James Mackenzie — Pope Francis attacks ‘throw-away’ economic globalization

Pope Francis launched a fresh attack on economic injustice on Saturday, condemning the “throw-away culture” of globalization and calling for new ways of thinking about poverty, welfare, employment and society. 

In a speech to the association of Italian cooperative movements, he pointed to the “dizzying rise in unemployment” and the problems that existing welfare systems had in meeting healthcare needs. 

For those living “at the existential margins” the current social and political system “seems fatally destined to suffocate hope and increase risks and threats,” he said.
The Argentinian-born pope, who has often criticized orthodox market economics for fostering unfairness and inequality, said people were forced to work long hours, sometimes in the black economy, for a few hundred euros a month because they were seen as easily replaceable. 

“‘You don’t like it? Go home then’. What can you do in a world that works like this? Because there’s a queue of people looking for work. If you don’t like it, someone else will,” he said in an unscripted change from the text of his speech. 

“It’s hunger, hunger that makes us accept what they give us,” he said..

“When money becomes an idol, it commands the choices of man. And thus it ruins man and condemns him. It makes him a slave,” he said. 

“Money at the service of life can be managed in the right way by cooperatives, on condition that it is a real cooperative where capital does not have command over men but men over capital,” he said [addressing the cooperative movement].

One America News Network
Pope Francis attacks ‘throw-away’ economic globalization

James Mackenzie