I am intensely thankful for those deferential and sincere expressions that you, also representing your colleagues of the Public Administration and all the Roman population, has wanted to address me during the itinerary that takes me from the Vatican residence to St. John of Lateran Cathedral.
The civil city
This intermediate stop, at the foot of the Capitol hill, has a special meaning for me, not only due to the accumulation of historical memories that are interweaved here and are of interest for the civil Rome and Christian Rome together, but also because it allows me to have a first direct contact with the people in charge of the citizen life and of their right order. Therefore, it is a propitious occasion to express you my warmest greeting and my best wishes.
The problems of the city, to which with founded preoccupation you have alluded, find me particularly aware and sensible because of their urgency, their gravity and, mainly, due to frustrations and human and familiar dramas, from which not rarely they are the evident sign. As a Bishop of the City that is the primitive see of the pastoral ministry that was trusted to me, those undergone experiences arrive to my heart more deeply and I feel stimulated by them to the availability, to the collaboration and the contribution of moral and spiritual order that corresponds to the specific nature of my service, to be able, at least, to alleviate them. And I also say this, not only as a personal view, but in the name of the children of the Church of God here in Rome: of my collaborators, the Bishops, Priests and Religious persons, the members of the Catholic associations and of each one of the faithful, involved, in different ways, in pastoral, educative, welfare and scholastic activities.
The Christian city
Hope, whose echo I have felt with affability in your kind greeting, is for us, believers, -- as I remembered in the general audience last Wednesday -- an obligatory virtue and a precious gift of God. May it serve to wake up energies and intentions in each one of us and, I also hope, in all the fellow citizens of good will; may it serve to inspire initiatives and programs, in order that those problems have the suitable solution and Rome remains faithful, in the facts, to those unmistakably Christian ideals that are called hunger and thirst of justice, active contribution to peace, supreme dignity of the human work, respect and love towards the brothers, solidarity with the weakest.
