BY Ian Dunn | April 4 | 
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Family is key to ending poverty, Vatican tells UN
The Vatican has told the United Nations that the family is the key to eradicating poverty.
Archbishop Francis A Chullikatt, the Holy See’s Permanent Observer at the United Nations, told the Tenth Session of the Open Working Group on the Sustainable Development Goals last Friday in New York, that Pope Francis was vehement in his belief that ‘the need to resolve the structural causes of poverty cannot be delayed.’
The archbishop said that it was fortunate that in the fight against poverty ‘through trial-and-error, society itself has developed it’s own basic building block the family.’
“It is within the family that the next generation of humanity is welcomed, fed, clothed, and provided form,” he said. “Setting a development agenda for the next 15 years is a powerful gesture of intergenerational solidarity. The future we want becomes, then, the future we want for our children and our children’s children.”
He also warned the assembled diplomats that ‘obstinacy in recognizing the obvious role of the family in eradicating poverty and addressing its causes with family-sensitive policies that bolster the stability of this most fundamental of societal institutions is highly irresponsible and ultimately counter-productive on the part of governments’.
The Open Working Group is believed to hold the power to set the pattern of the UN for the next 15 years.
Mgr Peter Smith, a former Chancellor of Glasgow Archdiocese, is an attaché to the Holy See’s Permanent Observer mission at the United Nations in New York.
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