This post was originally published on this site
Pope Francis waves to faithful at the end of the weekly general audience in the Paul VI hall at the Vatican.
AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia
“ ‘We don’t come out of the crisis the same, we can become better or worse, but never the same.’ ”
That’s Pope Francis calling for a united front in the battle against the coronavirus pandemic in a translation of an interview cited by Bloomberg News on Sunday.
“We have an increase in numbers of those who mercilessly profited from the misfortune of others, those who think only about themselves, who protested or complained about certain restrictive measures, unable to accept that not everyone has the same abilities and resources to face the pandemic,” he said, according to the Serbia-based Politika newspaper.
Countries around the world that are working to save their ailing economies risk “forgetting that an authentic development must promote all people and human as a whole,” he was reported by Bloomberg News as saying. The pontiff also praised what he described as urban heroes “who take responsibility toward others and look for a concrete solution so no one is left behind,” adding that such crises can bring out the best in people.
“We need change,” he said. “The pandemic brought our organizational and developmental models into a crisis; it exposed many injustices, the troubling silence and social and health failures, subjecting a great number of our brothers to the processes of social exclusion and degradation.”
The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 just topped 230,000 and the total number of cases hit 9.1 million after more than 99,000 infections were counted in a record one-day tally. The global number of cases has reached nearly 46.2 million, according to Johns Hopkins University.
