Pope: Don’t forget workers left on to the margins by pandemic
Pope Francis addressed an International Labour Organisation (ILO) summit last Thursday, calling for dignified working conditions and support for workers on the margins of the labour market still affected by pandemic losses.
“In 2020, we saw an unprecedented loss of employment all over the world. In our haste to return to greater economic activity, at the end of the Covid-19 threat, let us avoid excessive fixations on benefit, isolation and nationalism, blind consumerism, and denial of the clear evidence of discrimination against our ‘dispensable’ brothers and sisters in our society,” the Pope said via a video message to the ILO’s World of Work Summit on June 17.
“On the contrary, let us look for solutions that will help us build a new future of work based on decent and dignified working conditions, originating in collective negotiation, and promoting the common good, a phrase that will make work an essential component of our care for society and creation.”
US President Joe Biden, South Korean President Moon Jae-in, and Félix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo, the president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, also addressed the summit on the same day.
Secretariat, bishops begin discussing new synod process
After issuing revised guidelines for preparing for the next world Synod of Bishops, leaders of the synod’s general secretariat held online meetings with the presidents and general secretaries of national and regional bishops’ conferences.
Cardinal Mario Grech, secretary of the synod, and the office’s two undersecretaries, Xaviere Missionary Sr Nathalie Becquart and Bishop Luis Marín de San Martín, were holding the meetings June 14-18 in sessions divided by language.
In revisions to the synod process announced May 21, Pope Francis has asked that it begin with consultations with laypeople on the diocesan level before the discussion and discernment moved to a national level and then the 2023 synod assembly itself.
“Without this consultation, there would be no synodal process, because the discernment of pastors, which constitutes the second phase, emerges from listening to the people of God,” Cardinal Grech had explained in May.
After the first couple of meetings with leaders of bishops’ conferences, the cardinal said the reaction was “surprising, very positive, and there is a lot of enthusiasm among the bishops we have heard”.
Faith leaders to discuss climate change in Vatican in October
On the feast of St Francis, October 4, leaders of world religions or their representatives will meet at the Vatican and in Rome to draft a statement to government leaders who will gather in Scotland in November for COP26, the UN climate summit.
The British and Italian embassies to the Holy See and the Vatican Secretariat of State have hosted six virtual meetings since February with close to 40 leaders from world religions and 10 top climate scientists.
The leaders had a chance to share their faith’s understanding of creation and the human responsibility to care for it, and the scientists updated them on the latest research.
Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican foreign minister, has been part of the discussions. He told reporters June 17 it was “highly likely” that Pope Francis would be involved in the October meeting, but said he could not comment on reports that Pope Francis would travel to Glasgow in November for the COP26 meeting itself.
“If the Holy Father goes, it’s in the competence of the trip organisers and that ain’t me,” he said with a chuckle.