Pope: Popular movements must fill void left by society’s inhuman indifference

By Devin Watkins

Pope Leo XIV took up the mantle of Pope Leo XIII, on Thursday, as he met with participants in the Fifth World Meeting of Popular Movements.

In his address, the Pope reflected at length on the injustices that burden societies across the globe, reframing the “new things” that his namesake laid out in the Church’s first social encyclical Rerum Novarum.

Even though the late 19th century saw a time of rapid development through new sources of energy and industrial technologies, Pope Leo XIII focused his attention instead on “the situation of the poor and the oppressed of that time,” said Pope Leo XIV.

His predecessor, said the Pope, took the side of the poor and denounced the “submission of the majority to the power of comparatively few” in a form of work that was “little better than slavery itself.”

Pope Leo XIV said popular movements grow out of the peripheries of society, so as to seek justice and find solutions for people dominated by unjust systems.

“What I consider most important is that your service be animated by love,” he said. “I know of similar realities and experiences present in other countries, true community spaces full of faith, hope, and especially love, which remains the greatest virtue of all.”

The “poor Church for the poor,” added the Pope, must walk courageously, prophetically, and joyfully with popular movements, since Jesus has hidden His face in that of the poor.

Rather than being on the peripheries, the poor “are at the center of the Gospel,” affirmed Pope Leo, noting that the Church must decry inequality, which is “the root of social ills.”

Participants at the Fifth World Meeting of Popular Movements   (@Vatican Media)

As in Pope Leo XIII’s day, exclusion remains the new face of social injustice, said the Pope, lamenting the “systemic arbitrariousness” that sees artificial intelligence in our pockets while millions of people languish in deprivation of their basic human needs.

“Put simply, bad management generates and increases inequalities with the pretext of progress,” he said. “And by not having human dignity at its center, the system fails also in justice.”

Pope Leo XIV went on to list several ills that afflict contemporary society, saying the climate crisis represents the clearest example. It the poorest people and countries, he said, that endure extreme meterological events.

Another aspect of the “new things” harming society is the yearning that social media creates in the poor, who see the exaltation of falsly exaggerated lifestyles and unbridled consumerism.

At the same time, digital gambling platforms harness dark patterns to create compulsive dependency and addictive habits based on events outside one’s control.

Pope Leo also decried the pharmaceutical industry’s promotion of a “cult of physical wellbeing, almost an idolotry of the body, in which the mystery of pain is reduced to something totally inhuman.”

This attitude leads to dependency on pain medications and deadly drugs such as opioids and fentanyl, especially in the United States, he said.

Pope Leo XIV meeting with participants at the Fifth World Meeting of Popular Movements   (@Vatican Media)

The Pope pointed out that coltan—which lies at the base of modern technological devices—has led to paramilitary violence and child labor in the poor countries in which it is found, including the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“Lithium is another example,” he said. “The competition among the great powers and the large corporations for its extraction represents a grave menace to the sovereignty and the stability of poor states”.

Lastly, Pope Leo reaffirmed the rights of states to protect their borders, but said they must balance their right to security with the “moral obligation to provide refuge.”

“Ever more inhuman measures are being adopted—even celebrated politically—that treat these ‘undesirables’ [migrants, ed.] as if they were garbage and not human beings,” he said. “Christianity, on the other hand, refers to the God who is love, who creates us and calls us to live as brothers and sisters.”

Pope Leo XIV then thanked popular movements and civil society for addressing these forms of dehumanization and acting as “champions of humanity, witnesses to justice, and poets of solidarity.”

A gift offered to Pope Leo XIV   (@Vatican Media)

Unions and employees’ associations, he said, represent ever-smaller percentages of workers and have been incapable of providing proper protections for vulnerable workers.

Pope Leo said popular movements are called to work with Christians and governments to fill the void left behind by social institutions of the past, which he said were “not perfect” but whose collapse have left people “more vulnerable than before.”

“The Church supports your just struggles for land, housing and work,” concluded Pope Leo XIV. “Like my predecessor Francis, I believe that just ways begin from the ground up, from the periphery toward the centre.”

“I say today: housing, work and land are sacred rights, it is worthwhile to fight for them, and I would like you to hear me say ‘I am here,’ ‘I am with you!’”