The historic address, which accused politicians of treating citizens not with "dignity and transcendence" but as "cogs in a machine", saw the Pope take the EU's handling of the economic crisis to task, saying it had forgotten how to talk about anything but economics and treat people as humans beings.
Speaking in Italian, he accused the continent of becoming irrelevant and "haggard". The world, the Pope says, has become "less and less Eurocentric".
"Despite a larger and stronger Union, Europe seems to give the impression of being elderly and haggard, feeling less and less a protagonist in a world that frequently regards it with aloofness, mistrust and, even at times, suspicion."
He called Europe a "barren grandmother, no longer fertile and vibrant and as a result, the great ideas which once inspired Europe seem to have lost their attraction, to be replaced by bureaucratic technicalities of institutions."
To cheers from both the Eurosceptic and left-wing members, the Pope railed against the "certain selfish lifestyles, an opulence that is no longer sustainable" and the "frequent indifference to the world around us, especially to the poorest of the poor."
"To our dismay we see technical and economic questions dominating the political debate, to the detriment of genuine concern for human beings. Men and women are reduced to cogs in a machine, items of consumption to be exploited.
"The result is that when human life is no longer useful to the machine, it is discarded without qualms, as in the case of the terminally ill, the elderly who are abandoned and the children who are killed in the womb. It is a great mistake when technology is allowed to take over, there is a confusion between ends and means. It's inevitable consequence of throwaway culture and uncontrolled consumerism."
Original Article
Source: huffingtonpost.co.uk/
Author: Jessica Elgot
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