Here's a prescription for humanizing the global economy

                                                           They would do better to return to these every day

Alas, it's more of an earnest wish than a prescription.   It's embodied in a high-flown statement recently signed by a long list of US women's religious congregations.   I came across the document  while I was doing research into one of the signatory congregations, the Sisters of the Holy Cross.  The congregation was founded in France after the Revolution, and the Sisters first arrived in the US in 1843.  The Sisters served bravely as nurses in the Civil War, and today run many schools, including St. Mary's College, the famous sister college to the University of Notre Dame. 

I was interested in the Sisters of the Holy Cross because, like the Servites (see previous posts here and here) the Sisters have a particular devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows.   One of the ways the Sisters of the Holy Cross used to express their devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows was by praying the chaplet of the Seven Dolors/Sorrows of Mary in community every day.   The chaplet is prayed upon prayer beads like a rosary, except the beads are organized into seven sets of seven, one for each of the seven sorrows.  An example of such a chaplet is shown above.  According to the Sisters' website, this practice is now a "frequent" rather than a daily one.

Like many other religious congregations, the Sisters of the Holy Cross now view the pursuit of Social Justice as a critical part of their mission.  In connection with this pursuit, the Sisters, along with many other congregations of Sisters, in 2009 signed on to a document called  "A call to integrate FAITH ECOLOGY AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY."  The signatories note their desire for lots of good things, such as "secure, meaningful, and ecologically responsible livelihoods," but also note the existence of lots of regrettable things, such as "over-consumption."  As to how to achieve the goal of bringing about more of the things they like, while reducing the number of things they don't like, the signatories can do little more than speak wistfully of  "[p]aradigm shift" and "[p]ublic policies for an economy of right relationship."

I suppose if it were easy to build heaven on earth, we'd have done it already.

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us