Gaudium Et Spes Quotes

The artist’s job is to reveal the real nature of things through picture or story or song, to show the rest of us what is really there when we are content with the misleading surface of things. As Pope John Paul II has written, “Artists are constantly in search of the hidden meaning of things, and their torment is to succeed in expressing the world of the ineffable.” Through their work, in the words of the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes, “the knowledge of God can be better revealed and the preaching of the Gospel can become clearer to the human mind.” DAVID MILLS, “Imaginative Orthodoxy: The Art of Telling the Christian Story,” Touchstone

No bastará entonces que la Iglesia acompañe a las víctimas, como ya lo hace en muchas ocasiones. Toca denunciar un sistema criminal y genocida, que necesita de las guerras para mantener sus inmensos beneficios, primero para lucrarse con la producción y venta de armas y después para entrar en la reconstrucción de países e introducirse en los negocios. Estamos en riesgo grave de una Tercera Guerra Mundial y ya deberíamos saber que la única guerra mundial justa, en las actuales circunstancias, como decían Hélder Câmara y otros obispos en el Vaticano II, es la guerra contra el hambre y la carrera armamentista, como se expresa en Gaudium et spes (GS): «Hay que declarar de nuevo: la carrera de armamentos es la plaga más grave de la humanidad y perjudica a los pobres de manera intolerable» (GS 81).

Before the council closed in 1965, it issued sixteen documents—constitutions, declarations, and decrees—that made many widespread decisions about the life of the church. In an interview Reverend Theodore K. Parker observed that although Vatican II did not specifically tell Catholics to go out and participate in the civil rights movement, those who were inclined to do so might have taken inspiration from Gaudium et spes (The Pastoral Constitution on the Church

Let it be recognized that all of the faithful — clerical and lay — possess a lawful freedom of enquiry and of thought, and the freedom to express their minds humbly and courageously about those matters in which they enjoy competence” [Gaudium et Spes § 62].

Do not forget that freedom involves responsibility. A person is defined above all by his responsible behavior toward others and before history (Gaudium et Spes). No one should avoid the challenges of the time in which he lives.