ON HUMAN DIGNITY, THE RIGHT TO LIFE AND TO FOOD

VATICAN CITY, NOV 12, 1996 (VIS) - The Holy Father today received 180 representatives of Non-Governmental Organizations and international agencies, and highlighted the "substantial convergence" between Church teachings and the aim of their organizations to "promote and defend the dignity of the human person."

"In the Creator's plan," the Pope told these groups, in Rome for the UN's World Food Summit, "every individual has a basic right to adequate food. The specter of hunger and malnutrition is truly an offense against the Creator's image in every human being.

"This is especially so when hunger is the consequence of the misuse of resources or of excessive self-interest in the context of opposed political and economic groups, or ... the rigid application of the profit principle to the detriment of solidarity and cooperation for the benefit of all who make up the human family."

"Many of you seek to address another, even more terrible indignity: namely, threats to life itself, and the systematic elimination of innocent lives, in particular the unborn," said John Paul II. "As we come to the end of a century unprecedented for its destruction of life, ... are we to conclude that democracy too has become the sponsor of unparalleled attacks on human life?"

"When freedom is detached from moral principles," he concluded, "democracy itself is undermined and becomes the instrument by which the strong impose their will on the weak."
AC/DIGNITY:HUMAN RIGHTS/... VIS 961112 (230)