Geneva: Question-Intervention to Promote New Policies for Families

Parallel Event on Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation: Joy of Love

23 June 2016, Palais des Nations

How much the Inter-religious Dialogue can contribute on protecting and promoting the values pointed out by Pope Francis, in particularly those concerning Family Policies and those concerning the challenges that Family has to face today all over the world?
This question has been posed by Mr. Jorge M. Dias Ferreira – coordinator of the Catholinc Inspired NGO (CINGO)  Forum and Main Representative of New Humanity in Geneva -during the Parallel event organised by the Pontifical Council for the Family and the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See.

On his opening remarks H.E. Mgr. Vincenzo Paglia – President of the Pontifical Council for the Family – presented a large report about the content of the “Joy of Love”. Thanks to Mr. ferreira’s question, he was able to deeper analyse the current challenges for the contemporary families and especially individualism and consumism. “Since the very beginning – ha said – immediately after the creation of the Man, God couldn’t left alone him and he decided to put beside him another human being to make a relation and to realise thmeselves.”

Mgr. Paglia suggested to work and to invest at the international level, to incentivate relationship between human beings, peoples, cultures and religions. Under his opinion, that is the only possibility to avoid the current difficulties generated by the globalisation and a trend that forgot to put the human beings as origin and end of every action, by respecting the high dignity that should be recognised to everyone.

At the end of the event, several participants underlined how this final remarks by Mgr. Paglia provided many starting points for further reflections.

During the meeting, organised at Room XVIII of the Palais des Nations, intervened many other high level speakers as weel: H.E. Mgr. Ivan Jurkovic, Apostolic Nuncio and Permanent Observer at the Mission of the Holy See at the United Nations; H.E. Mr. Amr Ramadan, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Egypt; Mr. Andrey Nikiforov, Deputy Permanent Representative of Russia; Dr. Francesco Belletti, Director of the Center for International Family Studies. More than 150 people were attending this event. There were various Ambassadors, representatives of the national delegations and of many NGOs.

Many representatives of the CINGO Forum were attending as well because the event was co-sponsored by the Forum. Dr. Maria Lia Zervino, WUCWO’s Secretary General, intervened in order to present the current activities promoted on this topic by the working group on the Right to the Family of this Forum. Other organisations, such as Caritas Internazionalis, APGXXIII and Point Coeur are part of the Working Group as well.

Full-text of the intervention of Mr. Ferreira:

My name is Jorge Ferreira. I am the main representative of New Humanity that cordinates de Forum of the catholic inspired NGO’s.

New Humanity represents the Focolar Movement at the United Nations.

Congratulations to H.E. Mgr. Ivan Jurkovic and to the delegation of the Holy See for having organised this most important event.

My question to the distinguished paneslists is:

How do you consider, in our globalised world, the importance of developping the dialogue between cultures and namely the inter-religious dialogue as a fondamental contribution in order to protect and to promote the values pointed out by Pope Francis, in particularly those concerning Family Policies and those concerning the challenges that Family has to face today all over the world ?

Thanks your Excellencies.