Buenos Aires:  In his exclusively first interview, Pope Francis took on the issue of high youth unemployment in his home country of Argentina on Wednesday November 27.

He warned that today’s “throwaway culture” had discarded a generation of young Europeans. A day after issuing an 84-page platform for his eight-month-old papacy that blasted unfettered capitalism as “a new tyranny,” the pontiff used the interview aired on the TN TV channel to link high European unemployment to its twin problem of neglecting older people who are past their earning prime.

He said, “Today we are living in an unjust international system in which ‘King Money’ is at the center. It’s a throwaway culture that discards young people as well as its older people. In some European countries, without mentioning names, there is youth unemployment of 40 per cent and higher, a whole generation of young people does not have the dignity that is brought by work.”

European leaders pledged earlier this month to make fighting youth unemployment a priority but came up with no new ideas to tackle a problem that risks fueling social unrest. It is known that more than 6 million people under the age of 25 are without work in the European Union, with jobless rates among the young at close to 60 per cent in Spain and Greece.