(International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, October 17, 2020)

“Anyone who thinks that the only lesson to be learned was the need to improve what we were already doing, or to refine existing systems and regulations, is denying reality…Once this health crisis passes, our worst response would be to plunge even more deeply into a feverish consumerism and new forms of egotistic self-preservation. If only we might keep in mind all those elderly persons who died for lack of respirators, partly as a result of the dismantling, year after year, of health care systems...If we can accept the great principle that there are rights born of inalienable human dignity, we can rise to the challenge of envisaging a new humanity.” – Pope Francis in Fratelli Tutti, 4^th October 2020.