The Archbishop of Armagh commented on the current injustices in wages and salaries at the recent CIMS Annual service.
The Church of Ireland Mens’ Society held its Annual Service in Ballymore Parish, Tandragee (Armagh) on Advent Sunday, 27 November 2011. The service was one of Evening Prayer at which the Archbishop of Armagh, who is President of CIMS, gave the sermon and the Bishop of Connor, Chairman of the Society, led the prayers.
In the course of his address, the Archbishop said:
The principal criterion for the Last Judgement is compassion.
The implications of this for Christian men and women are clear. These disclosures from the record of the writings sacred to Christians, applicable though they are across the earth to every nation and society, have been given to us to act upon and also to share. They do not give us either the right or the responsibility to judge other people. They do lay upon us the priorities for the ordering of our lives. They particularly require us to seek a world in which fairness and compassion are established as the framework for all citizens and the problems created by inequality are seriously addressed.
You might think that those in business who take home in remuneration each month 1000 times more than the median income of their employees might be slightly uneasy about it. Not at all. Lord Brian Griffiths, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs and former adviser to Baroness Thatcher defended higher inequality as, ‘the way to achieve greater prosperity for all’.
Yet, while the income gulf has soared and continues to soar, the promised pay off in economic progress has eluded us. More, not fewer, people are unemployed. More, not fewer people are seeking the protection of bankruptcy. More, not fewer people are turning to organisations like St Vincent de Paul, the Salvation Army, agencies that help the aged, and parishes and congregations that try to assist those in trouble. More, not fewer people are turning to the Simon Community and other charities that address homelessness.
As a result, we do not have a society at ease with itself, we have a society destabilised by inequality and demotivated by hopelessness. As a headline in The Tablet put it, ‘The rich get rich and the poor get laid off.’