A powerful appeal for the dignity of life, peace, freedom and the value of small communities. This was the message addressed to Pope Leo XIV by the Bishop of San Marino-Montefeltro, Monsignor Domenico Beneventi, in his greeting delivered in the Basilica del Santo.
«Most Holy Father, with immense joy and filial affection the Church of San Marino-Montefeltro welcomes You in this Basilica, which safeguards the relics of Saint Marinus, founder of the Republic and, together with Saint Leo, patron of our Diocese. Your presence is a gift of grace that comforts us and confirms us in the faith, blessing a singular land that embraces, within a single local Church, two sovereign states, two Republics — San Marino and Italy — nestled within the inner regions of the Italian peninsula.
This is a condition we experience as a prophetic vocation to brotherhood, peace and shared coexistence among different realities. Here, where the beauty of the villages and the land is wedded to the gratuitousness of human relationships, we learn every day the value of closeness and cooperation for the common good.
Faced with depopulation, the reduction of services in Italy’s inner areas, and the complex challenges of how the Church must take shape today, our daily commitment is to keep alive the sense of community of a people gathered by faith.
In this way we preserve that value of «magnificent humanity» nourished by solidarity, closeness and belonging — distinctive and precious traits of our small towns, which we absolutely do not wish to abandon, but rather to inhabit with a gaze of hope, recovering and proposing the Christian sense of welcome, closeness and mutual care.
Our history is rooted in the principle of freedom which, for us, is never mere arbitrariness, but finds its fulfilment in faith and in the sense of community: freedom is the gift that defines us as men and women responsible before God and before history, fleeing — as You have taught us in Your Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas — every functionalist logic that reduces the human being to mere performance, and safeguarding the inviolable dignity of every life from conception to its natural end.
In frank and respectful dialogue with all institutions, we offer our collaboration as a prophetic voice of the Gospel to support the family, to promote an integral education of the younger generations and to serve the common good, rejecting the throwaway culture, the scourge of abortion and the spreading practice of surrogate motherhood, reaffirming that the dignity of the person, freedom of conscience and the protection of the weakest are the true pillars of civil coexistence.
Faced with the rapid shift in cultural paradigm, which is increasingly shaping a technicist and functionalist vision, we cannot remain silent before the universal crimes against life and the dignity of every human being.
For this reason, we reaffirm and make our own, all together, Your constant and fervent appeal for peace, so that all wars may cease.
Allow me, Holy Father, to also serve as an interpreter of the deep affection and greetings of our young people, who by the hundreds await You outside the Basilica with eager anticipation, hoping to embrace You and hear Your word.
In this time of ours, marked by “rarefied relationships reduced to mere images,” our young people ardently wish to rediscover and reclaim the profound meaning of the Mystery of the Incarnation.
They do not want to be passive spectators, but a living and leading Christian presence, capable of renewing the current climate of distrust and indifference caused by an increasingly individualistic and relativistic culture — restoring at the centre the sincere pursuit of joy and life, the authentic sense of community, and the inalienable respect for the dignity of the human person.
Together with them, we rediscover the legacy of our Holy Founders, Marinus and Leo: the historic Libertas as a gift of self and the building of a true «house of peace».
Thank you, Holy Father, for coming to embrace our small and extraordinary diocesan community — a discreet reality, yet vibrant with faith and simplicity.
In smallness lies and is preserved the humanity that will save us from every inhuman drift.
We ask You to confirm us in the faith and to bless our steps, so that this land may continue to be a womb of disciples and a dwelling place of hope».
