In a major statement "Fighting Poverty to Build Peace" for World Peace Day 2009, Pope Benedict has attacked the "unbridled pursuit of wealth and short term profit" as the root cause of poverty and the global food crisis.
In the 17 page message Pope Benedict said there was "a risk that in the world the rich will live in an ivory tower surrounded by a desert of poverty and degradation," The Times Online reports.
For the world of finance to focus on "short and very short term profit" posed "a threat to all, even for those who are able to reap benefits during periods of financial euphoria."
The current global financial crisis had "demonstrated how financial activity is only focused on itself without any consideration of the long term, the common good."
Finance has "lost its role as a bridge between the present and the future, in the creation of new production opportunities and employment in the long term," the pope wrote.
He called for a "common code of ethics" in a globalised world in which the gap between rich and poor was widening instead of being narrowed.
Globalisation "must be seen as an opportunity to achieve something important in the battle against poverty and offer peace and justice resources which until now have been unthinkable."
Pope Benedict said food shortages and high food prices were "not created by a lack of food as much as by the phenomenon of speculation and the inability of economic and political institutions to deal with needs and emergencies''. .
He urged governments to spend less on armaments and more on development, saying that "combating poverty means building peace."
Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, said the message was a "foretaste" or "antipasto" of the Pope's forthcoming encyclical on globalisation and poverty.
In the message Pope Benedict said the "conscience of humanity" could no longer ignore economic differences that had become more marked even in the more advanced countries. The pontiff said the global financial system had proved to be "extremely fragile".
The pope also called for disarmament, a fight against world hunger and child poverty and attacked some campaigns to reduce birth rates in order to help development, particularly those that promote abortion, Reuters adds.
"There are international campaigns afoot to reduce birth rates, sometimes using methods that respect neither the dignity of the woman, nor the right of parents to choose responsibly how many children to have," he said.
"... Graver still, these methods often fail to respect even the right to life. The extermination of millions of unborn children, in the name of the fight against poverty, actually constitutes the destruction of the poorest of all human beings," he said.
But the growth of population did not necessarily have to lead to greater poverty in a country, Pope Benedict said.
"... Among the most developed nations, those with higher birth rates enjoy better opportunities for development. In other words, population is proving to be an asset, not a factor that contributes to poverty," he said.
In a section on AIDS, the pope criticised donor nations and international organisations who he said were holding poor countries "hostage" by making economic aid conditional upon the implementation of what he called "anti-life policies".
SOURCE
Pope's New Year message released (Times Online, 11/12/08)
Pope brands financial system selfish, short-sighted (Reuters, 11/12/08)
LINKS
Fighting poverty to build peace (Pope Benedict, Message for World Day of Peace 2009)