By Deborah Castellano Lubov
“Drugs and addictions are an invisible prison that you, in different ways, have known and fought, but we are all called to freedom.”
Pope Leo XIV stressed this on the World Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, observed every Jun 26, during an audience in the Vatican’s Courtyard of San Damaso.
The Pope thanked all who made the meeting possible, especially during the Jubilee, “a year of grace in which dignity, too often diminished or denied, is recognized for all.”
The World Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking was declared by the United Nations to raise awareness of the major problem illicit drugs represent to society. Each year, the Day aims to strengthen global action and cooperation toward achieving a world free of drug abuse and is marked by campaigns, educational events, and community efforts to support prevention, treatment, and recovery.
In his remarks, the Pope stressed that all of society needs a jolt to confront this phenomenon, saying the world “needs your testimony and the great work you are doing.”
“Let us move forward together,” he said, “multiplying places of healing, encounter, and education: pastoral paths and social policies that begin in the streets and never write anyone off.”
Jesus recreated the Apostles
The Pope called on everyone struggling with an addiction to maintain hope, not “as a slogan,” “but as a light rediscovered through great effort,” and guaranteed by the Lord’s transformative words of peace to us all.
Jesus, he recalled, had delivered this peace to the disciples who were locked in the Upper Room on Easter night, after they had abandoned Him, were afraid and disheartened.
“It was Jesus,” Pope Leo recalled, who “found them again, who came once more in search of them,” entering, “even with the doors shut, into the place where they were as if buried alive. He brought peace, recreated them with forgiveness, and breathed on them—meaning, He gave them the Holy Spirit, which is the breath of God within us.”
When we lack perspective, Jesus comes to us
“When we lack air, when we lack perspective, our dignity withers,” he said. “Let us not forget that the Risen Jesus still comes and brings His breath!”
The Lord, Pope Leo reassured, often does so through people who go beyond our closed doors, and who, despite everything that may have happened, still see the dignity we have forgotten or that was denied us.
Even if “drugs and addictions are an invisible prison that you, in different ways, have known and fought,” he said, “we are all called to freedom.”
God is close to me
The Pope recalled that St Augustine confessed that “only in Christ did the restlessness of his heart find peace,” and called for togetherness, especially that which comes from God, to overcome evil and injustice.
“God, who created and knows each person,” Pope Leo reassured, “is closer to me than I am to myself” and He “made us to be together.”
Eliminating despair
The Pope noted that the struggle “cannot be abandoned” as long as “anyone around us remains imprisoned by the many forms of addiction,” as he also warned against those who use drugs and other dependencies to create business opportunities.
In particular, he lamented the vast concentrations of interest and sprawling criminal organizations “that States have a duty to dismantle.”
“Our cities,” he stressed, “do not need to be freed from the marginalized, but from marginalization; not cleaned of the desperate, but of despair.”
The Holy Father said the Jubilee shows us the culture of encounter “as the path to true security,” and told young people to not be spectators of the Earth’s greatly-needed renewal, but rather “protagonists.”
God does great things with those He frees from evil
The Pope recalled that “God does great things with those He frees from evil,” and of the Psalm which recalls, “The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone.”
In this context, Pope Leo highlighted how Jesus was rejected and crucified outside the gates of His city. “On Him, the cornerstone on which God rebuilds the world,” the Pope encouraged, “you too are precious stones in the building of a new humanity.”
You are needed
The Church, humanity, education, and politics need you, the Pope said.
“Together, over every degrading addiction,” Pope Leo XIV underscored, “we will make the infinite dignity impressed upon each person prevail.” – Vatican News
