To The Existential Peripheries

Here: 

Pope Francis has attacked the “dictatorship” of the global financial system and warned that the “cult of money” was making life a misery for millions. He said free-market capitalism had created a “tyranny” and that human beings were being judged purely by their ability to consume goods.

Money should be made to “serve” people, not to “rule” them, he said, calling for a more ethical financial system and curbs on financial speculation. Countries should impose more control over their economies and not allow “absolute autonomy”, in order to provide “for the common good”.

The gap between rich and poor was growing and the “joy of life” was diminishing in many developed countries, the Argentinian Pope said, two months after he was elected as the successor to Benedict XVI. “While the income of a minority is increasing exponentially, that of the majority is crumbling,” said Francis, who as archbishop of Buenos Aires visited slums, opted to live in a modest flat rather than an opulent Church residence and went to work by bus. In poorer countries, people’s lives were becoming “undignified” and marked by violence and desperation, he said.

Francis made the strongly-worded remarks in his first major speech on finance and the economy, during an address to foreign ambassadors in the Vatican. It underlined a reputation he has established in the last two months for showing deep concern for the plight of the poor and vulnerable. “The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly human goal,” Francis told the ambassadors.

As the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Argentina, he often spoke out about the plight of the poor during the country’s economic crisis. Unchecked capitalism had created “a new, invisible, and at times virtual, tyranny”, said the former Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio. “The Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike, but the Pope has the duty, in Christ’s name, to remind the rich to help the poor, to respect them, to promote them,” he said.

Francis will make the first foreign trip of his papacy to Brazil in July, during which he will visit a slum in Rio de Janeiro and meet young prison inmates. He will attend World Youth Day, a week-long event which is expected to attract more than two million people. 

Here:

It’s been slow in coming [no, you just were not paying attention], but religious leaders are starting to speak out against the mechanisms and high social cost of austerity. One dramatic but ineffective effort was when the Archbishop of Cyprus offered to contribute all the church land in Cyprus to a rescue package. He also urged Cyprus to exit the eurozone. Archbishop Chrysostomos II of Cyprus said his country should withdraw from the European Union as the EU will fall apart and cease to exist in the future.

“The economies of Spain, Portugal and Italy are currently in danger. And if the economy of Italy is destroyed just like our economy, the EU will not withstand,” Archbishop Chrysostomos said in an interview with Russia’s Channel One television channel. “People who rule the European Union, and particularly those making decisions in the so-called troika, do not understand many things and it leads to the collapse of the EU. This is why I believe we [Cyprus] should withdraw from the union before the collapse takes place,” he added.

On May Day, the new pope called for less austerity and more jobs. From the New York Times via Daily Kos: “I think of how many, and not just young people, are unemployed, many times due to a purely economic conception of society, which seeks selfish profit, beyond the parameters of social justice,” the pope said. “I wish to extend an invitation to solidarity to everyone, and I would like to encourage those in public office to make every effort to give new impetus to employment.”

A much starker depiction of what is at stake came today in the Telegraph, when Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote up an interview with the Archbishop of Toledo. The prelate discussed not only the severity of individual suffering, but more important, the cracks in the social order. This is a much bigger danger, and one that the Troika seems to treat far too casually. Greece has been broken on the rack and is in the process of becoming a failed state. Ireland escaped a similar fate by having a disproportionately large export sector (over 100% of GDP) which meant deflating early was tantamount to a currency devaluation. Even so, large-scale emigration has also helped reduce the level of official unemployment.

Spain is going down the Greece path, and having such a large country unravel socially and politically is likely to have bigger, if not readily foreseen, consequences. Unemployment around Toledo is 31%, 4 points over the national average, and youth unemployment is a mind-numbing 64%. Distress is widespread:

Europe’s Catholic bishops know first-hand from their Cor Unum charitable network just how desperate it has become. “We can try to mitigate the effects by giving basic help to people left totally unprotected, but we can’t create jobs,” said the Archbishop. “We are seeing families who used to middle class needing help. This is totally new. As a matter of honour, they won’t come to us until they have exhausted everything.”…

Marisa Martinez, the volunteer director of Caritas in Toledo, said the Catholic charity is now helping 40,000 people in a province of 700,000, often with bags of food. Each family receives 12 kilos a month, mostly beans, oil, milk, and pasta. “We pass on whatever we get in donations. It is all done quietly to protect the dignity of the families. They take the food away and cook it at home,” she said.

Spanish bourgeois pride works to the government’s advantage, since people have to be willing to admit to their desperation in order to figure out how to work together to alleviate it. Even so, some commentators seem to think there’s a riptide beneath the resigned surface:

El Mundo fears a slow-fermenting ‘crisis of the regime’, with almost every institution — including the monarchy — in disrepute. It likens the mood to “pre-revolutionary” France in the late 1780s.

The Archbishop, speaking in the austere episcopal palace of Spain’s ancient capital, said the current crisis is doing far more damage than the recession in the mid-1990s when unemployment briefly spiked above 24pc. On that occasion peseta devaluations let Spain regain competitiveness and recover gradually despite austerity cuts.

This time the country seems trapped in slump. The long-term jobless rate is much higher. Unemployment benefits taper off after six months, and stop after two years. There are almost two million households where no family member has a job. 

Catholic leaders are pushing for change in an effort spearheaded by the “firebrand” cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich. Criticism from the church may be harder to brush off than that of politicians. Nevertheless, so far, the objections are carefully worded and mild in comparison to the level of distress. In advanced economies, except for pet issues like abortion, the Catholic Church has steered clear of politics [that is not true]. It’s not clear that mere finger wagging would do, and this Church lacks the appetite to encourage protests. But its leaders do have media access.

Given that there is now a rift among Eurozone leaders as to whether it is necessary to ease up on budget-trimming and focus more on growth, they might be able to provide more visceral images and stories of the long-term costs of putting budget targets over vulnerable social orders. But orthodox economic views are so deeply entrenched that having Catholic leaders speak out is likely to be too little, too late. And sadly, they seem to be the only prominent figures who can invoke the language of morality and justice against a cruel and destructive economic calculus.

And here:

“People are dying of hunger because of the crisis but all we talk about it banks,” Francis said during today’s vigil with Catholic lay movements in St. Peter’s Square, quoting a Jewish Midrash on the Tower of Babel construction site, where “if a brick fell out of place it was a tragedy, but if a builder fell it was as if nothing had happened.”

“Representing a poor Church for the poor breaks this mentality,” Bergoglio said speaking about the importance of ethics in public life. “The Church’s mission is not to close in on itself but to go out to the existential peripheries… Think of a room that has remained closed for a year; a closed church is a sick church; the church needs to go out to the existential peripheries, whichever these may be…,” the Pope continued.

“There are more martyrs today than there were back in the early centuries of the Church and they are brothers and sisters of ours. They retain their faith even to the point of martyrdom. But martyrdom is never a defeat, it is the highest expression of the faith,” Francis said sending the crowd of 200 thousand faithful into frenzied applause.

“The Holy Father knew what faithful’s questions would be and did make some notes but spoke off-the-cuff, the Holy See informed. The four questions addressed to Bergoglio during this afternoon’s “question time” with ecclesial movements focused on the following topics: the fragility of faith, evangelisation, ethics, politics, poverty, the lack of jobs and finally Christian persecution.

The first question was about how Pope Francis became certain of his faith and what advice he could give Catholics for overcoming the fragility of faith. The second question was: “What one thing should Catholic movements, associations and communities focus on to carry out the task we are called to perform? How can we communicate our faith efficiently today?”

“How I would like to see a poor Church working in service of the poor,” was the wish expressed by the third person who went up to address their question to the Pope: “How can we contribute in a concrete and effective way to the Church’s efforts to deal with this serious crisis that is affecting public ethics, the development model and politics?” Finally, the fourth question was dedicated to “our brothers who are suffering” because of their faith: “We want to do more, but what can we do? How can we help our brothers?”

Neocathecumenal leader Kiko Arguello, Catholic Action’s Franco Miano, the Community of Sant’Egidio’s Andrea Riccardi, the Focolare Movement’s Maria Voce and Salvatore Martinez of the Rinnovamento nello Spirito movement were among those present at the vigil. 150 ecclesial movements attended and they all had one common aim: “To tell today’s mankind that it cannot live without Christ and in order to do this we have to be reliable testimonies.”

The pilgrimage of Catholic lay movements will end tomorrow at 10:30 after the Holy Father’s mass. The Holy See newsroom reported there were 200.000 people present at today’s vigil, which is more than attended Pope Francis’ inauguration ceremony on 19 March (150.000 faithful).