HuffPo | The global economic system is near collapse, according to Pope Francis.
An economy built on money-worship and war and scarred by yawning inequality and youth unemployment cannot survive, the 77-year-old Roman Catholic leader suggested in a newly published interview.
“We are excluding an entire generation to sustain a system that is not good,” he told La Vanguardia’s Vatican reporter, Henrique Cymerman. (Read an English translation here.) “Our global economic system can’t take any more.”
The pontiff said he was especially concerned about youth unemployment, which hit 13.1 percent last year, according to a report by the International Labor Organization.
"The
rate of unemployment is very worrisome to me, which in some countries
is over 50 percent," he said. "Someone told me that 75 million young
Europeans under 25 years of age are unemployed. That is an atrocity."
That 75 million is actually the total for the whole world, according to the ILO, but that is still too much youth unemployment.
Pope Francis denounced the influence of war and the military on the global economy in particular:
“We
discard a whole generation to maintain an economic system that no
longer endures, a system that to survive has to make war, as the big
empires have always done,” he said.
"But since we cannot wage the
Third World War, we make regional wars," he added. "And what does that
mean? That we make and sell arms. And with that the balance sheets of
the idolatrous economies -- the big world economies that sacrifice man
at the feet of the idol of money -- are obviously cleaned up."
