Whether we realize it or not, prayer is the encounter of God’s thirst with ours. God thirsts that we may thirst for him. - John Paul II

It is helpful to recall that the death of the person is a single event, consisting in the total disintegration of that unitary and integrated whole that is the personal self. The death of the person, understood in this primary sense, is an event which no scientific technique or empirical method can identify directly. Human experience shows that once death occurs certain biological signs inevitably follow, which medicine has learnt to recognize with increasing precision. In this sense, the "criteria" for ascertaining death used by medicine today should not be understood as the technical-scientific determination of the exact moment of a person's death, but as a scientifically secure means of identifying the biological signs that a person has indeed died.

the Church took it upon herself to draw attention to the unjust distribution of goods, not only between different social groupings but between different regions of the world. In fact, the gap became increasingly evident between the rich North, which was growing richer, and the poor South, which continued to be exploited and penalized in many ways even after the end of the colonial era. Instead of diminishing, the poverty of the South was constantly increasing. Such are the consequences of unbridled capitalism, which makes the rich ever richer while forcing the poor into conditions of growing degradation.

philosophy must obey its own rules and be based upon its own principles; truth, however, can only be one.