Benedict XVI’s new book Jesus of Nazareth is due out April 16th. Here’s an article on what’s sure to be one of the (many) controversial statements in his book.
Pope says rich nations "plundered" Third World | Top News | Reuters.com
In the 400-page book, called "Jesus of Nazareth," the Pope offers a modern application of Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan, who stopped to help a man who had been robbed by thieves when others, including a priest, had not.
"The current relevance of the parable is obvious," the Pope writes.
"If we apply it to the dimensions of globalised society today, we see how the populations of Africa have been plundered and sacked and this concerns us intimately," the Pope says in his book, which comes out on April 16, his 80th birthday.
He drew a link between the lifestyle of people in the developed world and the dire conditions of people in Africa.
"We see how our lifestyle, the history that involved us, has stripped them naked and continues to strip them naked," he writes.
The German Pope, who has condemned the effects of colonialism before, said rich countries had also hurt poor countries spiritually by belittling or trying to wipe out their own cultural and spiritual traditions.
"Instead of giving them God, the God close to us in Christ, and welcoming in their traditions all that is precious and great … we have brought them the cynicism of a world without God, where only power and profit count…," he writes.
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