Beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence. It is an invitation to savor life and to dream of the future. That is why the beauty of created things can never fully satisfy. It stirs that hidden nostalgia for God which a lover of beauty like Saint Augustine could express in incomparable terms: 'Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you!'.

For by his incarnation the Son of God united himself in a certain way with every man. He labored with human hands... and loved with a human heart. Born of Mary the Virgin, he truly became one of us.

The body in its masculinity and femininity has been called "from the beginning" to become the manifestation of the spirit. The body, in fact, and only the body, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine.

Lord Jesus, Who in the Eucharist make your dwelling among us and become our traveling companion, sustain our Christian communities so that they may be ever more open to listening and accepting your Word. May they draw from the Eucharist a renewed commitment to spreading in society, by the proclamation of your Gospel, the signs and deeds of an attentive and active charity

Young people are threatened... by the evil use of advertising techniques that stimulate the natural inclination to avoid hard work by promising the immediate satisfaction of every desire.

The only really effective means of enabling States to deal with the grave problem of poverty is to provide them with the necessary resources through foreign financial aid - public and private - granted under reasonable conditions, within the framework of international commercial relations regulated with fairness.

In Christ and through Christ man has acquired full awareness of his dignity, of the heights to which he is raised, of the surpassing worth of his own humanity, and of the meaning of his existence.