Catholic social teaching has useful principles that can help people of any faith to improve the world, Pope Francis said in his message to the fourth World Meeting of Popular Movements.
“The social teaching of the Church does not have all the answers, but it does have some principles that along this journey can help to concretize the answers, principles useful to Christians and non-Christians alike,” the pope said Oct 16.
The meeting brought together leaders of cooperatives and other grassroots organizations of the poor, the underemployed, indigenous communities and farmworkers.
“We have all suffered the pain of lockdown, but as usual you have had the worst of it,” the pope told members of the groups.
“Migrants, undocumented persons, informal workers without a fixed income were deprived, in many cases, of any state aid and prevented from carrying out their usual tasks, thus exacerbating their already grinding poverty,” he said.
And while one-third of the world’s people live in such precarious situations, they garnered almost no media attention, but remained “huddled together and hidden.”
He said the principles compiled in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, a manual of the Catholic Church’s social teaching, are “tested, human, Christian.”
“I recommend that you read it, you and all social, trade union, religious, political and business leaders,” he said.
According to their website, Popular Movements purpose is to create an “encounter” between Church leadership and grassroots organizations working to address the “economy of exclusion and inequality” by working for structural changes that promote social, economic and racial justice.
Pope Francis compared popular movements to the Good Samaritan. He said that these two things reminded him of the protests because of George Floyd’s death, a 46-year-old black man killed in 2020 by police officer Derek Chauvin.
Protests against police brutality were organized across the US and in other parts of the world in the wake of Floyd’s unjust death.
“It is clear that this type of reaction against social, racial or macho injustice can be manipulated or exploited by political machinations or whatever, but the main thing is that, in that protest against this death, there was the Collective Samaritan who is no fool!” Pope Francis said.
“This movement did not pass by on the other side of the road when it saw the injury to human dignity caused by an abuse of power. The popular movements are not only social poets but also collective Samaritans.”