Pope: Church needs entrepreneurs with “the smell of the sheep” – Vatican News

  Pope Francis on Friday received in audience a group of French entrepreneurs. He spoke to them about how to implement the Gospel values in their businesses. By Robin Gomes Pope Francis “finds it very beautiful and courageous that, in today’s world often marked by individualism, indifference and even marginalization of the most vulnerable people, some entrepreneurs and business leaders have at heart the service of all, not just the interests of individuals or restricted circles”.  He made the remark to a delegation of some 90 French business men and women who are in Rome for a pilgrimage on the theme of the common good.  To help them in the challenge of the common good, he spoke to them about two pairs of concepts based on the Gospel values: ideal and reality, and authority and service.  These concepts seem always to be in tension, but the Christian, with the help of grace, can unify them in his or her life. The ideal and reality He pointed out that a Christian often experiences a ‘collision’ between the ideal he or she dreams of and the reality he or she encounters. Just like the Virgin Mary, who had to give birth...

The Ousted: Embracing the Marginal

21 October 2021 The “Don Bosco College” in Mannuthy has brought about a series of events under the “WE CARE” project. It involved helping the Flood affected people from 2018 and 2019, going out of the way and becoming Covid Warriors during Pandemic and amidst all that held International Webinar on the theme including the excluded. “Our priority to take sides with the sidelined and go with the “Last the Least and the Lost” has seen Academic interventions as it is an IUS” Fr Raju Chakkanattu, Principal of the “Don Bosco College”, explains. These are the six books under the WE CARE Series. Two books on Flood Disaster Risk Reduction: Insulate Kerala: Hard Lessons from Flooded Fury Beyond the Flood: Lessons for Insulating Kerala. One on the Pandemic: When the World Dares the Odd: Life During Pandemic And the more recent books on Social Inclusivity: The Ousted: Embracing the Marginal Stigma: Reflections on Those left out at the Existential Peripheries The Resilient: Women’s war on subjugation. “Just as Don Bosco said, we need to cater to the poor and the abandoned. As an institution of Higher Education, we believe in giving also academic contributions in researches and publications to form part...

The new working class and the Pope’s duty to be an “advocate of the poor” – Vatican News

The new working class and the Pope’s duty to be an “advocate of the poor” Fifty years ago, ‘Octogesima adveniens’ was published. In it, Pope Paul VI spoke about the exodus toward the large urban centers, about the dignity of women and the pluralism of political options. He criticized Marxist and liberal ideologies and defended the “duty-right” of the Church to express itself regarding social issues. By Andrea Tornielli Octogesima adveniens contains prophetic words regarding those people whom the author’s successor, Pope Francis, today calls “the discarded”. It is a realistic analysis regarding the major imbalances and the consequences of the exodus toward the large urban centers. It criticizes Marxist ideology and its atheistic materialism, but also takes to task that liberal ideology that would prevail less than twenty years later, thus definitively opening the way toward turbo-capitalism. The year 1971 was running its course when on 14 May, Pope Paul VI recalled the eightieth anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum with an apostolic letter addressed to Cardinal Maurice Roy, the Archbishop of Quebec and President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. The papal document — which covers poverty, development and political obligations — should be read through the...

The sharing of goods and the social function of private property – Vatican News

The sharing of goods and the social function of private property In his homily on Sunday, 11 April, Pope Francis commented on the custom of the early Christians of sharing everything. We take a look at developments of the social Magisterium of the past century, which harken back to the great Fathers of the Church. By Andrea Tornielli The Acts of the Apostles tells us that “no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common.” This “is not communism; it is Christianity in its pure state.” With these words, Pope Francis, in the Mass celebrated on Divine Mercy Sunday, commented on the sharing of goods realized in the first Christian community. Often, and even very recently, the current Bishop of Rome has been criticized for questioning the untouchability of the right to private property, and his words have been linked to Marxism and communism. Last November 30, in a Message on the occasion of the opening of work of the International Conference of member judges of the Committee for Social Rights of Africa and America, Pope Francis said, “We build social justice on the basis of the fact that the...