Davos: Card. Turkson, we must change, because the earth and the poor are crying out
Intervention of religious leaders at the World Forum to "generate global awareness for change". The Oxfam report highlighted that wealth remains highly concentrated at the top of the distribution pyramid: the wealthiest 1%, in mid-2019, held more than double the net wealth owned by 6.9 billion people.
Vatican City (AsiaNews) - Pushing to urge awareness of the need to change the current world economic model due to which "the earth is crying and the poor are crying too". For this reason religious leaders went to the World Economic Forum which takes place in Davos, Switzerland, to speak "at the heart of great finance and the world economy".
Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson, prefect of the Dicastery for integral human development, spoke about a "global awareness for change" in his speech at the press conference held yesterday afternoon together with the ecumenical patriarch Bartholomew I and the chief rabbi of Moscow, Pinchas Goldschmidt.
The cardinal, who brought Pope Francis 'message to the meeting, argued that if, as the Pope says in the encyclical Laudato Si' the earth and the poor cry, there is an emergency that must be heeded, and "we must all seek to stop this crying ”.
The prefect continued that religious leaders are united, "because we want to generate global awareness for change." For Turkson, new technologies must not "determine what we are called to become", but must be used "for the common good, the good of humanity, of the earth and its inhabitants".
"There is no second planet to live in," he warned, before asking the political world and governments to recognize "the central role of religions and faiths", denouncing the practice, especially widespread in secularized countries, of " relegating religions to the private sphere, denying their influence in people's lives ".
To highlight the critical issues of the economic system, on the eve of the Forum the 2020 report of Oxfam was made public. Entitled Time to care, it highlights that global wealth, growing between June 2018 and June 2019, remains highly concentrated at the top of the distribution pyramid: the wealthiest 1%, in terms of assets, held more than double the wealth in mid-2019 net owned by 6.9 billion people.
Still: 2,153 billionaires in the world held more wealth than 4.6 billion people, about 60% of the global population. And the wealth of the 22 wealthiest people outweighed the wealth of all African women.
If the distances between the average wealth levels of countries narrow, wealth inequality grows in many countries. In a world where 46% of people live on less than $ 5.50 a day, disparities in income distribution remain strong, especially for job seekers. With an average work income of $ 22 per month in 2017, workers in the lowest 10% wage bracket would have had to work nearly three and a half centuries to reach the average annual wages of those in the top 10%.
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17/01/2017 17:14
