Has Money Become a God that terrorises us?

by Kilian SC · November 7, 2016

When the search for profits outweighs all other considerations in society, money becomes a god who terrorises humanity – excluding the majority of people and causing those still well off to build walls to cower behind, Pope Francis said.

“The entire social doctrine of the church and the magisterium of my predecessors rebel against money as an idol that reigns instead of serves, tyrannising and terrorising humanity,” the pope said.

Like all forms of terrorism, the terrorism of an economy focused only on making money relies on people’s fear for effectiveness, Pope Francis said during a meeting at the Vatican with participants in the third World Meeting of Popular Movements, a collection of grassroots organisations of the poor, the underemployed, indigenous communities and farmworkers.

“When this terror, which is sown in the peripheries with massacres, pillaging, oppression and injustice, explodes in the centres with various forms of violence – including odious and vile attacks – the citizens who still have some rights are tempted by the false security of physical or social walls,” he said. “Walls that enclose some and exile others.”

Frightened citizens building walls on one side and frightened and excluded people on the other – “is this the life that God our father wants for his children?” the pope asked.

Wherever there is fear, he said, there is someone who will increase and manipulate it. “Because fear, besides being good business for merchants of weapons and death, weakens and destabilises us, destroying our psychological and spiritual defences, anaesthetising us to the suffering of others and, in the end, making us cruel.”

Pope Francis said mercy is the “best antidote” to fear. It works better than anti-depression medicine and is “much more effective than walls, iron bars, alarms and weapons. And it is free.” By Cindy Wooden Catholic News Service