Clearly siding with the world’s poor and marginalized in a video message for the Fourth World Meeting of Popular Movements, Pope Francis boldly declared, “Seeing you, reminds me that we are not condemned to repeat or to build a future based on exclusion and inequality, rejection or indifference; where the culture of privilege is an invisible and insurmountable power.”
Reflecting on the many crises around the globe, the pope continued, “Every person, every organization, every country, and the whole world, needs to look for moments to reflect, discern and choose, because returning to the previous mindsets would be truly suicidal and, if I may press the point a little, ecocidal and genocidal.” Ecocidal and genocidal are accurate words to describe what most of those who hold corporate, industrial, economic and political power are inflicting on our earth-home and all of humanity.
According to the Holy Father, “we have stopped questioning the scourge of the food crisis. Annual deaths from hunger may exceed those of COVID. But this does not make the news. If all those who out of love struggled together against the pandemic could also dream of a new world together, how different things would be!”
But resistance to just and loving changes runs deep, Francis says. “They are what the Social Teaching of the Church calls structures of sin, these too we are called to change. Personal change is necessary, but it is also indispensable to adjust our socio-economic models so that they have a human facet.”
In the name of God, Francis challenges many of the “structures of sin.”
“In the name of God, I ask the great extractive industries – mining, oil, forestry, real estate, and agribusiness – to stop destroying forests, wetlands and mountains, to stop polluting rivers and seas, to stop poisoning food and people.”
“In the name of God,” Pope Francis challenges:
• food corporations to end monopolistic systems that keep many people hungry;
• arms manufacturers and dealers to completely stop their unholy work;
• technology corporations to stop facilitating hate speech, fake news, conspiracy theories;
• the media to stop promoting post-truth, disinformation and attraction to dirt and scandal;
• powerful countries to stop aggression, blockades and unilateral sanctions, military invasions and occupations.
As a guiding Gospel-based light out of all of the darkness, Pope Francis urges us to read, study, pray and apply Catholic social teaching to all of the life and death issues facing humanity.
