The economy - the Pope warned - cannot attempt only to increase profits by reducing the work force and thereby adding to the ranks of the excluded. It must follow the path marked out by business leaders, politicians, thinkers, and leaders in society who place the human person in first place, and do everything possible to ensure that there are opportunities of dignified work. Let us raise our voices together, asking that economists may have the courage to reject an economy of exclusion and know how to open new paths.
This is not the first time that we live through a massive transformation. When in the 19th century the subsistence farmers started joining the industrial economy, it also caused an upheaval.
Concerning "It must follow the path marked out business leaders, politicians ...", the papacy is naive to believe that anybody knows what the future state of the economy and the labour market will be. Read my lips: absolutely nobody knows. In those circumstances, central planning is simply absurd.
Especially politicians. Seriously, what the hell do they know about where all of this is heading? Why ask exactly the biggest idiots for advice? The ongoing changes are fueled by technology. For heaven's sake, what do politicians understand about technology? Seriously, what do they understand about anything at all?
Concerning "The economy cannot attempt only to increase profits by reducing the work force ...", I can only underline that morality is about forbidden/mandatory behaviours and never about outcomes. As Immanuel Kant pointed out in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, all morality must consist of categorical imperatives. Hypothetical (outcome-based) imperatives are not allowed in morality, because their soundness ultimately always require access to the Theory of Everything; which we simply do not have.
The papacy had better axiomatically derive his claims from religious law.
The Papacy's disregard for religious law as an axiomatic foundation of morality disturbs me. What would be wrong about proceeding through scripture and reason?
It is still the same mentality with which the erstwhile Papacy retorted to Martin Luther that "the Bible itself is the arsenal whence each heretic has drawn his deceptive arguments".
Nobody knew what would happen when the subsistence farmers, in large numbers, morphed into industrial workers. Every form of upfront planning would have completely missed the ball, and would only have made the problem worse.