On August 26, Pope Francis received participants in a conference organized by the International Catholic Legislators Network. The conference’s theme was “Great Power Struggle, Corporate Capture and Technocracy: A Christian Answer to Dehumanizing Trends.”
“Two essential aspects – connecting people and a common end – characterize your work and rightly mirror the nature of the Church herself, the People of God called to live in both communion and mission,” Pope Francis told participants in the gathering. “Those ‘centripetal’ and ‘centrifugal’ forces of the Christian life, sustained by the power of the Holy Spirit, inwardly bind people together in fraternal unity and direct them outwards on the shared mission of joyfully proclaiming the Gospel.”
“An authentic Christian network, then, is already an answer to ‘dehumanizing trends,’ for it not only points to the liberating truths about human existence, but seeks to model them in the exercise of its own activity,” the Pope continued. “Thus, by remaining a genuinely international Catholic network, you will credibly demonstrate an alternative to that technocratic tyranny which lures our brothers and sisters into seizing the raw elements of both nature and human nature, and diminishes their capacity for making decisions or living genuinely free lives.”