At Georgetown/On Faith, Katherine Marshall argues the weak economy is crippling the world’s poor, but no one seems to notice. That is, no one but the faith communities:
Two billion people are struggling with poverty, yet the subject is strangely absent from current political discourse. Financial pages and wires track stock prices second by second, but signs of worsening poverty-infant and maternal death rates, lower infant birth weights, malnutrition, crime, disease-take months to emerge. So we can, sadly, expect more evidence of the “four horsemen of the apocalypse” that protesters in London last week carried in effigy: war, climate chaos, financial crimes and homelessness.
Religious communities see the economic crisis as an issue that is tightly linked to justice and ethics, and the recent G20 discussions have prompted outraged responses from a new chorus of faith leaders. “It is difficult to understand,” said Peruvian interfaith leader Elias Szczytnicki, “how earlier, resources to fight hunger could not be found, but now far larger sums are being mobilized to save the international financial system.”
Wise and angry, shocked and forlorn, the voices from churches, mosques, and synagogues are demanding that technocrats confront the human face of the crisis. The huge income gaps in our societies signal something fundamentally amiss, they say, and demands are mounting for deep changes in the international financial system so it can provide far more generous help to poor countries.
Read the full piece here.