Suited City workers walk across London Bridge at the end of the working day, Friday March 27 2009.
(AP)
Speaking at a seminar on faith in the marketplace last night, Ken Costa said the single most important factor in the economic crisis was a breakdown in trust between the public, corporations and their shareholders, regulators and the government. Any recovery of the global economy, he said, would require the rebuilding of trust.
“Our values have shifted from a culture of trust to a culture of self first,” he said. “Religious faith can help us articulate values and provide a motivating spirit to generate and to sustain a culture of trust that needs to be recovered in the marketplace if it is to be effective.
“Thus faith is not only compatible with globalisation. It has a vital role to play in ensuring the very possibility of globalisation.”
While banking chiefs should apologise for their role in the crisis, Mr Costa said forgiveness was also needed in order to bring closure and allow society to move on.
Faith, he continued, could not be separated from the marketplace because companies were hiring increasing numbers of people with a faith.
“Since faith matters to people it matters to markets,” he said.
Mr Costa said people of faith had failed to apply their faith to the marketplace, being encouraged instead to leave it at home.
“The reality is that religious believers possess tremendous resources to promote exactly the sort of values that are required to build solid foundations for the global economy,” he said.
“Religious believers are well placed to building up a market place concerned not only with producing goods and services but to producing those things that really are good and of service.
“And this service ethic – the love of God and of neighbour – is central, albeit in different ways, to the world’s great religions.”
