Ro­man Catholic Vic­ar Gen­er­al Fr Mar­tin Sir­ju says he has seen first­hand the ef­fects of eco­nom­ic hard­ship in and around Port-of-Spain, not­ing an in­crease in the num­ber of peo­ple seek­ing the church’s help to ob­tain ba­sic ne­ces­si­ties in re­cent times.

Fr Sir­ju raised these con­cerns and oth­ers dur­ing his open­ing re­marks at an in­ter­faith ser­vice com­mem­o­rat­ing the 112th an­niver­sary of the Port-of-Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion at the Cathe­dral of the Im­mac­u­late Con­cep­tion on Char­lotte Street yes­ter­day.

He re­ferred to the life of John the Bap­tist, who car­ried out his min­istry in the wilder­ness, de­scrib­ing the mod­ern wilder­ness as one marked by fi­nan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties and oth­er chal­lenges.