A "new commitment for the promotion of the culture of solidarity inspired by evangelical values": this is the wish and the encouragement that Benedict XVI, in a telegram signed by the Secretary of State, card. Angelo Sodano, sent to the participants (from over 30 different countries) in the international conference organised by the Papal Council for Peace and Justice, which ended today, about "Micro-credit and the fight against poverty". The reports of some ecclesial groups working in this sector, and coming from such countries as Ethiopia, Rwanda, Peru, India, Cambodia, Germany and Italy, showed that micro-credit is one of the keys to support development and reduce poverty in the world. Margareth Pfeill, from the US Notre Dame University, spoke of the need that micro-credit schemes tend to the "integral development of the person that is the subject of the business”. To “give the poor access to the virtuous processes of development, imbued with a culture of involvement and the shared experience of the focal role of the poor”, such "tools must be more synergic and the initiatives of international cooperation must be more dynamic”, commented the president of the Papal Council, card. Renato Martino. As he concluded the conference, the cardinal stated that "Catholics will have to be in the forefront of that fantasy of love, that social, economic-financial and political creativity that can successfully support what the current financial rationality sees as a sort of contradiction: the eligibility of the ineligible”.
