Portside

Two Takes

(1)

Bill Moyers Essay: Joblessness is Killing Us

Moyers and Company
September 27, 2013

http://billmoyers.com/segment/bill-moyers-essay-joblessness-is-killing-us-the-pope-says-so-%C2%A0/

    Moved by the plight of the poor and unemployed, Pope Francis recently decried a global economy that “does us so much harm.” In this essay, Bill Moyers reflects on our broken economy.

BILL MOYERS: When Kumi Naidoo’s mother urged him to see God in the eyes of every human being that you meet, she was echoing a sentiment once expressed by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, who told the devout to “seek and find God in all things.” You may recall that Ignatius founded the Jesuits, and now there is a Jesuit pope, the first in Catholic Church history.

Last weekend, Pope Francis visited Sardinia, the Mediterranean island known for its white sand beaches and deluxe vacation homes owned by the rich and famous. Now Sardinia is blighted by closed factories and mines operating at low capacity. Thousands are out of work, including 50 percent of its young people.

Last year, in an effort to keep their jobs, workers in Sardinia barricaded themselves in front of a mine packed with almost 700 kilograms of explosives. One miner told the cameras, “We cannot take it anymore. We cannot. We cannot … Is this what we have to do?” And slit his wrist on live TV.

The pope met with some of those unemployed workers, including Francesco Mattana; 45 years old, married, father of three children, unemployed now for four years after losing his job with an alternative energy company.

Mattana told Pope Francis how unemployment, “oppresses you and wears you out to the depths of your soul.”

The pope was so moved, he put aside his prepared speech and talked spontaneously of the suffering he was seeing, suffering that “weakens” and “robs you of hope,” he said.

“Where there’s no work, there’s no dignity.” The consequence, the Pope said, of a system that has at its center an idol called money.

The crowd of 20,000 cheered. And when the Pope told them, you must fight for work, they cheered again, and broke into a chant that the pope heard as a prayer for work, work, work.

At that moment, Pope Francis was not just the head of the Catholic Church. Rather, he embodied the heart of a catholic cry for justice, small “c” catholic, a universal aspiration expressed in our country by the promise that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is the birthright of every citizen.

Surely, that’s not hard to understand. What the richest parents want for their children is what the poorest parents want for theirs. Measure their aspiration, however, against the fact that more than 21 million Americans are still in need of full time work, many of them running out of jobless benefits.

The richest 400 Americans are now worth a combined $2 trillion, while new figures from the Census Bureau show that the typical middle class family makes less, less than it did in 1989, with roughly 46 million people living at or below the poverty line. With the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percentage of kids in poverty than we do. Yet the House of Representatives has just cut food stamps for people who don’t have enough money to feed themselves.

Listen. That sound you hear is the shredding of the social contract. And look at this heading above a piece in the current Columbia Journalism Review, “The line between democracy and a darker social order is thinner than you think.” If that doesn’t send a shiver down the spine, I don’t know what it will take to wake us up.

So Pope Francis and Kumi Naidoo speak the truth, in different accents and with different metaphors, but their message boils down to this, capitalism is like fire, a good servant but a bad master. If we don’t dethrone our present system of financial capitalism that rewards those at the top who then use it to rig the rules against even the most reasonable check on their excesses, It will consume us. And that fragile, thin line between democracy and a darker social order will be extinguished.

(2)

Pope, in Sardinia, Denounces Globalization and Unemployment

By Francis X. Rocca
Catholic News Service
September  23, 2013

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1304006.htm

VATICAN CITY

Visiting an Italian region especially hard hit by the European economic crisis, Pope Francis blamed high unemployment on globalization driven by greed and said those who give charitable aid to the poor must treat their beneficiaries with dignity.

"We want a just system, a system that lets all of us get ahead," the pope said Sept. 22, in his first address during a full day on the Italian island of Sardinia. "We don't want this globalized economic system that does us so much harm. At its center there should be man and woman, as God wants, and not money."

Sardinia has an overall unemployment rate of nearly 20 percent, rising to nearly 50 percent among young adults.

Before speaking to a crowd of about 20,000 near the Cagliari city port, Pope Francis heard a series of speeches in greeting, including one from an unemployed father of three, who spoke of how joblessness "wears you out to the depths of your soul."

In response, the pope discarded his prepared remarks and told his audience what he said "comes to me in my heart seeing you in this moment."

Pope Francis recalled the struggles of his immigrant Italian father in 1930s Argentina.

"They lost everything. There was no work," he said. "I was not born yet, but I heard them speak about this suffering at home. I know this well. But I must tell you: courage."

The pope said he knew that his preaching alone would mean little to those in difficulty.

"I must do everything I can so that this word 'courage' is not a pretty fleeting word, not only the smile of (a) cordial church employee," he said. "I want this courage to come out from inside and push me to do all I can as a pastor, as a man. We must all face this historic challenge with solidarity and intelligence."

The pope said that the current economic crisis was the "consequence of a global choice, of an economic system that led to this tragedy, an economic system centered on an idol, which is called money."

In his undelivered remarks, which the pope said should be considered "as if they had been spoken," he thanked those entrepreneurs who, "in spite of everything, have not ceased to commit themselves, to invest and take risks to guarantee employment."

The pope emphasized the need for "dignified work," lamenting that that crisis had led to an increase in "inhumane work, slave labor, work without fitting security or without respect for creation."

Pope Francis said that a commitment to the natural environment could actually stimulate job creation in fields such as energy, environmental protection and forestry.

The pope celebrated Sunday Mass in a square outside the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Bonaria, the namesake of his native city of Buenos Aires. Pope Francis originally announced his trip to Sardinia to venerate the statue of Mary there.

Calling for solidarity with the neediest in society, the pope concluded his homily by urging his listeners to "see our brothers and sisters with the gaze of the Madonna, she who invites us to be true brothers."

He prayed to Mary to "give us your gaze, may no one hide it from us. May our childlike heart defend it from so many windbags who promise illusions, from those who avidly look for an easy life, from promises that cannot be fulfilled."

At an afternoon gathering with poor people and prisoners who had been taken to the Cagliari cathedral, Pope Francis had strong words for those who practice charity in the wrong spirit.

"Charity is not simply welfare, much less welfare to soothe one's conscience," he said. "That's not love, right? It's business, a transaction. Love is free.

"Sometimes one finds arrogance, too, in those who serve the poor," the pope said. "Some make themselves pretty, they fill their mouths with the poor; some exploit the poor in their own interests or those of their group.

"This is a grave sin, because it means using the needy, those in need, who are the flesh of Jesus, for my vanity," the pope said. "It would be better for these people to stay home."

Copyright (c) 2013 Catholic News Service