By His Eminence Óscar Andrés Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga, SDB, President of Caritas Internationalis and Michel Roy, Secretary General of Caritas Internationalis
“We have created a ‘throw away’ culture…the excluded are not the ‘exploited’ but the outcast, the ‘leftovers’…no one is to be ‘excluded’ from God’s love and from our care.”
Pope Francis wrote in his first Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, about the divisions in our world. Sadly, those divisions have only grown in 2014. Caritas will rise to the challenge, remaining steadfast in combating social injustice through its humanitarian, integral human development and campaigning work.
The ‘throw away’ culture about which Pope Francis wrote is an issue both at local and global levels. The extremism engulfing the Middle East is a local crisis for those living in its vortex. But it is a global crisis: it has had a profound impact on all of us in our own countries and in our hearts. So too has the plight of migrants around the world, the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and global hunger afflicting families in countries, rich and poor.
This bleak picture could make us despair. But we can’t afford that luxury. So Caritas organisations pressed on with their work, carried out in the name of the Church.
And out of the darkness, we saw signs of hope. We saw God’s love for all humanity in the welcome given to the millions of refugees from Syria. We found courage in the actions of those who went to help communities affected by Ebola. And we found solidarity in those who supported Caritas in both richer and poorer countries in our One Human Family, Food for All campaign to end hunger by 2025.
