M
Matt25
Guest
The horizon of justice has opened progressively to distributive justice, to social justice and, finally, to planetary justice. There will be no peace until worldwide justice is achieved. As long as inhuman and dehumanizing situations remain, it is absurd to speak of peace; more than a billion people live in conditions of absolute poverty; every year, 13 to 18 million human beings die of hunger; 800 million people are chronically and visibly undernourished; developing countries are expected to pay many billions of dollars in interest for debts contracted with affluent countries. …
An adequately understood justice will force us to rethink these situations in a new manner. In this regard, the great and recently deceased Pope John Paul II, in his Message for the 2003 World Day of Peace, underlined the indissoluble link between the commitment to peace and the respect of promises that have been made: “pacta sunt servanda.” The Holy Father emphasized above all the need to fulfill the pledges made to the poor: “Especially frustrating for them is any breach of faith regarding promises which they see as vital to their well-being. In this respect, the failure to keep commitments in the sphere of aid to developing nations is a serious moral question and further highlights the injustice of the imbalances existing in the world. The suffering caused by poverty is compounded by the loss of trust. The end result is hopelessness. The existence of trust in international relations is a social capital of fundamental value” (No. 8).
Judging this state of affairs according to the logic of social and planetary justice, strongly emphasized in “Sollicitudo Rei Socialis,” it seems necessary to state that rich countries are in duty bound to consolidate a more decisive international cooperation according to the perspective outlined by the Millennium Declaration of the United Nations and by the successive World Conferences and Summits, in which a different course was laid out, a course that was more human and more humanizing, also in the area of economic relations and international commercial relations. Everything is becoming globalized. A global dimension must be given, above all, to the requirements of justice. There exist even today, within the affluent areas of the world, large swaths of emarginated and poor people, but the most serious and dramatic problems of justice are found at the global level, among people who do not have the minimum needed to live and peoples who are drowning in abundance. Ours, then, is an epoch dominated by problems of a planetary dimension, which require answers and solutions at a planetary level.
An adequately understood justice will force us to rethink these situations in a new manner. In this regard, the great and recently deceased Pope John Paul II, in his Message for the 2003 World Day of Peace, underlined the indissoluble link between the commitment to peace and the respect of promises that have been made: “pacta sunt servanda.” The Holy Father emphasized above all the need to fulfill the pledges made to the poor: “Especially frustrating for them is any breach of faith regarding promises which they see as vital to their well-being. In this respect, the failure to keep commitments in the sphere of aid to developing nations is a serious moral question and further highlights the injustice of the imbalances existing in the world. The suffering caused by poverty is compounded by the loss of trust. The end result is hopelessness. The existence of trust in international relations is a social capital of fundamental value” (No. 8).
Judging this state of affairs according to the logic of social and planetary justice, strongly emphasized in “Sollicitudo Rei Socialis,” it seems necessary to state that rich countries are in duty bound to consolidate a more decisive international cooperation according to the perspective outlined by the Millennium Declaration of the United Nations and by the successive World Conferences and Summits, in which a different course was laid out, a course that was more human and more humanizing, also in the area of economic relations and international commercial relations. Everything is becoming globalized. A global dimension must be given, above all, to the requirements of justice. There exist even today, within the affluent areas of the world, large swaths of emarginated and poor people, but the most serious and dramatic problems of justice are found at the global level, among people who do not have the minimum needed to live and peoples who are drowning in abundance. Ours, then, is an epoch dominated by problems of a planetary dimension, which require answers and solutions at a planetary level.
