“Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall,” says Rev. Robert A. Sirico in this week’s Acton Commentary, “but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.”
In 1776, there were fewer than one billion people on Earth. A vast majority of them were poor, and living under tyrannies. Just over two centuries later, there are more than seven billion human beings. Rapid medical discoveries and inventions have helped to double the average lifespan, vastly reduce infant mortality, and provide relief for hundreds of diseases.
Thanks to economic progress, six-sevenths of the greatly expanded human race has now broken free from poverty – over a billion people from 1950 to 1980, and another billion since 1980. But there are another billion more still in those chains. The Jewish, Christian, and humanist task is to break them free as well.
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