Vatican City, May 2, 2008 / 18:13 pm
Beginning today, the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences is meeting to study how to overcome the negative effects of globalization so that trend can be harnessed to build a "civilisation of the common good.”
Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences; Margaret Archer of the University of Warwick, England; and Pierpaolo Donati of the University of Bologna, Italy held a press conference at the Vatican today to announce the academy’s 14th plenary meeting. The summit will take place at the Vatican from May 2-6 and has the theme: "Pursuing the common good: how solidarity and subsidiarity can work together".
According to organizers, the goal of the conference "is to give new meaning and application to the concept of common good in this age of globalisation, which in certain fields is leading to growing inequalities and social injustice, laceration and fragmentation of the social fabric, in short, to the destruction of common goods throughout the world".
"The main hypothesis on which scholars are called to exchange their views is that the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity can, unlike the compromises between socialism and liberalism, mobilise new social, economic and cultural forces of civil society which, within politically-shared fundamental values, can generate those common goods on which the future of humanity depends.”