http://moneynews.newsmax.com/streettalk/global_economy/2009/07/07/232693.html
Pope proposes new financial order guided by ethics
Associated Press
From profits to ethics: pope calls for a new political and financial world order
• Global recession caused by greed, says pontiff
• Economic crisis is 'clear proof of effects of sin'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/07/pope-new-political-financial-order
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8137849.stm
Page last updated at 12:33 GMT, Tuesday, 7 July 2009 13:33 UK
Pope calls for a UN 'with teeth'
Pope Criticizes World Economic System, Urges Social Responsibility
Pope Benedict XVI criticized the international economic system yesterday and called for a new global structure based on social responsibility, concern for the dignity of the worker and a respect for ethics.
"Today's international economic scene, marked by grave deviations and failures, requires a profoundly new way of understanding human enterprise," Benedict wrote in his latest encyclical, which is the most authoritative document a pope can issue. "Without doubt, one of the greatest risks for business is that they are almost exclusively answerable to their investors, thereby limited in their social value."
In the sweeping 144-page document, Benedict sketches a radically different world economy, in which access to food and water is a universal right, wealthy nations share with poorer ones and profit is not the ultimate goal of commerce. He advocates the creation of a "world political authority" to manage the economy.
He blames "badly managed and largely speculative financial dealing" for causing the economic meltdown. The primary capital to be safeguarded is people, he says, adding that economic systems need to be guided by charity and truth.
The encyclical comes a day before President Obama and leaders of other industrial nations are to gather in L'Aquila, Italy, to discuss the global economic crisis at a Group of Eight summit. The timing demonstrates that Benedict, 82, aims to insert his voice into that discussion by focusing on the moral underpinnings of the meltdown.
The document buoyed the left wing of the Roman Catholic Church, which focuses on the church's social justice teachings, and disappointed some socially conservative Catholics, who emphasize wealth creation and believe in the market's capacity to empower the poor.
Conservative George Weigel, a Benedict biographer and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington think tank, said that two drafts of the document prepared by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace had been rejected by the pope and that it was possible that the encyclical's stress on wealth distribution, rather than wealth creation, was a conciliatory gesture toward more left-leaning members of the Vatican bureaucracy.
Benedict is scheduled to meet with Obama on Friday and is expected to raise the issues discussed in the encyclical, "Caritas in Veritate" ("Charity in Truth"). This is Benedict's third encyclical since taking office four years ago. He has been working on this document since 2007 but has said that he delayed releasing it to reflect the world's current economic troubles.
Analysts say the document places the usually conservative pontiff on the left as to economic issues. But the document also gives a nod to the more conservative wing of the Catholic Church, maintaining that birth control, for example, is not only immoral but also poor economic policy because it narrows the "brain pool" of qualified labor. He makes comparable arguments about abortion and gay marriage.
In all, though, "Benedict is significantly to the left of any major political position in the United States," said Vincent J. Miller, a professor of Catholic theology and culture at the University of Dayton. "You don't have anything like this kind of trenchant critique of capitalism."
Benedict again urged that people show more respect toward the environment. But this time he added specific prescriptions -- more research into alternative energy, worldwide redistribution of energy resources and pushing more advanced countries to lower their energy consumption, either through technology or through greater "ecological sensitivity" among residents
The timing of the encyclical is unusual because it addresses a current crisis, said Maryann Cusimano Love of Catholic University's Life Cycle Institute. Normally, "the emergence of major Catholic teachings are often quite slow."
| Breaking News from Moneynews.com Pope Calls for New World Financial Order Pope Benedict. Photograph: Chris Helgren/Reuters
Pope Benedict today pinned responsibility for the worldwide recession squarely on greed and an amoral fascination with technological progress for its own sake. This must be tackled, he said, by the creation of a global political authority and financial order based not just on the search for ever greater profits, but on ethics and a sense of the common good. The pontiff made the appeal in a 144-page encyclical – a reflection on doctrine that is the highest form of papal writing – three days before he was due to discuss the global downturn with Barack Obama. Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth) is Benedict's third encyclical and the first to deal exclusively with economic and social issues. In one section, he says the current economic crisis is "clear proof" of the "pernicious effects of sin". The pope's analysis echoed some of the criticisms made by the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, of government policies that target growth to the exclusion of wider social considerations. But, as its title suggests, the papal encyclical is a primarily theological discourse which takes as its point of departure the argument that only a belief in the truth as proclaimed by Christianity can offer the necessary answers. "A Christianity of charity without truth would be more or less interchangeable with a pool of good sentiments," Benedict writes. His reflection – delayed by more than a year by the world economic crisis – nevertheless contains numerous specific criticisms and recommendations. Though the pontiff does not use the word "capitalism" in the encyclical, there are lengthy reflections on morality in economics. In a key passage, the encyclical says: "The conviction that the economy must be autonomous, that it must be shielded from 'influences' of a moral character, has led man to abuse the economic process in a thoroughly destructive way. In the long term, these convictions have led to economic, social and political systems that trample upon personal and social freedom, and are therefore unable to deliver the justice that they promise." Then in an unequivocal critique of unbridled markets, the pope writes that "grave imbalances are produced when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution." At a press conference in the Vatican, the pope's technical consultant, Stefano Zamagni, an economics professor at the University of Bologna, denied the encyclical was anti-capitalist, but added that it "views capitalism in its historical dimension and goes beyond it". He noted that "the market economy is broader than just capitalism", which was merely one variant. In another section of the reflection, Benedict argues that "financiers must rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity … right intention, transparency, and the search for positive results are mutually compatible and must never be detached from one another." Then, in a passage that builds on ideas first voiced by his predecessor, John Paul II, the pope argues that globalisation has made necessary a "reform of the United Nations Organisation and likewise of economic institutions and international finance so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth". One of his most senior advisers, cardinal Renato Martino, said: "The encyclical is not asking for a super- or world government." But it comes very close to doing so. It proposes a "true world political authority" that "would need to be universally recognised and to be vested with the effective power to ensure security for all, regard for justice and respect for rights." It would be asked to "manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis [and] to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis." But its responsibilities would be more than just economic. They would include securing "timely disarmament, food security and peace". The new body, a reformed UN, would also be called upon "to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration". Often regarded as the first "green" pope, Benedict also took advantage of his encyclical to make clearer his ideas on the importance of respecting the environment. But Zamagni said the document implicitly rejected forms of environmental thinking that put other forms of creation on a par with humankind. |
Pope Calls for New World Financial Order | ||
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VATICAN CITY -- Pope Benedict XVI called Tuesday for a new world financial order guided by ethics, dignity and the search for the common good in the third encyclical of his pontificate. In ''Charity in Truth,'' Benedict denounced the profit-at-all-cost mentality of the globalized economy and lamented that greed had brought about the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. ''Profit is useful if it serves as a means toward an end,'' he wrote. ''Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.'' The document, in the works for two years and repeatedly delayed to incorporate the fallout from the crisis, was released one day before leaders of the Group of Eight industrialized nations meet to coordinate efforts to deal with the global meltdown. The release was clearly designed to give world leaders a strong moral imperative to correct errors of the past, ''which wreaked such havoc on the real economy,'' and make a more socially just and responsible world financial order. ''The economy needs ethics in order to function correctly -- not any ethics, but an ethics which is people centered,'' he wrote. The German-born Benedict, 82, has spoken out frequently about the impact of the crisis on the poor, particularly in Africa which he visited earlier this year. But the 144-page encyclical, one of the most authoritative documents a pope can issue, marked a new level of church teaching by linking the Vatican's long-standing doctrine on caring for the poor with current events. While acknowledging that the globalized economy has ''lifted billions of people out of misery,'' Benedict accused the unbridled growth of recent years of causing unprecedented problems as well, citing mass migration flows, environmental degradation and a complete loss of trust in the world market. He urged wealthier countries to increase development aid to poor countries to help eliminate world hunger, saying peace and security depended on it. He specified that aid should go to agricultural development to improve infrastructure, irrigation systems, transport and sharing of agricultural technology. At the same time, he demanded that industrialized nations reduce their energy consumption, both to better care for the environment and to let the poorer have access to energy resources. ''One of the greatest challenges facing the economy is to achieve the most efficient use -- not abuse -- of natural resources, based on a realization that the notion of 'efficiency' is not value-free,'' he wrote. He denounced that the drive to outsource work to the cheapest bidder had endangered the rights of workers, and demanded that workers be allowed to organize in unions to protect their rights and guarantee steady, decent employment. Benedict called for a whole new financial order -- ''a profoundly new way of understanding business enterprise'' -- that respects the dignity of workers and looks out for the common good by prioritizing ethics and social responsibility over dividend returns. Kirk Hanson, a business ethics professor at Santa Clara University, said the encyclical is likely to spark debate over capitalism and social justice. ''When a group of U.S. Catholic bishops issued a similar statement during the Reagan years, it sparked a nationwide debate about the fairness of our capitalist system,'' said Hanson, who chaired the hearings leading up to the bishops' statement. Benedict stressed he wasn't opposed to a globalized economy, saying that if done correctly it has an unprecedented potential to redistribute wealth around the globe. But he warned that if badly directed and if the problems aren't fixed, globalization can increase poverty and inequality and trigger the type of crisis under way. Benedict has written two previous encyclicals in his four years as pope: ''God is Love'' in 2006 and ''Saved by Hope'' in 2007. His pronouncement on world finance for his third raised questions about the state of the Vatican's own books. The Vatican was implicated in a major Italian banking scandal in the 1980s in the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, in which the Vatican's bank was the major shareholder. The Vatican agreed to pay $250 million to Ambrosiano's creditors, while denying any wrongdoing. Last October, at the start of the meltdown, a top Vatican bank official issued assurances that its deposits were safe and had no liquidity problems, saying the bank had stayed away from derivatives, the financial instruments blamed for many of the steep loses in the meltdown. Other officials have said 80 percent of the Vatican's investments are in low-yield government bonds and 20 percent in stocks and that the Vatican follows an ethical code: no investments in companies that produce arms or contraceptives. The Vatican in its annual financial statement issued Saturday said it ran a deficit in 2008 for the second straight year, posting a euro900,000 ($1.28 million) loss, compared with a loss of euro9.06 million a year earlier. © 2009 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | ||
From profits to ethics: pope calls for a new political and financial world order
• Global recession caused by greed, says pontiff
• Economic crisis is 'clear proof of effects of sin'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/07/pope-new-political-financial-order
Pope calls for a UN 'with teeth' | |||
The Pope has called for reform of the United Nations and financial bodies, giving them the "real teeth" needed to tackle economic and social injustice. Benedict XVI said the blind pursuit of profit and economic mismanagement had "wreaked havoc" on the global economy. The market, said the Pope, must not become the place where the strong prevail over the weak. His encyclical letter said a reformed UN should strive for disarmament, food security and environmental protection. An encyclical letter is the highest form of papal teaching, says the BBC's David Willey in Rome.
This letter, Caritas in Veritate, or Charity in Truth, is his third since being made Pope in 2005. It is the first to focus on social issues, and follows two on spiritual matters. The densely argued 144-page document is the result of a two-year effort by the Pope to bring Catholic social teaching up to date on the ethical responsibilities for the global economic meltdown, says our correspondent. Its publication comes on the eve of Wednesday's G8 meeting of world leaders at L'Aquila. "There is a strongly felt need... for a reform of the United Nations Organisation, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth... there is urgent need of a true world political authority," the Pope wrote. The strengthened international body should work "to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace, to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration," Benedict said. Dangers of profit The letter, addressed to all Catholics "and people of goodwill", reminds them of their moral duties in financial dealings. "Profit is useful if it serves as a means toward an end," he wrote. "Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty." He warned that globalisation, properly managed, could "open up the unprecedented possibility of large-scale redistribution of wealth on a world-wide scale". But badly directed, it could "lead to an increase in poverty and inequality, and could even trigger a global crisis". On Friday Pope Benedict will have his first meeting with President Barack Obama at the Vatican, when the new US leader will have the opportunity to exchange views with the Pope on the moral imperatives facing world leaders in 2009, our correspondent says. | |||
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