Statement
Pope Francis Speech to WMPM, November 2016
Pope Francis' Address to participants in the 3rd Annual World Meeting of Popular Movements, November 5, 2016
Pope Francis greets delegates from urban, rural, and working peripheries from over 60 countries and affirms their shared cry for Land, Work, and Housing.
He criticizes a prevailing socio-economic system that reduces human development to consumption, concentrates wealth, and produces social atrophy, exclusion, unemployment, and environmental degradation.
Positive framing of popular movements
He praises popular movements as “social poets” and agents of grassroots, creative change—building cooperatives, reclaiming land, restoring factories, recycling, and generating local solutions that imitate Christ’s care for the wounded. Pope Francis urges popular movements to respond to fear and exclusion with mercy, love and solidarity, calling these the true antidotes to violence and walls built by money and power.
He reaffirms the movement’s demands: dignified employment, land for campesinos and indigenous peoples, housing and urban integration for the poor, elimination of discrimination and violence, freedom of expression, and technology and science serving peoples rather than profit. He emphasizes a rejection of consumerism in favor of solidarity, mutual love, and respect for nature.
He urges collective discernment grounded in local realities, insisting solutions must grow from communities themselves and be adapted to place, time and persons.
Courage and sacrifice
He acknowledges that organizers often face surveillance, persecution, and even death, honoring those who risk or give their lives for justice and the common good.
He contrasts a “bridge-project of peoples” with a “wall-project of money,” calling for human, integral development that respects creation and includes everyone in dignity.
He notes further reflections on two additional central issues discussed at the meeting (besides the three Ts and integral ecology) and calls for continued struggle to heal social and ecological wounds and promote a humane, inclusive future.