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The financial and economic crisis that has been sweeping the world since 2007 led the Pope to call for a “profound reform” of the system. Its “financialization,” caused by speculation and greed, is a blow to human dignity by harming more and more people. To put it in numbers: for the first time in history, a billion people are malnourished.
Based on the lastest papal encyclical and in the proposals of great Catholic thinkers, John Medaille defends an alternative economic system that avoids the errors of both capitalism and socialism. He says: “We have abandoned justice on a global scale, which has led to chronically unbalanced trade. When trade is chronically unbalanced, it is not really “a trade” at all. Rather, it is a system by which foreign producers finance our consumption of their goods, a system that impoverishes both parties.” That’s why he chooses this third way, called distributism, a really free market based on people’s choices and communitarian bonds.
Missionary activity finds its own ultimate goal in personal, social and cosmic salvation from all experiences and effects of the mystery of evil. A liberation which depends always on the presence and action of Jesus – be it explicit or implicit. Mission is always at the service of the fullness of life to be proclaimed, to be spearheaded, to be proposed in its totality and globality here and hereafter. A fullness whose paradigm is the Risen Christ. Mission cannot but serve reconciliation and promotion of communion and solidarity among all human groups, religions, genders and classes.
Jesus didn’t answer the question. It is very complex and requires the answer to a previous question: “What is salvation?” The issue is a mystery and should be approached with humility. For Jesus, however, salvation is a gift from God that can be achieved by denying ourselves, following His example, for the benefit of all.
Father Fabio Gilli, 75, is a visually-impaired Italian Comboni missionary. He became blind when he was in his mid-30’s. Blindness made him find a new light and opened the eyes of his heart to the reality of the blind of Togo. He returned to the country where he had previously worked and dedicated his life to this newly-found mission. Two centers and two clinics are the visible signs of his care for the neglected blind.
Described by critics as “the prince of paradox,” by his wife as “the jolly journalist” and by others as “a beneficent bomb,” the English writer G. K. Chesterton is one of the most remarkable figures of the early twentieth century. A modern intellect, he strove for integrity; his religious faith and conversion to Catholicism inspired his greatest books and profoundly influenced other great literary converts like C.S. Lewis, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. A large man in every sense, perhaps his greatest discovery was that ‘the secret of life lies in laughter and humility.” The Church may soon honor him as a saint.
“In your articles, you insist on the value of poverty, on the necessity for the Church and missionaries not to have material ties. If, however, the Church would divest itself of all goods, wouldn’t it end by being itself crushed and lose every possibility of influencing society?”
– Claudio (Via e-mail)
