One of the most serious emergencies today is that the world forgets about and does not attend to the common good and the needs of regular people, especially poor people, the head of the Pontifical Academy for Life said yesterday. Source: CNS.
“It is an emergency that risks being tragic because the common good cannot be decided or managed by just a few people,” especially, as it is now perhaps, by “the richest and the most powerful,” Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia said at a news conference at the Vatican.
Politics and many other institutions are at risk when they are “in the hands of a few and forgetting the common good of the entire planet,” he said.
Pope Francis, instead, from the very start of his pontificate, has been advocating that truth can be found in the “inner depth of the people,” the archbishop said.
The entirety of a people and community, but especially the poor “have a light that needs to be revealed in order to counter the power of the few”.
The archbishop’s comments came during his presentation of the academy’s 30th general assembly being held in Rome this week.
More than 130 academicians and another 200 guests are attending the conference, which concludes tomorrow, dedicated to addressing not only the “apocalyptic” outlook and attitude present in the world today but also trends putting people and the planet increasingly in danger.
Titled, “The End of the World: Crises, Responsibilities, Hopes,” the assembly brought together Nobel Prize laureates, planetologists, physicists, biologists, paleoanthropologists, theologians and historians to look at how everyone can and must come together to “save the world.”
Pope Francis sent a written message to participants, dated February 26, from Gemelli Hospital, noting the multiple crises facing humanity “in which wars, climate change, energy problems, epidemics, the migratory phenomenon and technological innovation converge.”
The multidisciplinary and global nature of these “critical issues, which currently touch on various dimensions of life, lead us to ask ourselves about the destiny of the world and our understanding of it,” he wrote.
People must not remain immobile, “anchored in our certainties, habits and fears,” he wrote, but must listen carefully to the world of science and encounter people and their stories.
Everyone and everything in the world is related and interconnected, which “can provide us with signs of hope,” he said.
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Only a united global family can fix crises, archbishop says (By Carol Glatz, CNS)
