Strong businesses that care about workers as well as profits are essential for a thriving democracy, Pope Francis has told steel workers in Genoa.
Speaking at a struggling factory on Saturday, the Pope said it was from the Genoa port that his father and grandparents had emigrated to Argentina.
He said the “world of work was a priority for the Pope” and lamented that a modern “illness” of the economy was the “progressive transformation of entrepreneurs into speculators”.
The speculator, similar to Jesus’s money-changers, “does not love his company [and] does not love his workers, but sees the company and the workers only as means to a profit”, the Pope said. “When work is weakened, it’s democracy that enters into crisis,” he added.
Pope Francis also warned against the idea of “meritocracy” in the workplace. The idea, he said, takes a positive, “merit”, and “perverts it” by mistaking as merits the “gifts” of talent, education and being born to a family that is not poor.
“Through meritocracy, the new capitalism gives a moral cloak to inequality,” because seeing gifts as merit, it distributes advantages or keeps in places disadvantages accordingly, he said. Under such a system, “the poor person is considered undeserving and, therefore, guilty. And if poverty is the fault of the poor, then the rich are exonerated from doing anything.”
During his one-day visit the Pope had lunch with 120 refugees, migrants and homeless people. He also met priests and Religious, visited a paediatric hospital, greeted young people at a Marian shrine and celebrated Mass for 80,000 people.
Vatican officials to consider Cause of Vietnam War hero
A tribunal of the US Archdiocese for the Military Services has finished a four-year inquiry into whether Fr Vincent Capodanno, a Vietnam War hero and US Navy chaplain, should be considered a saint.
Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who leads the archdiocese, announced that the archdiocesan phase of the Cause had concluded. The tribunal’s findings will be sent to the Vatican’s Congregation for Saints’ Causes for review and a possible decision on whether the priest lived a life of “heroic virtue”. Archbishop Broglio called Fr Capodanno, who died in Vietnam in 1967, one of the “great priest chaplains”. Fr Capodanno, who served with the Marines, died in Operation Swift in Que Son Valley. He went among the wounded and dying, giving last rites. Wounded in the face and hand, he went to help an injured corpsman only yards from an enemy machine gun and was killed. He was 38.
His biographer Fr Daniel Mode quoted Marine Corporal Keith Rounseville: “Chaplain Capodanno looked and acted cool and calm, as if there wasn’t an enemy in sight. As he reached the wounded marine, Chaplain Capodanno lay down beside him and gave him aid and verbal encouragement.”
Premier attends son’s first Mass
Poland’s Prime Minister Beata Szydło attended a Mass celebrated by her son on Sunday.
Fr Tymoteusz Szydło, 25, was celebrating his first Mass after being ordained a priest the day before.
The prime minister said she and her husband, Edward Szydło , were “very happy and proud”.
Szydło leads a government of the Law and Justice party, which is influenced by Church teaching on marriage and abortion.
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