ROME — Pope Francis warned Tuesday that globalization risks creating a stultifying uniformity in the world if it fails to respect local diversity and individuality.
In his address to participants at the fifth global meeting of the Indigenous Peoples’ Forum, the pope denounced a one-size-fits-all, globalist mentality that prioritizes sameness over variety.
Communion and solidarity do not stem from homogeneity, the pontiff said, and “globalization cannot mean a uniformity that ignores diversity and imposes a new kind of colonialism.”
The challenge, he said, “is to create alternatives based on solidarity so that no one feels ignored, but without imposing overwhelmingly its own direction, considering it to be the only correct one.”
When diversities are articulated and mutually enriching, “communion between peoples flourishes and comes to life,” he added.
As he has done on other occasions, the pope took advantage of his address to promote his idea of “integral ecology.”
What the world needs, he said, is “a development that does not take consumption as a means and an end, but one that truly cares for the environment, listens, learns and dignifies.”
“This is integral ecology, in which social justice is combined with the protection of the planet,” he continued. “Only with this humility of spirit can we see the total defeat of hunger and a society based on enduring values, which are not the fruit of passing fads and biases, but of justice and goodness.”
The pope also expressed his wish that the present generation will hand down to the future a world that is a treasure and not “a heap of waste and debris.”
“Let us be attentive to what benefits us all, and which will be precisely what will allow us to pass through this world leaving altruism and generosity in our wake, without being wounded by earthly immanence, desolated by spiritual emptiness, paralyzed by self-centredness or saddened by individualism,” he said.