At the UN, the Pope linked misuse of environment to “process of exclusion” of weak and the disadvantaged. He called it part of our “growing culture of waste,” a situation of “exclusion and inequality” with “baneful consequences: human trafficking, the marketing of human organs and tissues, the sexual exploitation of boys and girls, slave labor, including prostitution, the drug and weapons trade, terrorism, and international organized crime.”
Of course, directed at world leaders who give in to greedy corporate development initiatives.
But Pope made me feel guilty for being an infrequent recycler and a non-composter.
Appealed to leaders to “ensure that our institutions are truly effective in the struggle against all these scourges.”
To do that, people must be allowed to be “dignified agents of their own destiny.” Education. For girls too, he said. And at absolute minimum, social development to support a family required “lodging, labor, and land; and one spiritual name, spiritual freedom, which includes religious freedom, the right to education and other civil rights.”
And he linked it all back, to the ecological crisis which can threaten the human species.
Complex speech because of multiple audiences of varying means.
But the church isn’t t called catholic for nothing. The pope is delivering a universal message, that correcting the world’s ills is going to take real action, and not just prayer.
