Read more at sojo.net ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ View this email in your browser [[link removed]] [[link removed]] When One Part Suffers, The U.S. Looks Away
[[link removed]] Adam Russell TaylorPope Francis has a penchant for impeccable, maybe even providential timing. His
encyclical Laudato Si’ came out just months before the 2015 Paris climate summit and played a key role
in influencing public opinion and galvanizing political will behind bolder
climate action to protect “our common home.” Now, less than a month before the
most consequential U.S. election in generations, the pope’s new encyclical
provides a powerful rebuke to a politics of division, fear, and hate while also
casting a vision for the human family that is deeply relevant to applying our
faith to U.S. leadership in the world. Fratelli Tutti (on “universal fraternity and social friendship”) takes its title from St.
Francis of Assisi and is inspired by his “fraternal openness,” which, the pope
said, calls on people “to acknowledge, appreciate and love each person,
regardless of physical proximity, regardless of where he or she was born or
lives.” The encyclical also references and was inspired by a document on human
fraternity and interreligious dialogue that Pope Francis and Sheikh Ahmad
el-Tayeb, grand imam of al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, Egypt, signed in 2019. As E.J.
Dionne writes, “We are not accustomed to hearing from a pope, a month before
Election Day, who criticizes ‘myopic, extremist, resentful and aggressive
nationalism,’ and castigates those who, through their actions, cast immigrants
as ‘less worthy, less important, less human.’”

Human rights and international aid and cooperation are rarely, if ever, make
headlines in national politics or elections. But from a faith perspective, they
should. They factor into our discernment both as Christians and Americans
because our moral obligations and concerns cannot be confined to our borders.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been particularly devastating to the
world’s efforts to combat extreme poverty, hunger, malnutrition, and child
mortality.

The World Bank reports that COVID-19 has dealt an unprecedented setback to the
worldwide effort to end extreme poverty, raise median incomes, and create shared
prosperity. The World Bank’s new poverty projections suggest that by 2021, an
additional 110 to 150 million people will have fallen into extreme poverty. This
means that the pandemic and global recession may push 1.4 percent of the world’s
population into extreme poverty. And since the outbreak, more than 1.6 billion
children in developing countries have been out of school, implying a potential
loss of as much as $10 trillion in lifetime earnings for these students. Making
matters worse, gender-based violence is on the rise, and early estimates suggest
a potential increase of up to 45 percent in child mortality because of
health-service shortfalls and reductions in access to food. I have spent his
career advocating for greater global leadership to end the dehumanizing impacts
of extreme poverty; these trends are heartbreaking.

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