ROME — Humanity needs a global reset because the unjust, pre-pandemic world is not worth going back to, Pope Francis asserted Monday.
In a message to the Paris Forum on Peace, the pope painted a dire picture of a pre-coronavirus world dominated by corruption, war, and capitalistic oppression.
“The reality we knew before the pandemic was that wealth and economic growth were reserved for a minority while millions of people were unable to meet the most basic needs and lead a dignified life,” Francis said, “a world in which our Earth was plundered by a myopic exploitation of resources, by pollution, by ‘disposable’ consumerism, and wounded by wars and experiments with weapons of mass destruction.”
“Return to normal would also mean a return to old social structures inspired by self-sufficiency, nationalism, protectionism, individualism and isolation,” he added, “and excluding our poorest brothers and sisters. Is this a future we can choose?”
Woke Pope Francis goes all in! Calls for ‘Green economics,’ ‘Green spirituality,’ and ‘Green education’! https://t.co/XE18kiUP0f
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) May 25, 2021
“In this globalized but torn world, the decisions we make today to get out of the crisis determine the ‘route’ of the generations to come,” he declared, and thus “we need a new way out” to “come out better than before.”
“Hope invites us to dream big and give space to the imagination for new possibilities,” he said. “Hope is bold and incentivizes action based on the knowledge that reality can be changed.”
Our conscience calls us “not to follow the easy way of returning to a ‘normality’ marked by injustice, but to accept the challenge of assuming the crisis as a concrete opportunity for conversion, transformation, to rethink our lifestyle and our economic and social system,” he said.
The pope’s vision for a new world begins with “a concrete collective commitment in favor of integral disarmament,” he noted.
