The Pope’s July prayer intention is for social friendship.
The video to accompany the message was released on June 30, 2021, through the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network.
In The Pope Video, the Holy Father focuses on dialogue as the “path to seeing reality in a new way, so we can live with passion the challenges we face in constructing the common good.” He calls for putting an end to the polarization that divides us and praying that “no spaces of enmity or war” may remain.
Full Text of Video:
The Bible says that whoever finds a friend has found a treasure.
I would like to invite everyone to go beyond their groups of friends and build social friendship, which is so necessary for living together well.
We especially need to have a renewed encounter with the most impoverished and vulnerable, those on the peripheries. And we need to distance ourselves from populisms that exploit the anguish of the people without providing solutions, proposing a mystique that solves nothing.
We must flee from social enmity which only destroys, and leave “polarization” behind.
And this isn’t always easy, especially today when part of our politics, society, and media are bent on creating enemies so as to defeat them in a game of power.
Dialogue is the path to seeing reality in a new way, so we can live with passion the challenges we face in constructing the common good.
Let us pray that, in social, economic, and political situations of conflict, we may be courageous and passionate architects of dialogue and friendship, men and women who always hold out a helping hand, and may no spaces of enmity and war remain.
