Vatican City, Mar 18, 2010 / 09:11 am
The current economic crisis provides opportunities for the marketplace to find new and better ways of doing business, the Holy Father said to a group of businessmen meeting with him at the Vatican on Thursday. A “humanism” based on the knowledge of our role as individuals and a community in God’s one family, he told them, is needed to establish a “more competitive and civil marketplace.”
Speaking of the current crisis which has put economic and productive systems to the test in many countries, the Holy Father said that despite this situation, we should live these moments with “trust, because it can be considered an opportunity.” He referred specifically to the economic struggles as a time for a “revision of development models and of a new organization in the world of finance, a ‘new time’ ... of profound rethinking.”
Pope Benedict repeated the importance of one of the lessons in his most recent encyclical, “Caritas in veritate,” emphasizing that putting the person at the center of the economy is crucial and that ethical and spiritual concerns should be favored over those of strictly material and technical nature.
“Moreover,” the Pope continued, referring to his call for a reform of the U.N., “while recommending that politics not be subordinate to financial mechanisms, I encouraged the reform and creation of an international juridical and political order (adapted to global structures of economy and finance) in order more effectively to achieve the common good of the human family.”