The Church and believers cannot remain insensitive and passive, therefore, before the multiplication of denunciations of torture and ill-treatment practiced in various countries on persons arrested interrogated or else put in a state of supervision or confinement. While Constitutions and legislation make room for the principle of the right to defense at all stages of justice, while proposals are put forward to humanize places of detention, it is obvious, nevertheless, that techniques of torture are being perfected to weaken the resistance of prisoners, and that people sometimes do not hesitate to inflict on them irreversible injuries, humiliating for the body and for the spirit. How can one fail to be troubled when one knows that many tormented families send supplications in vain in favour of their dear ones, and that even requests for information pile up without receiving an answer? In the same way we cannot pass over in silence the practice, denounced on so many sides, which consists in putting on the same footing those guilty, or presumed such, of political opposition and persons who need psychiatric treatment, thus adding to their pain another motive, perhaps even harder to bear bitterness.
The address made to the Diplomatic Corps in 1978
