In his encyclical, Fratelli tutti, Pope Francis highlights the related practices of slavery, trafficking in person, women subjugated and forced to abort and kidnapping for organ harvesting or organ trafficking. He notes that, whether by coercion, deception, or by physical or psychological duress, human persons, created in the image and likeness of God, are deprived of their freedom, sold, and reduced to being another person’s property.
Read more >>
Cardinal Bo of Myanmar reflects on World Peace Day in the context of a nation of nearly 60 million that is trapped in the most appalling wars against its own people. This article is his World Peace Day message issued in his capacity as Chairman of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Myanmar.
Read more >>
Following the recent post on this blog about corruption, we thought we would follow up by one on the related theme of lobbying.
The subject of lobbying has had very little sustained treatment in Catholic social teaching, though Pope Francis has started to address the question. If anything, Catholic writers tend to regard lobbying in a rather positive way. And there is no doubt that lobbying has its positive dimensions, for example where Christian organisations are lobbying on behalf of the oppressed.
Read more >>
It can be argued that there should be a natural empathy amongst Catholics for globalisation. The Catholic Church desires to take the faith to the ends of the earth. Given this, why should commercial and cultural relationships not extend across borders too? Furthermore, it could be asked whether the hostility to foreigners or instinct for self-preservation (even if misguided) which often accompanies protectionism is a healthy way to conduct political, civil and economic relationships. Pope Francis, for example, has exhorted President Trump to build “bridges rather than walls”, referring to the former US president’s desire to reduce migration from Mexico using physical constraints.
Read more >>
Pope Francis has raised, in several of his talks and encyclicals, the problem of corruption. It is surprising how rarely this has featured explicitly in Catholic social teaching more generally because it is a major driver of poverty, injustice and miserable living conditions.
Read more >>
In the interview with Professor Grace mentioned in Part I of this post, I asked him about the areas where he believed more research was needed. He suggested three main areas: (i) Catholic Education and service for the Poor; (ii) the effectiveness of the spiritual, moral and social cultures of Catholic schools; (iii) the education and formation of Catholic school leaders and teachers. These themes are echoed by his friends and colleagues in interviews conducted over the last six months that are available in a compilation from the Global Catholic Education project. The interviews are organized around the following questions:
Read more >>
This is the first of two posts forming a tribute to Professor Gerald Grace who retired late last year. This post is an interview with Quentin Wodon who is a lead economist at the World Bank
Read more >>
In ‘Refuge Reimagined – Biblical Kinship in Global Politics’ Mark R. Glanville and Luke Glanville have created an innovative inter-disciplinary way to rethink conversations surrounding refugees and displaced people. Drawing on both theology and the subject area of international relations, each discipline representing the authors’ separate academic fields, Mark Glanville and Luke Glanville challenge us to rethink and re-imagine current arguments as individuals, as church communities, as a nation and as a globe, proposing instead a more compassionate response grounded in the notion of a biblical ethic of kinship.
Read more >>
There is a temptation to play down those aspects of Rerum novarum which related to private property. This encyclical was really about labour, it is argued. Or it is suggested that the right to property is only a secondary right subject to the universal destination of goods and therefore not important. Still others say it was an encyclical that, in this respect, reflected its time – a period when the Church’s property was under attack from extreme socialists.
Read more >>
As 2020 ended Pope Francis’s Fratelli tutti called with passion for the world to discover the energy to rediscover ‘lost dreams’. Building on his experience in Buenos Aires and his creation of a Pontifical Commission for Latin America to bring that region into the heart of the Roman Curia, he specifically suggested that a symbol of such a dream was a ‘patria grande’. The idea of ‘patria grande’, of course, has a long history in the Americas: part rallying cry of Simon Bolivar, part lament at the division of what had been ‘Spanish America’ and part radical social and economic project. Like many visions at scale it is fed by multiple sources.
Read more >>