I can’t help noticing what Pope Francis has done in his address to the United Nations. Everyone out there, participating in the Reval and intending to use the sacred money they receive to create a world that works, just look at what he says in the last few paragraphs.
If you don’t know where to channel your funds, consider the discussion that he offers. I think he’s done a good job of providing us with a useful list and agenda for spiritually-based expenditures.
“Our world demands of all government leaders a will which is effective, practical and constant, concrete steps and immediate measures for preserving and improving the natural environment and thus putting an end as quickly as possible to the phenomenon of social and economic exclusion, with its baneful consequences: human trafficking, the marketing of human organs and tissues, the sexual exploitation of boys and girls, slave labour, including prostitution, the drug and weapons trade, terrorism and international organized crime. Such is the magnitude of these situations and their toll in innocent lives, that we must avoid every temptation to fall into a declarationist nominalism (1) which would assuage our consciences. We need to ensure that our institutions are truly effective in the struggle against all these scourges. …
“To enable these real men and women to escape from extreme poverty, we must allow them to be dignified agents of their own destiny. Integral human development and the full exercise of human dignity cannot be imposed. They must be built up and allowed to unfold for each individual, for every family, in communion with others, and in a right relationship with all those areas in which human social life develops – friends, communities, towns and cities, schools, businesses and unions, provinces, nations, etc. …
“At the same time, government leaders must do everything possible to ensure that all can have the minimum spiritual and material means needed to live in dignity and to create and support a family, which is the primary cell of any social development. In practical terms, this absolute minimum has three names: lodging, labour, and land; and one spiritual name: spiritual freedom, which includes religious freedom, the right to education and other civil rights.
“For all this, the simplest and best measure and indicator of the implementation of the new Agenda for development will be effective, practical and immediate access, on the part of all, to essential material and spiritual goods: housing, dignified and properly remunerated employment, adequate food and drinking water; religious freedom and, more generally, spiritual freedom and education. These pillars of integral human development have a common foundation, which is the right to life and, more generally, what we could call the right to existence of human nature itself.” (2)
Footnotes
(1) Politicians who do little else than make declarations? That’d be as close as he’d wish to come to saying “cabal,” I believe.
(2) Ryan Teague Beckwith, “Transcript: Read the Speech Pope Francis Gave to the United Nations,” Time Magazine, Sept. 25, 2015 at http://time.com/4049905/pope-francis-us-visit-united-nations-speech-transcript/
