By Hannah Brockhaus
Catholic News Agency

VATICAN CITY — Speaking about St. Pope John XXIII’s encyclical on establishing universal peace, Pacem in terris, Pope Francis said that even 55 years after its publication, the document still stands as “a permanent commitment” to peace.
In an interview published May 24 in “L’Eco di Bergamo,” a newspaper of the northern Italian town of Bergamo, Francis said he is concerned about the ways violence occurs, not only with weapons, but with “mechanisms of oppression.”
Imbalances linked to the “reckless exploitation of men and of the resources of nature” are a cause for concern today, he continued, underlining that peace cannot only “be linked to the absence of war,” but must involve the “integral development of people and populations.”
The job of the church is not to make governments change, he said, but to bring the “logic of the Gospel into the thinking and gestures” of those who govern.
St. John XXIII, he said, was “a man, a saint who did not know a contrary word, who did not like words like ‘crusades’ or ‘proselytism’ and who instead always sought what unites, who trusted in God and in man in his image.”
The “Good Pope,” Francis said, believed that the church is called to serve all people, not only Catholics, and to “defend above all and everywhere the rights of the human person … aware that the pope must build bridges.”