Bailing out banks is like pouring money in a ripped sackBailing out banks is like pouring money in a ripped sack, said Cardinal Maradiaga

Here is an excerpt from an interview of Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, Archbishop of Tegucigalpa in Honduras and president of Caritas Internationalis, with the television program “Where God Weeps” of the Catholic Radio and Television Network (CRTN) in cooperation with Aid to the Church in Need, reproduced in a Jan. 10, 2011 press release by Zenit.org:

Q: Latin America is not without challenges. You yourself stated that “globalization” is the greediness of the few, which is leaving the majority on the margins of history. Is this something that we can say is particularly acute today, especially now with the financial crisis?

Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga: The Holy Father has been repeatedly stating that it’s a crisis of ethics that has left most of the population of our world on the outside. In the beginning, it was like a marginalization, but not exclusion. Today there’s not even a margin for them. I am the president of Caritas Internationalis, so I know that the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said there was no money to alleviate poverty in the world. Seven billion dollars would have been enough, and one month later, they were giving $600 billion to save some of the banks of the world, and they’ll never stop pouring money into the “sack” because it’s a ripped sack. They still haven’t touched the bottom, and they continue pouring and pouring money into it. If you divide the $600 billion dollars between the 6.5 billion inhabitants of the world … poverty would disappear immediately.