By Elise Harris
Vatican City, Oct 20, 2017 / 13:43 pm
Pope Francis met Friday with leaders in business and civil society, telling them not to get carried away by wealth and the demands of the global market, but rather to promote justice by eliminating the root causes of inequality.
"We must ask the market not only to be efficient in the production of wealth and in the assurance of sustainable growth, but also to be at the service of integral human development," the Pope said Oct. 20.
"We cannot sacrifice on the altar of efficiency – the 'golden calf' of our times – fundamental values such as democracy, justice, freedom, the family, and creation," he said, explaining that instead, "we must seek to 'civilize the market' with a view to an ethic friendly to man and his environment."
Pope Francis spoke to members of the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences, who are gathered in Rome for an Oct. 19-21 conference on "Changing Relations Among Market, State and Civil Society."
In his speech, the Pope spoke on the need to develop "new models of cooperation" among the market, the state, and civil society that more accurately respond to the challenges of our time.
Pointing to two primary causes which he said "nourish the exclusion of the existential peripheries," Francis said the sharp levels of inequality today are caused in large part by the exploitation of the planet and the lack of opportunity for dignified work.
The first cause, he said, "is the endemic and systemic increase of inequalities and of the exploitation of the planet, which is greater than the increase in income and wealth."
Both inequality and exploitation depend, aside from individual behaviors, on the economic rules "that a society decides to give themselves," he said, and pointed to energy production, the labor market, the banking system, the welfare system, the tax system, and the school sector as examples.
The more these are projected, the more they have consequences "on the way in which income and wealth are divided among those who have competed to produce them," he said. "If the aim of profit prevails, democracy tends to become a plutocracy in which inequalities and the exploitation of the planet grow."
Neither of these phenomena are inevitable or a historic constant, he said, asserting that "there are periods in which, in some countries, inequalities diminish and the environment is better protected."
Turning to what he said is another key cause of exclusion, the Pope focused on work "unworthy of the human person."
"Yesteryear, in the age of Rerum novarum, 'just wages for workers' were demanded. Today, beyond this sacrosanct exigency, we also ask ourselves why it has not yet been possible to translate into practice what is written in the Constitution Gaudium et spes: 'The entire process of productive work, therefore, must be adapted to the needs of the person and to his way of life'."
To this can be added, he said, respect for creation, referring to his 2015 encyclical Laudato si'.
In creating new opportunities for work "open and enterprising people, people of fraternal relations, of research and investment in the development of clean energy to resolve the challenges of climate change" are needed, he said, adding that this is concretely possible today.
He said it's also necessary "to get rid of the pressures of public and private lobbyists that defend sectoral interests," and stressed the need to "overcome forms of spiritual laziness."
"It is necessary for political action to be placed truly at the service of the human person, of the common good and of respect for nature."
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The explained that the challenge to meet "is to strive with courage to go beyond the prevailing model of social order prevalent today, transforming it from within," such that the market will serve integral human development, as well as the production of wealth.
He also addressed "the rethinking of the figure and the role of the nation-state in a new context which is that of globalization, which has profoundly modified the previous international order," the Pope said, explaining that the state "cannot understand itself as the sole and exclusive holder of the common good by not allowing intermediate bodies of society to express, in freedom, their full potential."
To do this, he added, "would be a violation of the principle of subsidiarity which, combined with solidarity, is a cornerstone of the Church's social doctrine."
The role of society, then, can be summed up with an image used by French poet Charles Peguy, who described the virtue of hope as the "younger sister" in the middle of the other theological virtues: faith and charity.
"Hope then moves, taking them by the hand and pulling them forward. This is how the position of civil society seems to me: 'pulling' the state and the market forward so that they can rethink their reason for being and how they operate."
