Remarks and powerpoint presented at the seminar, “G-20 Summit: Promise or Peril,” at The Center for the Study of Catholic Social Thought, Duquesne University on September 21, 2009.

Father Hug contends that the demonstrators who will be in the streets of Pittsburgh this week are just the latest incarnation of gatherings of people from around the world who have been traveling to meetings of heads of state like the G-8 and the G-20 or at intergovernmental meetings like the UN Conferences of the late 1980s and the 1990s, WTO Ministerial meetings or the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank for the last 20 years.

Through these years, the organization and communications of the groups have become stronger and more sophisticated. Their message has become clearer, more focused, and more urgent. They want the leaders gathered to hear that the policies these political elites are furthering and the ways they are governing the world are destructive. Those policies are creating or contributing to growing poverty and hunger at the same time as they are enriching a very small percentage of the world’s people in a way that is unbearable. And they are threatening the survival of the planet.

Their message, loud and insistent, is “Another World is Possible!”