2 Anyone who considers carefully the prolonged and bitter series of sufferings, the unhappy heritage of sin, whereby, as by so many stages, we mark the course of fallen man in this mortal pilgrimage, can hardly find any occasion since the flood, when the race of man was so deeply and so commonly tried by so many and such great distresses of body and of mind as those which we lament to see in the present troubles; for even the most terrible calamities and disasters which have left indelible traces on the records and the life of nations did but devastate now one people, now another. But in this troubled time the whole human race is so pressed by the scarcity of money and by the straits of the economic crisis that the more it struggles to get free, the more it feels itself inextricably fettered. And from this it comes that there is now no nation, no state, no society, no family, that is not either itself oppressed, more or less gravely, by these calamities, or else seems likely to be dragged down headlong by the ruin of others. Nay more, those very men, very few indeed, who since they are endowed with immense riches, seemed to control the government of the world, those very few, moreover, who, being addicted to excessive gain, were and are in great part the cause of such great evils; those very men - we say - are often, with little honor, the first to be ruined, grasping the goods and the fortunes of very many unto their own destruction; so that we may see how the judgment, spoken by the Holy Spirit concerning guilty individual men, is now verified in the whole world: "By what things a man sinneth, by the same also he is tormented" ( Wisdom xi. 17).
Source: Caritate Christi Compulsi (Vatican.va)