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challenges to a better and a wholesome India, is then not limited to
the presence of indigents and declassified minorities, marginalized
peoples etc. It is most importantly the need to address the ethical
and moral forces underlying the various manifestations of evil in the
Indian society. It is the daunting task of addressing some of the
manifestations of what Pope Benedict XVI referred to in his homily
at the inaugural Mass of the 2 nd African Synod as the sickness of
the spirit, which the developed countries were transporting to
developing countries. It is the need to re-visit of the one area where
Christianity best makes a contribution: the area of ethics based on
truth and love.
The Yearning for a Better India as a Yearning for Integral
Human Development:
In his first social encyclical, Caritas in veritate, Pope
Benedict XVI roots himself deeply in the heritage of the Church’s
Social Teaching and its development of the principles of human
dignity, common good, the universal destination of the goods
of the earth, brotherhood of the human family, solidarity and
subsidiarity:
• To underline the centrality of the human person in all activities of
man: a commitment and responsibility for the well-being and the
common good of all.
• To remind man of his vocation to gift and transcendence, and so
to the evangelization of our world of inequalities and poverty with
a logic of gift and gratuitousness, with solidarity and
subsidiarity.
• To teach that man’s activity, with which he/she builds the earthly
city, makes the “earthly city” an anticipation of the universal
city of God when his/her activity is inspired by love (divine) and
justice, and when it seeks the well-being of the human person,
whole and entire.
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sabv 2012
359
sabv 2012
The persistence of poverty, global poverty, is the denial of
the actualization of this vision of the encyclical Caritas in veritate;
and it is perhaps the greatest challenge to the mission of the Church
too......being Church in the world.
Poverty in our world has been variously characterized as an
affront to civilization and a scandal; and you yourselves have
variously analyzed and diagnosed it at this conference. As you know,
at the beginning of this millennium, this scandal so provoked the
conscience of the United Nations that it formulated the Millennium
Development Goals. When it (UN) met in September 2010 to
evaluate the conduct of the MDG programme and their chances of
success, it became abundantly clear, at least to me and the delegation
of the Holy See, that our world is not only dealing with the eradication
of poverty of poor countries, which is essentially the poverty of
deprivation and its dehumanizing effects ... ie material poverty. It
became clear also that there is another type of poverty at work: a
spiritual poverty (a poverty of the mind and spirit, a poverty of
values, consistency and commitment, sincerity and goodwill, a poverty
of broken trust) which is closely related to the persistence of material
poverty. It readily disposes the world to solve material poverty
superficially and often by recourse to anti-life measures: eliminating
the poor rather than investing in and developing the resourcefulness
of the poor and making them the protagonists of their emergence
out of poverty. To do this, the poor must be made to know more
and have more in order to be more, as Benedict XVI affirms; and
as Mahbub Ul Haq and Amartya Sen postulate by calling for an
enhanced access to education and health.
More than 60 years ago, the Charter of the United Nations
spoke about promoting social progress and better standards of living
in larger freedom; about tolerance and living together in peace and
with one another as good neighbours; about higher standards of
living, full employment and social advancement.
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