Participants in the recent Fifth World Meeting of Popular Movements issued a final statement, “Organizing Hope through an Alliance against Exclusion,” which the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development has published in English.
After lamenting “a fractured world, wounded by violence, injustice, and contempt for human dignity,” participants agreed to four steps:
- Commit to Structural, Economic, and Political Actions that Unite Us
- Strengthen Our Platforms as Popular Movements and Church
- Design New Public Policy Strategies
- Globalize the Struggle of Popular Movements and Strengthen Our Communicative Capacity and Unity
Pope Leo and Cardinal Michael Czerny addressed the fifth world meeting. The first world meeting was held in Rome in 2014; the Vatican’s press office described the meetings as a “platform built by various movements around Pope Francis’s invitation for the poor and organized peoples not to resign themselves but to become protagonists of change.”