VATICAN CITY (CNS): In a Jubilee celebration with tens of thousands of farmers, Pope John Paul II warned that ecological and economic abuse in agriculture was keeping millions of people in poverty and threatening the earth itself.
Meeting with farm families on November 11 and celebrating Mass with them the next day, the Pope issued one of his most detailed economic critiques of the Jubilee Year.
At the root of modern agricultural problems, the Pope said, was an attitude of economic domination that ignores the Church’s teaching that the goods of the earth belong to everyone. Globalisation and progress in biotechnology threaten to aggravate the existing imbalances, he said.
“If the world of advanced technology is not reconciled with the simple language of nature in a healthy equilibrium, human life will face ever greater risks, of which we already see worrisome signs,” he said at the Jubilee Mass.
An estimated 100,000 farmers and their families, most of them from Italian rural areas, turned out for the liturgy in St Peter’s Square.
