On Wednesday Pope Francis said the current health crisis is proof the world’s wealth is controlled by “a few rich people,” which he says amounts to “an injustice that cries out to heaven.”
“We must say it simply: the economy is sick,” the pope wrote in a letter. “It has become ill. It is sick. It is the fruit of unequal economic growth — this is the illness: the fruit of unequal economic growth — that disregards fundamental human values.”
Pope Francis blamed the wealthy for the pandemic, writing that it “disregards fundamental human values” and stressed the “injustice” that a fraction of people “possess more than all the rest of humanity.” The pontiff also stated that economic inequality is undeniably connected to the “damage inflicted on our common home,” planet Earth.
“I will repeat this so that it makes us think: a few rich people, a small group, possess more than all the rest of humanity. This is pure statistics,” he wrote. “At the same time, this economic model is indifferent to the damage inflicted on our common home. Care is not being taken of our common home.”
“We are close to exceeding many limits of our wonderful planet, with serious and irreversible consequences: from the loss of biodiversity and climate change to rising sea levels and the destruction of the tropical forests,” Francis wrote. “Social inequality and environmental degradation go together and have the same root: the sin of wanting to possess and wanting to dominate one’s brothers and sisters, of wanting to possess and dominate nature and God Himself.”
“But this is not the design for creation,” he said.
The pope also offered his opinions on how different governments have managed the coronavirus, highlighting that working from home and digital education are not practical choices for many non-wealthy people. Francis is known to weigh in on social-justice subjects and says these troubles are not new but that the health crisis has “exposed and aggravated” a deepening “inequality” among the prosperous and deprived.
The man who sits on the Vatican fortune then turned his attention to other people’s money, writing that “Property and money are instruments that can serve mission. However, we easily transform them into ends, whether individual or collective. And when this happens, essential human values are affected. The homo sapiens is deformed and becomes a species of homo œconomicus – in a detrimental sense – a species of man that is individualistic, calculating and domineering.”
In a bid to call people to action, the pope went on to say, “When the obsession to possess and dominate excludes millions of persons from having primary goods; when economic and technological inequality are such that the social fabric is torn; and when dependence on unlimited material progress threatens our common home, then we cannot stand by and watch. No, this is distressing. We cannot stand by and watch!”
The pope challenged people to use the health crisis as a chance to tackle an “economic system of social injustice and depreciating care for the environment.”
“May the Christian communities of the twenty-first century recuperate this reality — care for creation and social justice: they go together — thus bearing witness to the Lord’s Resurrection,” he wrote.
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the pope has addressed an audience from around the world, emphasizing that the pandemic reveals social inequality in many first world countries. He gave a personal blessing to the world in March during a service broadcast on television where he stated that the world would not “listen to the cry of the poor nor of our gravely ailing planet” before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We carried on regardless, thinking that we would stay healthy in a world that was sick,” he added.