“But since manufacturing and industry have so rapidly pervaded and occupied countless regions, not only in the countries called new, but also in the realms of the Far East that have been civilized from antiquity, the number of the non-owning working poor has increased enormously and their groans cry to God from the earth. Added to them is the huge army of rural wage workers, pushed to the lowest level of existence and deprived of all hope of ever acquiring ‘some property in land.’ ”
—Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno
On October 28, 2014, in the Old Synod Hall, Pope Francis welcomed over two hundred participants at the world meeting of popular movements organized by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.1 He said that “empty promises” cannot be the answer to the poverty in which many people are reduced around the world: farmers (campesinos); temporary workers and migrants; cardboard collectors and street vendors. But it is important to fight “against the structural causes of poverty.” This eloquent and personal speech is worth rereading. Pope Francis read it in Spanish and announced that in the encyclical on ecology, Laudato Sì, which has recently been released, the popular movements’ “concerns” will have their place in it as well.
The meeting at the Vatican “is a sign, it is a great sign, for you have brought a reality that is often silenced into the presence of God, the Church and all peoples. The poor not only suffer injustice, they also struggle against it!”
Francis said that the poor “are not satisfied with empty promises, with alibis or excuses. Nor do you wait with arms crossed for NGOs to help, for welfare schemes or paternalistic solutions that never arrive; or if they do, then it is with a tendency to anaesthetize or to domesticate . . . and this is rather perilous.” “The poor,” added Francis, “are no longer waiting. You want to be protagonists. You get organized, study, work, issue demands and, above all, practice that very special solidarity that exists among those who suffer, among the poor, and that our civilization seems to have forgotten or would strongly prefer to forget.”
“Solidarity is a word that is not always well received. In certain circumstances it has become a dirty word, something one dares not say. However, it is a word that means much more than an occasional gesture of generosity. It means thinking and acting in terms of community. It means that the lives of all take priority over the appropriation of goods by a few.”
“It also means fighting,” continued Francis, “against the structural causes of poverty and inequality; of the lack of work, land and housing; and of the denial of social and labour rights. It means confronting the destructive effects of the empire of money: forced dislocation, painful emigration, human trafficking, drugs, war, violence and all those realities that many of you suffer and that we are all called upon to transform. Solidarity, understood in its deepest sense, is a way of making history, and this is what the popular movements are doing.”
Francis then stressed that the meeting with the popular movements was not “shaped by an ideology. . . . You do not work with abstract ideas; you work with realities such as those I just mentioned and many others that you have told me about. You have your feet in the mud, you are up to your elbows in flesh-and-blood reality. You carry the smell of your neighborhood, your people, your struggle! We want your voices to be heard—voices that are rarely heard. No doubt this is because your voices cause embarrassment, no doubt it is because your cries are bothersome, no doubt because people are afraid of the change that you seek. However, without your presence, without truly going to the fringes, the good proposals and projects we often hear about at international conferences remain stuck in the realm of ideas and wishful thinking.”
Therefore, we cannot face the scandal of poverty by promoting strategies of containment that only “tranquilize the poor and render them tame and inoffensive.” Francis also noted how “sad it is when we find, behind allegedly altruistic works, the other being reduced to passivity or being negated; or worse still, we find hidden personal agendas or commercial interests. ‘Hypocrites’ is what Jesus would say to those responsible.”
The pope instead commended the movement of peoples, especially their young and poorest members, hoping that the “promising breeze” becomes a “cyclone of hope” and recalling how the yearning for social justice and the overcoming of what Evangelii Gaudium called “inequality,” “should be within everyone’s reach, namely land, housing and work. However, nowadays, it is sad to see that land, housing and work are ever more distant for the majority.” “It is strange,” noted Francis, “if I talk about this, some say that the Pope is communist. They do not understand that love for the poor is at the centre of the Gospel. Land, housing and work, what you struggle for, are sacred rights. To make this claim is nothing unusual; it is the social teaching of the Church.”
Land was one of the key points of the meeting. “At the beginning of creation,” said the pope,
God created man and woman, stewards of his work, mandating them to till and to keep it. I notice dozens of farmworkers (campesinos) here, and I want to congratulate you for caring for the land, for cultivating it and for doing so in community. The elimination of so many brothers and sisters campesinos worries me, and it is not because of wars or natural disasters that they are uprooted. Land and water grabbing, deforestation, unsuitable pesticides are some of the evils which uproot people from their native land. This wretched separation is not only physical but existential and spiritual as well because there is a relationship with the land, such that rural communities and their special way of life are being put at flagrant risk of decline and even of extinction.
Francis then went on to talk about the issue of hunger: “The other dimension of this already global process is hunger. When financial speculation manipulates the price of food, treating it as just another commodity, millions of people suffer and die from hunger. At the same time, tons of food are thrown away. This constitutes a genuine scandal. Hunger is criminal, food is an inalienable right. I know that some of you are calling for agrarian reform in order to solve some of these problems, and let me tell you that in some countries—and here I cite Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church—‘agrarian reform is, besides a political necessity, a moral obligation.’ ”
A second key point was housing. Francis called for “a home for every family.”
We must never forget that, because there was no room in the inn, Jesus was born in a stable; and that his family, persecuted by Herod, had to leave their home and flee into Egypt. Today there are so many homeless families, either because they have never had one or because, for different reasons, they have lost it. Family and housing go hand in hand. Furthermore, for a house to be a home, it requires a community dimension, and this is the neighbourhood . . . and it is precisely in the neighbourhood where the great family of humanity begins to be built, starting from the most immediate instance, from living together with one’s neighbours. We live nowadays in immense cities that show off proudly, even arrogantly, how modern they are. But while they offer wellbeing and innumerable pleasures for a happy minority, housing is denied to thousands of our neighbours, our brothers and sisters including children, who are called elegant names such as “street people” or “without fixed abode” or “urban camper.” Isn’t it curious how euphemisms abound in the world of injustices! A person, a segregated person, a person set apart, a person who suffers misery or hunger: such a one is “urban camper.” It is an elegant expression, isn’t it? You should be on the lookout—I might be wrong in some cases; but in general, what lurks behind each euphemism is a crime.
The pope continued recalling what happens in big cities. “We live in cities that throw up skyscrapers and shopping centres and strike big real estate deals . . . but they abandon a part of themselves to marginal settlements on the periphery. How painful it is to hear that poor settlements are marginalized, or, worse still, earmarked for demolition! How cruel are the images of violent evictions, bulldozers knocking down the tiny dwellings, images just like from a war. And this is what we see today.”
In contrast to this situation, the pope emphasized again that there is the experience of those neighborhoods where “values endure that have been forgotten in the rich centres,” and where “public areas are not just transit corridors but an extension of the home, a place where bonds can be forged with neighbours. . . . How lovely are the cities that overcome unhealthy mistrust and integrate those who are different, even making such integration a new factor of development.”
The third key point cited by Francis was work: “There is no worse material poverty—I really must stress this—there is no worse material poverty than the poverty which does not allow people to earn their bread, which deprives them of the dignity of work. But youth unemployment, informality or underground work, and the lack of labour rights are not inevitable. These are the result of an underlying social choice in favour of an economic system that puts profit above man. If economic profit takes precedence over the individual and over humanity, we find a throw-away culture at work that considers humanity in itself, human beings, as a consumer good, which can be used and then thrown away.”
“This happens,” said the pope, “when the deity of money is at the centre of an economic system rather than man, the human person. Yes, at the centre of every social or economic system must be the person, image of God, created to ‘have dominion over’ the universe. The inversion of values happens when the person is displaced and money becomes the deity.”
Francis then commended all that the popular movements are doing: “Despite this throw-away culture, this culture of leftovers, so many of you who are excluded workers, the discards of this system, have been inventing your own work with materials that seemed to be devoid of further productive value. . . . But with the craftsmanship God gave you, with your inventiveness, your solidarity, your community work, your popular economy, you have managed to succeed, you are succeeding. . . . And let me tell you, besides work, this is poetry. I thank you.”
“From now on, every worker,” he added, “within the formal system of salaried employment or outside it, should have the right to decent remuneration, to social security and to a pension. Among you here are waste-collectors, recyclers, peddlers, seam-stresses or tailors, artisans, fishermen, farmworkers, builders, miners, workers in previously abandoned enterprises, members of all kinds of cooperatives and workers in grassroots jobs who are excluded from labour rights, who are denied the possibility of unionizing, whose income is neither adequate nor stable. Today I want to join my voice to yours and support you in your struggle.”
Finally, Francis spoke of peace in relation to ecology. “It is logical. There cannot be land, there cannot be housing, there cannot be work if we do not have peace and if we destroy the planet. These are such important topics that the peoples of the world and their popular organizations cannot fail to debate them. This cannot just remain in the hands of political leaders. All peoples of the earth, all men and women of good will—all of us must raise our voices in defence of these two precious gifts: peace and nature or ‘Sister Mother Earth’ as Saint Francis of Assisi called her.”
“Recently I said and now I repeat, we are going through World War Three but in installments.” Pope Francis mentioned again those “economic systems that must make war in order to survive,” pointing out that “arms are manufactured and sold and, with that, the balance sheets of economies that sacrifice man at the feet of the idol of money are clearly rendered healthy.”
“And no thought is given to hungry children in refugee camps; no thought is given to the forcibly displaced; no thought is given to destroyed homes; no thought is given, finally, to so many destroyed lives. How much suffering, how much destruction, how much grief. Today, dear brothers and sisters, in all parts of the earth, in all nations, in every heart and in grassroots movements, the cry wells up for peace: War no more!”
In the final part of his speech, Francis returned to talk about the integrity of creation:
An economic system centred on the deity money also needs to plunder nature to sustain consumption at the frenetic level it needs. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity, deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in terrible cataclysms which we see and from which you the humble suffer most—you who live near the coast in precarious dwellings, or so economically vulnerable that you lose everything due to a natural disaster. Brothers and sisters, creation is not a possession that we can dispose of as we wish; much less is it the property of some, of only a few. Creation is a gift, it is a present, it is a marvellous gift given to us by God so that we might care for it and use it, always gratefully and always respectfully, for the benefit of everyone. You may be aware that I am preparing an encyclical on ecology. Rest assured that your concerns will have their place in it.
“We talk about land, work, housing,” said Francis. “We talk about working for peace and taking care of nature. Why are we accustomed to seeing decent work destroyed, countless families evicted, rural farmworkers driven off the land, war waged and nature abused? Because in this system man, the human person, has been removed from the centre and replaced by something else. Because idolatrous worship is devoted to money. Because indifference has been globalized: ‘Why should I care what happens to others as long as I can defend what’s mine?’ Because the world has forgotten God, who is Father; and by setting God aside, it has made itself an orphan.”
Pope Francis concluded by saying that “some of you said that this system cannot endure. We must change it. We must put human dignity back at the centre and on that pillar build the alternative social structures we need. This must be done with courage but also with intelligence, with tenacity but without fanaticism, with passion yet without violence. And all of us together, addressing the conflicts without getting trapped in them, always seeking to resolve the tensions in order to reach a higher plane of unity, of peace and of justice.” Francis then said that Christians already have a guide to action, a “revolutionary” program: the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 and Luke 6 and the Last Judgment in Matthew 25.
“Moving towards a world of lasting peace and justice calls us to go beyond paternalistic forms of assistance; it calls us to create new forms of participation that include popular movements and invigorate local, national and international governing structures with that torrent of moral energy that springs from including the excluded in the building of a common destiny. And all this with a constructive spirit, without resentment, with love.”