Pope Leo XIV criticizes digital environment: Indifference increases

“The cry for justice of the poor today is silenced by multiple techniques, increasingly subtle, until all their efforts to make their appeals heard become inaudible,” the pontiff said in the document.

Specifically, he noted that “the digital environment radicalizes prejudice” against the most disadvantaged and contributes to increasing “the veil of indifference that surrounds their causes.”

He also lamented “how widespread social injustice is, even today, which is born from arrogant corruption”, a reality he described as “deplorable” and “discriminatory”.

Marginalization

According to the Pope, when the sense of transcendence is lost, societies fall into a “desacralizing logic of prevarication and exclusion that marginalizes and humiliates”, where people stop being side by side in mutual respect and, instead, place themselves “one above the other under the sign of domination and subjugation”.

“The first to suffer the consequences are the poor, whose numbers are increasing in many societies, not by chance,” he warned.

Faced with this situation, he stated that the Christian community cannot remain “insensitive” and reaffirmed the role of the Church as a “refuge” for those living in vulnerable conditions.

In contrast to “the obsession of those who accumulate wealth only for themselves”, Leo XIV offered the example of those who open their hearts to those most in need.

“The obsession of those who accumulate wealth only for themselves is contradicted by the persistence of God who, in the testimony of people of flesh and blood, opens their hearts and welcomes them into his love,” he wrote.

Pope Leo XIV calls for examination of conscience

Pope Leo XIV also called for a “serious examination of conscience” to assess how much still needs to be done for the poor and for their liberation.

“Then we will see that the poor themselves become a refuge for others. The experience of poverty makes us particularly sensitive to renewed solidarity in the face of challenges,” he noted.

To combat this inertia, the document appeals to the example of Saint Francis of Assisi, whose death is commemorated this year on his eighth centenary.

The Pope recalls how the Italian saint gave up his own clothes to wear the rags of a beggar in Rome and urges contemporary society to “put itself in the shoes of the poor and listen to them, instead of just talking about them”.