VKD. IT’S A BEGINNING! Pope denounces Mafia, meets father of slain boy, plus Pope Francis: “We are discarding an entire generation to maintain an…

In an exclusive interview with Spain’s La Vanguardia newspaper, Pope Francis blasted the way the dying imperial financial system is destroying humanity’s future:
“Now also it is in style to throw the young people away with unemployment. The rate of unemployment is very worrisome to me, which in some countries is over 50%. Someone told me that 75 million young Europeans under 25 years of age are unemployed. That is an atrocity. But we are discarding an entire generation to maintain an economic system that can’t hold up anymore, a system that to survive must make war, as the great empires have always done. But as a Third World War can’t be done, they make zonal wars.”
The Pope further elaborated on a human economy vs. one where money is the measure of value:
“I believe that we are in a world economic system that isn’t good. At the center of all economic systems must be man, man and woman, and everything else must be in service of this man. But we have put money at the center, the god of money. We have fallen into a sin of idolatry, the idolatry of money. The economy is moved by the ambition of having more and, paradoxically, it feeds a throwaway culture. Young people are thrown away when their natality is limited. The elderly are also discarded because they don’t serve any use anymore, they don’t produce, this passive class…
“In throwing away the kids and elderly, the future of a people is thrown away because the young people are going to push forcefully forward and because the elderly give us wisdom. They have the memory of that people and they have to pass it on to the young people…
“What does this mean? That they produce and sell weapons, and with this the balance sheets of the idolatrous economies, the great world economies that sacrifice man at the feet of the idol of money, obviously they are sorted. This unique thought takes away the wealth of diversity of thought and therefore the wealth of a dialogue between peoples.”
The full interview can be found here http://www.patheos.com/blogs/catholicnews/2014/06/pope-francis-interview-with-la-vanguardia-full-text/#ixzz34XQikRFJ

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AP Photo: L’Osservatore Romano

In this picture made available by the Vatican newspaper L’ Osservatore Romano, Pope Francis delivers his message during his meeting with inmates and personnel of the prison of Castrovillari, southern Italy, June 21, 2014.

2 hr ago By Associated Press

During his one-day pilgrimage to the southern region of Calabria, Francis comforted the imprisoned father of Nicola Campolongo in the courtyard of a prison in the town of Castrovillari.
In January the boy was shot, along with one of his grandfathers and the grandfather’s girlfriend, in an attack blamed on drug turf wars in the nearby town of Cassano all’Jonio. The attackers torched the car with all three victims inside.
The boy’s father and mother already were in jail at the time on drug trafficking charges. The pope had expressed his horror following the attack and promised to visit the town.
Francis embraced the man. He asked the pope to pray for the boy’s mother, who was permitted to leave prison following her son’s slaying and remains under house arrest. The pope also met two of the boy’s grandmothers.
A Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Ciro Benedettini, said Francis told the father: “May children never again have to suffer in this way.”
“The two grandmothers were weeping like fountains,” Benedettini added.
AP Photo: Adriana Sapone

Calabria is the power base of the ‘ndrangheta, a global drug trafficking syndicate that enriches itself by extorting businesses and infiltrating public works contracts in underdeveloped Calabria.
During his homily at an outdoor Mass, Francis denounced the ‘ndrangheta for what he called its “adoration of evil and contempt for the common good. “
“Those who go down the evil path, as the Mafiosi do, are not in communion with God. They are excommunicated,” he warned.
Francis greeted about 200 other prisoners during his visit there.
When Francis visited a hospice, a doctor there removed a bothersome wooden splinter from one of the pope’s fingers at his request, organizers said.

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The gemstone