Pope preaches ‘liberation from idols’ on visit to Monaco

Leo urged the Church in Monaco ‘to bear witness to living in peace’ with ‘authentic joy, which is not won through a wager, but shared through charity’.

Pope Leo condemned “idolatry” as he became the first pope in modern times to visit Monaco on Saturday.

Preaching in French at a Mass in the principality’s Stade Louis II, he warned that “the great and wonderful things of this earth become idols and bring about forms of slavery – not for those who lack these things, but those who gorge themselves on them, leaving their neighbour in misery and sorrow”.

“Liberation from idols is thus deliverance from power understood as dominion, from wealth turned into greed, from vanity masquerading as beauty,” he told the 15,000 people gathered in the stadium, including Prince Albert II of Monaco and his wife Princess Charlene.

Reflecting on the account in John’s gospel of the authorities’ plans to kill Jesus, Leo said it represented “the hidden schemes of powerful authorities who are eager to kill without scruples”.

“Does this not also happen today?” he asked. “Even today, how many plots are devised around the world to kill the innocent! How many excuses are made to justify their elimination!”

He continued: “Idolatry makes people slaves of each other, but purification from idolatry sanctifies them. It is a gift of grace that makes people children of God, and brothers and sisters to one another. This gift sheds light on our present, for the wars that stain it with blood are the fruit of the idolatry of power and money.”

Leo urged the Church in Monaco “to bear witness to living in peace” with “authentic joy, which is not won through a wager, but shared through charity”.

Earlier in his nine-hour visit to the principality, the Pope had addressed members of its Catholic community – representing the 82 per cent of the population who identify as Catholic – after prayers in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.

He praised the local Church as “a place where all find welcome and hospitality, marked by a social and cultural mix that is characteristic of your society”. More than 12,000 of Monaco’s 38,000 residents are millionaires and average wealth per resident exceeds $20 million, while more than 30,000 people travel into the state each day to work there.

“It is a small cosmopolitan state, in which the diversity of origins are also complemented by socio-economic differences,” Leo said. “In the Church, such variety should never become the occasion of division into social classes. On the contrary, everyone is welcomed as persons and children of God.”

He emphasised the need to proclaim the Gospel “in defence of the human person” and to act “so that the life of every man and woman may be defended and promoted from conception until natural death”.

“Offer new pathways capable of stemming the tide of secularism, which risks reducing humanity to individualism and basing social life on the production of wealth,” he urged his audience, insisting on the importance of “responding to questions and being thought provoking”. 

“Are we truly defending human beings? Are we safeguarding the dignity of the person by protecting life in all its stages? Is the current economic and social model truly just and marked by solidarity? Does it possess an ethic of responsibility, which assists and goes beyond the ‘mere logic of the exchange of equivalents, of profit as an end in itself’, so as to build a more equitable society?” he asked, citing Benedict XVI’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate.

Pope Leo travelled from Rome to Monaco by helicopter on Saturday morning, receiving a welcome from Prince Albert, before addressing a crowd from the balcony of the Prince’s Palace.

He said the principality “finds in its very independence a vocation to promote encounter and to foster social friendship” especially when “these values are threatened by a widespread climate of isolation and self-sufficiency”.

“The gift of smallness and a living spiritual heritage invite you to put your prosperity at the service of law and justice, especially at a historical moment when the display of power and the logic of oppression are harming the world and jeopardising peace. As you know, in the Bible it is the little ones who make history,” he said.

Leo insisted that “the perspective of the Kingdom of God … is not limited to the private sphere, still less to a utopian vision of the world” but rather “shakes up the unjust configurations of power – those structures of sin that create chasms between the poor and the rich, between the privileged and the discarded, between friends and enemies”.

“You are among the few countries in the world to have the Catholic faith as a state religion,” he continued.

“This faith places us before the sovereignty of Jesus, who calls Christians to become in the world a kingdom of brothers and sisters – a presence that does not cast down but raises up, that does not separate but connects, always ready to protect every human life with love, at any time and in any condition, so that no one is ever excluded from the table of fraternity.”

Later in the visit he spoke to young people and catechumens who will be received into the Church at Easter: “Monaco is a small country, but it can be a great place of solidarity and a beacon of hope. Incorporate the Gospel into the choices you make at work and in your social and political commitments in order to give a voice to the voiceless, thereby spreading a culture of care.”

Leo’s way – the personal and the political

View from Rome

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