obstacle to the public affirmation of God--whose name we have to make resound again "joyfully" in the public sphere, "under the skies of Europe" and all over the world--, but it is, on the contrary, demand, condition, and guarantee of the effective and full exercise of religious freedom on the part of all in basic conditions of equality. 
 
In the area of freedom, which must guarantee a policy of righteous secularism, we have to express our faith "with joy, coherence, and simplicity, at home, at work and in our citizen commitment", with which we also bear witness to our hope, Through the realization of charity, rooted in the social fabric, with a generous intense participation, in active solidarity, expression of the social dimension of our faith, which translates into tasks of sociopolitical ordination, in the denunciation of injustice, in the defense of the dignity of all people at all times, as well as in works of service to the brothers, especially to the weakest and unattended, service that for the Christian "is not a mere option, but an essential part of his being". 
This Congress condemns in an absolute way and calls for the cessation of persecution that the whole world suffers countless people because of their religious faith. We see all these people today represented in ASIA BIBI, whose immediate freedom we demand.
 
The line of secularism has to facilitate, in the present situation of educational and cultural emergency, the development of an educational activity, at the same time evangelizing and civilizing, that leads us to recover and bequeath to the new generations “the sense of what sacred” and to offer them as a fundamental patrimony “the faith in a creator and provident God, the revelation of Jesus Christ the only savior and the common understanding of the fundamental experiences of the man-like being born, to die, to live in a family, and the reference to a moral natural law”. In this way, we will be able to overcome the antihumanist modern rupture and to achieve the reconstruction of anthropology on which to carry out a true integral education, which leads to a congratulations full personal and communitarian fulfillment. We must once again affirm the fundamental right of the parents to decide the type of education that their children have to receive and the strict respect that the public authorities have to keep to the legitimate pluralism determined by the different last conceptions of the person, pluralism densified among us by the increasingly intense and varied immigration and that must be translated into the enrichment of the integrative common bases of coexistence in whose acceptance we have to converge from the basic human experience of common radical basic needs, aspirations and desires in which all men are to be recognized just as men and as brothers. 
 
Steadfast in the mission, confirmed in the faith, let´s give ourselves without reservation to transmit it courageously, being Christians as citizens and citizens as Christians, in this pressing task of the new evangelization. NO DOUBT, NOW! 
Madrid, November 21, 2010








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