Vatican Document on Global Financial Reform Released
October 24, 2011
The Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace has released a 41-page document titled “Toward Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of Global Public Authority.” A first translation of the document is HERE. Let’s all carefully review the document before arguing over it.
Well, Mr. Slippery George Weigel seems to be suggesting an Occupy Nothing Movement in relation to this document:
“The truth of the matter is that “the Vatican” — whether that phrase is intended to mean the Pope, the Holy See, the Church’s teaching authority, or the Church’s central structures of governance — called for precisely nothing in this document.”
Cue Mr. Peters . . .
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/pope-benedict-calls-for-central-world-bank-only-he-didnt-heres-why?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=10bee58bd1-LifeSiteNews_com_Canada_Headlines10_24_2011&utm_medium=email
Oh, CatholicVote had several posts on how this is not really authoritative (it is, just because it wasn’t written from the Pope, it certainly is authoritative, even if of a less authority than an encyclical). What is also amazing is how they say “see, it’s not from the Pope” while ignoring how much of it is referencing the words — of Popes!
http://commonsensejesus.tumblr.com/post/11603043892/luke-10-25-37
http://www.catholicvote.org/discuss/index.php?p=22025
What is even more surprising — and shows the dishonesty involved — they are completely ignoring the fact that Pope Benedict has already discussed the idea of a world authority!
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/money_co/2009/07/pope-benedict-xvi-is-offering-a-solution-for-what-ails-the-global-economy-a-true-world-political-authority-to-manage-it-al.html
“To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority, as my predecessor Blessed John XXIII indicated some years ago.”
Oh, and yes, that was from an encyclical.
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate_en.html
OOPS.
It certainly would not be appropriate for me to lecture Catholics on how to treat or accept their reactionary co-religionists. But I can try to speak for some educated interested parties generally. It is all too clear that for people like George Weigel the Catholic religion is just a prop and no more more. He has made a career of being a useful cipher for monied interests, especially the ones who make money off the slaughter of our fellow citizens who toil as soldiers in unnecessary wars. Pope John Paul II clearly was clever enough to know he needed a a cipher for potential hagiography. When he met Mr. Weigel he must have thought his dream had come true. A rare combination of pursed-lip prissiness and a valley-girl mental schema. The Pope knew that in a world awash in American culture only a cipher of this particular weird configuration could handle the simplicities demanded by the world-wide dumb-ass argot. What Mr. Weigel actually understands about Catholicism as an actual great force in human history is so small that you could fit it in a thimble. His mind is filled with quixotic cold-war memes, the type of thing one imagines J. Edgar Hoover used as bedroom talk in a weird mood . Weigel seems to have taken the worst from all sorts of people and rolled them into one human being’s prevarications. He suits the ever-useful desideratum of the truly canny who use him with pleasure I am sure: He makes everyone else look good by withering comparison.
As for Mr. Peters, a pure step-and-fetch-it. Religion is just a way to avoid the great pain of being merely used.
I love the Lifesite article. Please explain how it advances the Pro-Life movement to debunk and dismiss a Vatican document on economic justice? Couldn’t they just had said nothing?
The Catholic voices I listen to on the Left carefully consider and respectfully read church documents even while disagreeing with large or small parts of them. I’m trying to find the Catholic voices on the Right who do the same. Can anyone help me?
Here’s Benedict XVI himself from Caritas en Veritate:
“In the face of the unrelenting growth of global interdependence, there is a strongly felt need, even in the midst of a global recession, for a reform of the United Nations Organization, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth. One also senses the urgent need to find innovative ways of implementing the principle of the responsibility to protect and of giving poorer nations an effective voice in shared decision-making. This seems necessary in order to arrive at a political, juridical and economic order which can increase and give direction to international cooperation for the development of all peoples in solidarity. To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority, as my predecessor Blessed John XXIII indicated some years ago.”
Putting aside the question of authority, can we talk reality? While I agree with most of what it says, and believe that we are suffering worldwide from economic systems that view people as commodities, I don’t think a world governance system would be effective. Can anyone say United Nations?
Also, while the document paid lip service to subsidiarity, it doesn’t, at least to me, make a convincing case that it is actually being applied. If control is enacted at a level at which it is not effective, it suggests to me that it could be done better on a smaller scale. Is it a waste of time to suggest something that is not real, and is unlikely to ever be implemented?
I have to say, I am a more than a little uncomfortable with the idea of a “world political authority.” More international cooperation, yes. But a global authority with the juridical and police power customary to states seems to fly directly in the face of the principle of subsidiarity. As I understand CST’s critique of both capitalism and socialism, it is precisely concentrations of economic power, either private or public, that lead to the commodification of human persons. How much greater would the risk be to human dignity if a single political authority was invested with responsibility for the management of the global economy?
I thought that the widest possible diffusion of economic power – including the ownership of productive private property – was at the heart of the Church’s economic program.
Mark
I think there are many issues which are in play, and we must not neglect the Catholic “both/and.” You are right, the widest possible diffusion of economic power is wanted; this is exactly, however, why there is the need for some regulatory principle which will make sure this happens instead of the law of the jungle. It is not utopian, and certainly, there can be (and would be) abuse within any institution which is set up to help monitor and protect the situation, however, it is seen as a counter-balance to other principles which are already at work — such as the drive for greed which combined with a willingness to do whatever it takes to halt the free distribution of goods. The principle still will be, at the lowest level possible and needed, that is where the work will be accomplished, but in a world-system which has many large players (nation-states), there is a need to make sure those players also play fair (which the Church has consistently pointed out, has not been the case). This is where this authority would have a role; in an ideal situation, it would be the Confucian ideal – it’s very existence would establish the rule of law necessary to keep the most freedom for the most people — though, in practice, this will not be perfect. This ideal has a long standing tradition in the Church, and can be found back before the Reformation, and in part, this was what was fought against by the various princes of Europe — while the Church consistently pointed out the instability which was created and the need for a central figure to help establish justice (similar to the position of the Pope in relation to other bishoprics being the final arbitrator of theological conflict, if necessary). To be sure, some, like de Maistre, thought the Pope should be this figure (the spiritual principle being ontological superior to the temporal), but, others thought it needed to be someone like a Tsar (Solovyov), recognizing that the spiritual force should be a guiding moral force, but not a temporal power.
Nonetheless, the point is, with such an authority in place, it could in theory become tyrannical, but, depending upon how it is established, it is likely to help overcome the tyranny of the corporate system. Checks and balances are what are needed. This is a part of a world-wide check and balance to help make the social doctrine possible (like laws make freedom possible).
Henry, is it both “both/and” and “either/or” or is it either “both/and” or “either/or?”
If the Catholic point of view that it is both “both/and” and “either/or,” then I choose to say that we either break down concentrations of power or we will be crushed by them.
Mark,
I share your concern. But it does bring back memories of Sister Mary Emil Penet’s lectures in the Catholic Social Teaching class is college seminary, always suggesting that Church teaching had to involve some form of “One-World” form. Ah, the best laid plans of mice and nuns. As I see it, suggestions like the Vatican’s are not necessarily so interesting as prescriptions, but rather as indications. Namely, an indication that an important and ancient source in society — which the Church certainly is no matter what one thinks of it — is seriously interested in some countervailing force to global oligarchic hegemony. Please God if some sort of international organization materializes out of real practical need, in case of worsening economic crisis, that it be set up with more savvy and responsiveness to the determinative Realpolitik of the actual balances of power.
Paul, why do you imagine that such a “world political authority” would be a countervailing force? Isn’t it much more likely to become a handmaiden to the global capitalist plutocracy? That’s what’s happened (or is happening) in this country. On what basis can we expect it would be different writ large?
Mark,
Stop making so much sense. it’s depressing. I am going to stick to watching House Hunters International. One needs to see what you can buy in, say, Montenegro or Mongolia, just in case things get really bad here.
Good luck, PPF. As one of my favorite writers, James Howard Kunstler, says, when those millions of tattooed and camouflaged good ole’ boys with their pickup trucks and gun racks discover that the American Dream has been stolen out from under them, it ain’t gonna be pretty.
Mark,
Well, if history is any guide, and it usually is, when that redneck crisis dawns some sort of new religion or religious evolution will appear. People have to be controlled somehow.
The last time we asked for a King, we got Saul.
Nate, I guess this is where I depart from both Left and Right. My friends here on the Left seem perfectly comfortable with the notion of a global Leviathan-King, while their counterparts on the Right seem more than satisfied with the current reign of the global Robber Barons. We should be working to break down concentrations of power. The only global organization I’m interested in advancing is the Catholic Church.
The great thing about disordered power is that it always self-destructs.
When the structures of sin disintegrate of their own accord, what will we who inherit the earth replace them with? I hope not more of the same.
Or, as Peter Maurin often taught, we ought to build a new society in the shell of the old.
Amen.
Brian writes: Also, while the document paid lip service to subsidiarity, it doesn’t, at least to me, make a convincing case that it is actually being applied. If control is enacted at a level at which it is not effective, it suggests to me that it could be done better on a smaller scale.
And then Mark writes: But a global authority with the juridical and police power customary to states seems to fly directly in the face of the principle of subsidiarity. As I understand CST’s critique of both capitalism and socialism, it is precisely concentrations of economic power, either private or public, that lead to the commodification of human persons. How much greater would the risk be to human dignity if a single political authority was invested with responsibility for the management of the global economy?
I thought that the widest possible diffusion of economic power – including the ownership of productive private property – was at the heart of the Church’s economic program.
There is a great misunderstand of word subsidiarity as the Church has historically applied it. First, it is not a principle limited to government. Subsidiarity does not mean a Town Council is the prefered regulator of multinational corporations. If financial corporations are transnational, then it is no violation of subsidiarity to have transnational regulation.
Kurt, rather than proposing the erection of a “world political authority” to regulate transnational financial institutions, I would prefer that the Church propose the dissolution of such institutions altogether on the basis that, regulated or not, they represent an inhuman concentration of power. Our experience with regulatory capture and the rise of the Corporate State in the United States ought to give us pause in recommending a global analogue. And who, really, doubts that such a body would not be put at the service of the multinationals and their retainers in national governments. After all, even the most fervent globalist can admit that a “world political authority” would be much more likely to look like the plenary session at Davos than a general chapter of the Missionaries of Charity.
Mark,
That is a worthy idea for discussion. But I think we can say subidarity does not call for a regulatory regime six levels below from where we accept the regulalatee exsisting.
You’re right.
Note, by the way, that the kind of argument that Mark Gordon and others are having about the document is *precisely* what it means to take this document seriously as a Catholic. Note Mark’s tone and approach and contrast it to the neoliberals quoted above and in earlier posts. That’s the difference between recognizing that the document is important and struggling with its implications, and just ignoring it because you’ve already decided what is the right view on the matter and you can’t be bothered by an uppity African Justice and Peace Cardinal who hasn’t read Thomas Woods Jr. on anarcho-capitalism, or something.
‘That’s the difference between recognizing that the document is important and struggling with its implications, and just ignoring it because you’ve already decided what is the right view on the matter and you can’t be bothered by an uppity African Justice and Peace Cardinal who hasn’t read Thomas Woods Jr. on anarcho-capitalism, or something.”
I highlight this statement mostly because it makes clear the vast tectonic shift that has apparently occurred in conservative Catholic circles, without many noticing it seems. That “anarcho-capitalism” should be in any way connected with the view of the Catholic Church is such disjunct that it is utterly surreal. Truth IS stranger than fiction!