LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) – Referring to the sin of idolatry, Pope Francis criticized the dominant economic climate where elites focus on building wealth but do little to employ youth. Such a culture also discards the elderly, writing them off as useless despite their wisdom.
The Pope delivered his comments in an interview with the Spanish paper, La Vanguardia. He said the economy was surviving “the the profits of war,” alluding to the constant warfare and big-budget arms deals that are constantly happening.
“Our world cannot take it anymore,” the Pope warned. “Our global economic system can’t take anymore.”
It’s a powerful warning that is sure to prove prophetic. Around the globe, mass youth unemployment, growing student debt, and the loss of opportunity are all combining with rises in sectarianism and a slow re-arming of the world with new and powerful weapons.
This is a recipe for global conflict. It is also has the makings of global evolution as the youth grow older and realize their future has already been mortgaged.
Now, more than ever the world needs the Church to reverse this trend of greed and the throwaway culture that fails to respect human life.
The idleness of so many youth is particularly troubling to Pope Francis who said that over 50 percent of the youth are experiencing chronic unemployment in some countries.
“We discard a whole generation to maintain an economic system that no longer endures – a system that to survive has to make war, as the big empires have always done,” he told the paper.
He continued, “The economy is moved by the ambition of having more and, paradoxically, it feeds a throwaway culture.”
“The rate of unemployment is very worrisome to me, which in some countries is over 50 percent. That is an atrocity.
“Young people are thrown away when their natality is limited. The elderly are also discarded because they don’t serve any use anymore.
“In throwing away the kids and elderly, the future of a people is thrown away because the young people are going to push forcefully forward and because the elderly give us wisdom,” Pope Francis concluded.
It was only a century ago that the world slumbered, blissfully unaware that defunct kings and emperors had built armies and fleets without practical use to their people. The sleeping world blundered to war over the short space of a summer. That conflagration, initially known as The Great War, and today, World War I, consumed tens of millions of lives, destroyed a generation, and made necessary a second sacrifice of millions more just two decades later.
It is difficult for those who know their history to avoid the comparison.
Is Pope Francis wrong? Only if we choose to heed his warning and make him so. It’s up to us to quit the worship of idols and money, and to respect all human life from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death. To do otherwise is to invite history to repeat itself.
