Pope Francis’s concern for social justice sometimes makes people nervous. What they perhaps don’t realize is that he’s saying the same thing as his predecessors.
Below is a brief passage from Pope Benedict’s inaugural encyclical, on love. He warns us that sometimes our social thinking is more worried about progress than about real live people today. Yes, we should work for a more efficient market down the road. But let us keep everything subservient to real live human beings.
What could this mean for us, in our day-to-day life?
What we have here, though, is really an inhuman philosophy. People of the present are sacrificed to the moloch of the future—a future whose effective realization is at best doubtful.
One does not make the world more human by refusing to act humanely here and now. We contribute to a better world only by personally doing good now, with full commitment and wherever we have the opportunity, independently of partisan strategies and programmes.
The Christian’s programme —the programme of the Good Samaritan, the programme of Jesus—is “a heart which sees”. This heart sees where love is needed and acts accordingly.
–Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est?
