By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
Pope Benedict XVI is urging participants in the G20 Summit in London to remember that “a key element of the crisis is a deficit of ethics in economic structures” and to avoid solutions marked by “nationalistic selfishness or protectionism.”
In a letter addressed to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the Pope applauded the participants’ “noble objectives” that arise from the conviction “that the way out of the current global crisis can only be reached together, avoiding solutions marked by any nationalistic selfishness or protectionism.”
He reiterated the goals of the gathering, which are to stabilize financial markets and enable businesses and families to weather the recession as well as to reform and strengthen systems of global governance in order to ensure that a similar crisis never happens again.
However, he noted in his letter that only one state in sub-Saharan Africa was represented at the meeting. This, he writes, “must prompt a profound reflection among the summit participants, since those whose voice has least force in the political scene are precisely the ones who suffer most from the harmful effects of a crisis for which they do not bear responsibility.”
After underlining how “a key element of the crisis is a deficit of ethics in economic structures”, the Pope insisted that “the same crisis teaches us that ethics is not ‘external’ to the economy but ‘internal’ and that the economy cannot function if it does not bear within it an ethical component.”
In his letter, he also emphasised the need for “a courageous and generous strengthening of international co-operation, capable of promoting a truly humane and integral development. Positive faith in the human person, and above all faith in the poorest men and women – of Africa and other regions of the world affected by extreme poverty – is what is needed if we are truly to come through the crisis once and for all, without turning our back on any region, and if we are definitively to prevent any recurrence of a situation similar to that in which we find ourselves today.”
He concluded his letter by expressing the wish to add his voice to those organizations such as the United Nations Millennium Summit who have committed themselves to eliminating extreme poverty by 2015, saying this commitment “remains one of the most important tasks of our time.”
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