Justice Quote by Claudio Hummes

A polite cleric’s sentence that lands like an indictment: the “new economic world order” isn’t an abstraction here, it’s a machine with winners, losers, and an alibi. Claudio Hummes, a Brazilian cardinal known for linking Catholic social teaching to real-world inequality, threads a needle between diplomacy and moral accusation. He grants the dominant story its own vocabulary - “globalized,” “free and open markets” - then flips it into a charge sheet: the promise of prosperity has been selectively redeemed.

The intent is corrective, almost pastoral. Hummes isn’t rejecting markets outright; he’s rejecting the triumphalist assumption that openness equals fairness. By pairing “prosperity” with “social justice,” he undercuts a common rhetorical trick: treating GDP growth as a proxy for human dignity. The phrase “social exclusion” is the tell. It’s not just poverty; it’s being structurally pushed out of citizenship, stability, and voice. Exclusion is an outcome produced by systems, not a personal failing.

Subtextually, he’s calling out the moral anesthesia of globalization-speak. “We know” functions like a quiet rebuke to elites who pretend the evidence is ambiguous. He’s also widening the frame: economic policy becomes an ethical question, not merely a technical one for economists and trade ministers.

The context is the Church’s late-20th/early-21st century turn toward critiquing neoliberal globalization, especially from Latin American perspectives shaped by debt crises, austerity, and unequal development. In that world, “open markets” can mean open season on labor, land, and the social safety net - and Hummes is insisting that the ledger include the people left outside the gates.