A few years ago for all persons of Filettino it was a great joy and surprise learn that Pope St John Paul II was occasionally to do his walks among the mountains that surround our country. For this reason we decided to name a path that begin from Serra S. Antonio and comes close near M. Viglio and that allows you to see the most beauty scenary in the whole chain of the Apennines. Personally I have been involved for several questions: why the Saint came here to spend the few moments of rest at his disposal? Having stayed there several times what he found in the places? It is well known that the Saint has always been a lover or nature but I think there was another reason that led them to these places: the beauty of Creation. Walking through these mountains and spectacular scenary is breathtaking and the reference to Jesus as principle and creative wisdom of all that exists, it allows you to give the right value of creation is a recognition of the presence of God in all creation. This common bond with the Creator God impelled St. Francis to call the nature "sister" and "mother". The Simbruini mountains are part of a region park and before its first constitution and after the birth of the Park of the Simbruini mountains, there was by the resident population a greatest respect and preservation of the natural beauty present. The natural world has laws and cycles by which to live in harmony and within which search freedom and progress because they are the school that God the Father has prepared for every man to learn patience and mystery of the rhytms and expectations, the greatness of life that dies and is reborn, the bond that unites all creatures.

This throught of the relationship with creation is frequently present in the words of St. John Paul II pionts out that among other things the moral value of the ecological crises.

"Man, who discovers his capacity to transform and in a certain sense create the world through his own work, forgets that this is always based on God's prior and original gift of the things that are. Man thinks that he can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to his will, as though it did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which man can indeed develop but must not betray. Instead of carrying out his role as a co-operator with God in the work of creation, man sets himself up in place of God and thus ends up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature, which is more tyrannized than governed by him.

In all this, one notes first the poverty or narrowness of man's outlook, motivated as he is by a desire to possess things rather than to relate them to the truth, and lacking that disinterested, unselfish and aesthetic attitude that is born of wonder in the presence of being and of the beauty which enables one to see in visible things the message of the invisible God who created them.

From these and many other words of the Pope is clear that the nature is not only a directional arrow to indicate the presence of God as almost always it has been understood in the church, but has its inherent richness that comes from this bond and become a teacher for the man of real life. The path St. John Paul II but also all the other way in our mountains hannotin if such beauty and natural landscape to fill the eyes and hearts of those who want to throw themselves in the nature and fully understand the feeling of closeness to God and to themselves.

The Mayor
Dr. Paolo De Meis