SEOUL (UCAN) - South Korea's president has called on religious leaders to launch a nationwide campaign to aid unemployed people, whose number, currently about 1.5 million, continues to increase rapidly due to the economic crisis.
"I hope that you (religious) leaders will launch an active public movement aimed at supporting the jobless," President Kim Dae-jung told a March 25 prayer service in Seoul sponsored by South Korean Christian Churches.
A drive to collect funds for the unemployed would be a great moral boost to them, suggested Kim, the country's first Catholic president, who compared the jobless to "the least ones" in the Matthean depiction of the Final Judgment.
Kim cited the verse, "I tell you, whenever you refused to help one of these least important ones, you refused to help me" (Matthew 25:45). Unemployment is the biggest problem caused by the economic downturn which forced the country to turn to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout loan to ease its economic woes, the president explained.
Nonetheless, the country can pull through the crisis, Kim told the 1,500 participants, including National Assembly Speaker Kim Soo-han, Supreme Court Chief Justice Yoon Kwan, several ministers and foreign diplomats.
Reverend Park Jong-soon of Chungshin Church in Seoul stressed in his sermon that "hope will begin to spring only if our Koreans return to God."
The president was accompanied by his wife, First Lady Lee Hee-ho, a Methodist and former secretary of the Young Women's Christian Association.
UCAN 3. april 1998