c. 2000 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ Urging the world to”draw lessons from the past”in its journey through the new millennium, Pope John Paul II appealed Monday (Jan. 10) for an end to war and poverty and respect for human life and the family.

The Roman Catholic pontiff devoted his annual New Year’s message to the Vatican diplomatic corps to a review of current world affairs and his hopes for the future as the church marks the start of the third millennium of Christianity with Jubilee Holy Year celebrations.”The doors of the Great Jubilee have been opened for Christians and the doors of a new millennium for humanity as a whole. What is important now is to cross the threshold in order to make our journey,”the pope declared.”Nothing, no prejudice or ambition, should hold us back. A new history is beginning for us.” Speaking slowly in a sometimes quavering voice, the pope addressed the envoys of 171 countries, the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta in unusually personal terms and with evident emotion.

Describing himself as”a fellow-traveler of several generations of the century just ended,”the 79-year-old John Paul recalled his youth in Poland during World War II.”I shared the harsh ordeals of my native people as the darkest hours experienced by Europe,”he said.

When elected leader of the world’s Roman Catholics in 1978, he said,”I felt myself charged with a universal fatherhood which embraces all the men and women of our time without exception.”Today, in addressing you who represent practically all the peoples of the Earth, I would like to share with each one something personal,”he said.”At the opening of the doors of a new millennium, the pope began to think that people might finally learn to draw lessons from the past.”Indeed, I ask everyone, in God’s name, to save humanity from further wars, to respect human life and the family, to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor, to realize that we are all responsible for one another. It seems to me,”he said,”that the century now beginning ought to be the century of solidarity.” John Paul hailed attempts to build a”new world order,”citing the continuing Middle East peace process, dialogue between the two Chinas and the two Koreas, and attempts at negotiations between rival factions in some African countries and between the government and armed groups in Colombia.

But, he said,”the errors of the past are all too often being repeated.”He deplored ethnic and religious persecution, war, social inequalities, the gap between rich and poor countries and”the exclusive trust in profit alone.” The pope said he saw Africa”shackled by ethnic conflicts,”the Middle East”constantly poised between war and peace,”Asia in”precarious balance”between”peoples of venerable and economically highly developed cultures and others who are becoming increasingly impoverished”and Latin America”dangerously crippled by alarming social inequalities, the drug trade, corruption and in some cases movements of armed struggle.””North America, where economic and political concerns are often considered paramount, is home to many poor people, despite its manifold riches,”he said. Europe, while striving to achieve unity,”has not been spared terrible forms of violence”in the Balkans and the Caucasus, he said.

Despite”remarkable advances”in science and technology, especially in the field of information, humanity suffered significant setbacks in the 20th century, John Paul said.”As the balance is made,”he said,”the memory of bloody wars, which have decimated millions of people and provoked massive exoduses, shameful genocides, which haunt our memories, as well as the arms race, which fostered mistrust and fear, terrorism and ethnic conflicts, which annihilated peoples who had lived together in the same territory, all force us to be modest and in many cases to have a penitent spirit.”The life sciences and biotechnology continue to find new fields of application, yet they also raise the problem of the limits imposed by the need to safeguard people’s dignity, responsibility and safety.” Globalization has offered possibilities of growth but also relegated many people”to the side of the road,”he said, while unemployment plagues the developed countries and extreme poverty the developing countries of the Southern Hemisphere.

The pope urged the men and women of the 21st century to make a commitment to solidarity by renouncing”idols such as prosperity at any price, material wealth as the only value, science as the sole explanation of reality.” Solidarity, he said, requires the sharing of technology and prosperity, respect for human rights, conflict prevention and”calm dialogue between cultures and religions (to) make it possible in the future to avoid arriving at an absurd situation: that of excluding or killing others in the name of God.”

DEA END POLK