New Job Quote by Claudio Hummes

“Most urgent” lands like a pastoral alarm bell, but the real bite is in the bureaucratic bluntness that follows: a “good First Job Program” that “hasn’t got off the ground.” Claudio Hummes, a Brazilian cardinal who often treated social policy as a moral test, is doing something deft here: blessing the idea while quietly indicting the execution. Calling it “good” preempts the easy partisan rebuttal; he isn’t attacking Lula’s stated goals, he’s spotlighting the gap between promise and delivery.

The phrase “First Job” is loaded in early-2000s Brazil, where youth unemployment and precarious work weren’t abstractions but family-level crises. Hummes frames employment not as an economic metric but as dignity, a threshold into citizenship. That’s why “urgent” matters: it implies delay is not neutral. In Catholic social teaching, time wasted on the poor is time stolen from them.

Then comes the political subtext. “Lula plans to implement” grants authority and intention, but “hasn’t got off the ground” strips away the romance of a charismatic presidency and replaces it with the friction of coalition politics, administrative capacity, and the slow grind of the state. It’s a public nudge from a figure who can’t be easily dismissed as an opposition operative: moral credibility used as leverage.

The line works because it performs a balancing act Brazil knows well: hope without naivete. It demands competence, not just empathy, and it reminds a popular leader that the poor can’t live on plans.