Invited by mayor Enrique Tomás Cresto, this Monday the mayors and presidents of government boards of the municipalities of the Salto Grande region will join the Pact of San Antonio. The mayor of Merlo, Gustavo Menéndez, one of the promoters of the Pact who, under the spiritual guidance of Pope Francis, has brought together mayors from all over the country of different political affiliations, will participate in the ceremony.
This Monday, June 13, is the Day of the Patron Saint of Concordia, Saint Anthony of Padua. In this context, mayors from the entire region will participate together with Cresto and Menéndez in the mass that will be held at 10 a.m. at the Cathedral of Concordia, and in the afternoon they will sign the Pact of San Antonio de Padua, in a ceremony to be held at the Convention Center at 6 p.m.
The Pact, signed in January 2016 by mayors from all over the country at the Convent of the Franciscan Brotherhood in Merlo, coincides with the national agreement that the Catholic Church will sign with the different political parties at the National Eucharistic Congress in Tucumán. The Pact sets 10 points of management action, based on the Papal Encyclical Laudato Si, in order to take care of the Common Home that is Planet Earth and achieve better living conditions for the entire population.
The Pact has been promoted by the mayor of Merlo, Gustavo Menéndez, and the municipal president of Concordia signed it last February, being the first mayor from Entre Ríos to join. After the trip that both leaders made to the Vatican to participate in a public audience with the Supreme Pontiff, they returned with the objective of expanding the call, including to the entire continent, as suggested by Pope Francis himself.
In this sense, Cresto, together with the mayors and presidents of government boards of the InterMunicipal Consortium of Concordia, will receive the mayors of Federación, San Salvador, General Campos, Chajarí, Villa del Rosario, Feliciano, and representatives of the Mayor's Office of Salto, Oriental Republic of Uruguay, who will join the mayors from all over the country who have already signed the pact, to work together on the guidelines it establishes.
The 10 points of the Pact of Padua are:
1) Continue the active fight against drug trafficking;
2) Intensify actions for the prevention of drug addiction from childhood and support for the social reintegration of victims;
3) Work to eradicate hunger and child malnutrition;
4) Combat gender and domestic violence with the full weight of the law and the State;
5) Protect the family as the basic cell of society and human life from conception;
6) Encourage the use of low-carbon energy, including renewables;
7) Combat poverty;
8) Unify action criteria to guarantee universal access to Land, Housing, Work, health, quality education, and drinking water;
9) Promote cooperation to eradicate child labor and abuse, human trafficking, and all modern forms of slavery;
10) Promote regulations for the creation of Observatories for tasks of paradigm shifts, of individual and collective behaviors, summoning the resident, commercial, industrial, and other organized sectors, in order to take care of the Common Home that is Planet Earth together, within the framework of the encyclical Laudato si.