Pont. Academy Social Sciences calls for new roads to integration

The Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences wrapped up its Plenary Assembly on Tuesday with a call for inclusion of the most marginalized in society.

The five-day Plenary Session focused on the theme “Towards a Participatory Society: New Roads to Social and Cultural Integration”.

A message from Pope Francis provided the guidelines for the Plenary. Recalling the movements and the battles for the rights of workers in the past two centuries, the Pope pointed out that “those battles are far from over” and called for a new world vision that has the value of fraternity at its basis.

Present at this mornings’ press conference in the Vatican was one of the participants of the Plenary, Professor Paulus Zulu who highlighted the fact that in Africa one of the major causes for exclusion is to be found in political systems which prevent the people from accessing even the basic resources of life.

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Professor Zulu explains that in Africa there is a crisis of representative democracy which leads to major causes of social exclusion. Consequently, he says, there are growing inequalities.

“One of the consequences – migration - often represents a response to these inequalities” he says.

“Some of the excluded populations, he says,  try to seek measures of existence – not only just inclusion – measures of existence outside their continent”  or country.

Prof. Zulu concludes that that is one of the manifestations which one would refer to as original. 

“Part of the solution, or what communities deem as the possible mechanism, is through social movements which are trying to garner mechanisms towards social inclusion, particularly access, where inclusion leads to access of the basic resources of life” he says.