A Trillion-Peso March will be held on Sunday, Sept. 21, at the EDSA People Power monument by the Church Leaders Council for National Transformation and civil society organizations. The day marks the 53rd anniversary of the declaration of martial law by then President Ferdinand E. Marcos, Sr. Indeed, the current wave of protest actions in the country is driven by pent-up discontent about the yawning gap between the elite few and the Filipino masses.

My focus today is on Pope Leo XIV’s critique of the “widening pay gap between corporate bosses” such as Elon Musk and the ordinary working people.” But first, let’s be firmly grounded on the seriousness of the poverty problem in our country.

The World Bank, updating a 2018 study in November 2022, presented key findings on a study entitled Overcoming Poverty and Inequality in the Philippines: Past, Present, and Prospects for the Future.

First, the good news: “The country has made important gains in poverty reduction, with the poverty rate falling to 16.7 percent in 2018 from 49.2 percent in 1985. By 2018, the middle class had expanded to nearly 12 million people and the economically secure population had risen to 44 million.”

And now, the not-so-good news:

“Income inequality, however, is still high, with the country’s income Gini coefficient, which measures the distribution of income across a population, at 42.3 percent in 2018, one of the highest income inequality rates in East Asia, the World Bank said. The wealthiest one percent of earners capture 17 percent of national income; all those in the bottom 50 percent collectively receive only 14 percent.”

Enter Pope Leo XIV, namesake of Pope Leo XIII who authored in 1891 the encyclical Rerum Novarum (Of New Things). The encyclical advocates the right of workers to form unions and as well as the right to a living wage. Moreover, “it condemns socialism and capitalism, particularly state socialism and competitive or laissez-faire capitalism.”

The Financial Times (FT) reports on Pope Leo XIV’s recent pronouncements:

“Pope Leo has criticized the widening pay gap between corporate bosses such as Elon Musk and ordinary working people as he blamed rising economic inequality for the polarization roiling the globe. In his first interview since becoming pope in May, Leo IV, the first US-born spiritual leader of the Catholic church, singled out Musk as an example of the kind of wealth he said was undermining “the value of human life, of the family, of the value of society.”

In an interview given in late July and published on Sunday in Crux, a Catholic news website. the Pontiff also sounded the alarm: “Yesterday, the news arrived that Elon Musk is going to be the first trillionaire in the world. If that is the only thing that has value anymore, then we are in big trouble.”

Musk’s fortune, amassed from his stake in his flagship firm Tesla, and private holdings in SpaceX, xAI, Neuralink and The Boring Company, is currently estimated at $367 billion. Ahead of Pope Leo’s comments, Informa Connect Academy had estimated that Musk could be worth $1 trillion by 2027.

Pope Leo’s comments were made weeks before Tesla unveiled its latest plan, which, according to FT, could reward Musk over $1 trillion over the next decade. This could be realized “if he hits a series of ambitious targets, including selling millions of cars, robotaxis and artificial intelligence-powered robots.”

But Pope Leo XIV said Musk was not the only example of “the continuously wider gap between the income levels of the working class and the money that the wealthiest receive.”

He observed: “CEOs that 60 years ago might have been making four to six times what the workers are receiving, the last figure I saw, it’s 600 times what average workers are receiving.”

The Catholic leader also warned of the loss of “a higher sense of what human life is about” amid spirited discussions on “the vast wealth and power being accumulated by Silicon Valley’s elite, and their impact on the globe.”

The Pope’s message resonates with the pastoral letter issued last Sept. 8 by the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) through its president, Pablo Virgilio Cardinal S. David which touches on the roots of the problems being denounced in connection with the Trillion Peso march on Sunday.

Pope Leo XIV’s grim characterization — “we are in big trouble” — strikes at the root of a world losing its moral perspective. The prospect of a single person, Elon Musk, amassing a trillion dollars while billions struggle to eat is scandalous. It exposes an economic order that rewards excesses and tolerates misery, a system where technological innovation is glorified, but social justice is forgotten. Cardinal David’s pastoral letter amplifies this alarm.

Truly, when wealth towers so grotesquely over poverty, society itself teeters on the verge of massive unrest. Inequality at this scale is both sinful and unsustainable. Let the prophetic voice of Church leaders be heeded. Humanity must reorder wealth and power in favor of justice, dignity, and solidarity for all.

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