Scottish Catholic Observer

Pope Benedict XVI has said the world needs a new evangelisation to combat growing social inequality and the return of dangerous financial speculation after the global financial crisis.
The Holy Father was addressing participants in an international conference sponsored by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace to 50th anniversary of Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Mater et Magistra.

The Holy Father said his predecessor’s writing is still very applicable today.

“Pope Roncalli, with a vision of the Church at the service of the human family, especially through her specific evangelising mission, thought of social doctrine as an essential element of this mission,” he said. “For Blessed John XXIII, the social doctrine of the Church has Truth as its light, Love as its propelling force, and Justice as its objective, a vision of social doctrine, which I took up in the encyclical Caritas in Veritate, as testimony of that continuity that keeps united the entire corpus of the social encyclicals.”

Truth, love and justice, along with the principle of the universal destination of goods, are still the pillars to enable solutions to the injustice seen throughout the world, the Popesaid.

He lamented that after the acute phase of the financial crisis, the same problems have returned. He said the practice of dangerous speculation, for example, only results in graver problems for those who already live in precarious situations.

“Today’s social question is without a doubt a question of global social justice, as, moreover, Mater et Magistra reminded 50 years ago, although with reference to another context,” he said. “It is, in addition, a question of equitable distribution of material and immaterial resources, of globalisation of essential, social and participatory democracy.”

The Pope said a new evangelisation of the social realm must bring about justice at the universal level.

Such a justice, he said, cannot be achieved by ‘leaning on mere social consensus, without recognising that, to be lasting, it must be rooted in the universal human good.’