Pope Francis said Wednesday that the coronavirus pandemic reveals that the world’s wealth is controlled by “a few rich people,” which is “an injustice that cries out to heaven.”
“We must say it simply: the economy is sick,” Francis wrote in a letter. “It has become ill. It is sick. It is the fruit of unequal economic growth — this is the illness: the fruit of unequal economic growth — that disregards fundamental human values.”
Francis emphasized the “injustice” that a small group of people “possess more than all the rest of humanity” and said that economic inequality is inextricably tied to the “damage inflicted on our common home,” the Earth.
“We are close to exceeding many limits of our wonderful planet, with serious and irreversible consequences: from the loss of biodiversity and climate change to rising sea levels and the destruction of the tropical forests,” Francis said. “Social inequality and environmental degradation go together and have the same root: the sin of wanting to possess and wanting to dominate one’s brothers and sisters, of wanting to possess and dominate nature and God Himself.”
Francis also criticized the way that many governments have handled the pandemic, pointing out that work-from-home situations and online education are not viable options for many poor people. The pope, who frequently comments on social justice issues, said that these problems are not new but that the pandemic has “exposed and aggravated” a widening “inequality” between the rich and poor.
Francis urged people to use the pandemic as an opportunity to address an “economic system of social injustice and depreciating care for the environment.”
“May the Christian communities of the twenty-first century recuperate this reality — care for creation and social justice: they go together — thus bearing witness to the Lord’s Resurrection,” he said.
Throughout the pandemic, Francis has spoken to a global audience, stressing that it reveals social inequality in many developed nations. In March, he blessed the world in a televised ceremony in which he said that the world had failed to “listen to the cry of the poor nor of our gravely ailing planet” before the coronavirus.
