When Pope Francis was first elected,
there was a lot of initial speculation about what his
political/economic/cultural views would be. I wrote the following article at
the time and I think it has held up fairly well, except the Pope has been a
little less conservative on moral issues than I expected. I was viciously
attacked almost immediately by the Jesuit Magazine, America, but I’ll share
with you my response to that later. Read what I wrote at the time and tell me
if you think it holds up pretty well…
I remember when Cardinal Ratzinger
was announced as Pope. It happened while I was on live TV, on CNBC with Larry
Kudlow. They cut away from me and the other pundits to a live correspondent,
who announced that the former Cardinal Ratzinger had decided to call himself
Benedict XVI.
Larry said something like “I wonder
what the significance of that is.” I turned my head away from the camera and
said to my wife “It means he’s not giving up on Europe.” I wondered whether to
try to get the attention of the line producer to inform him that I had
something to say about the choice of name, but decided not to. I was there as
an market pundit, not a church pundit (if there even is such a thing). But I’d
always regretted not saying something, because subsequent events really did
show that Pope Benedict XVI had in fact, chosen that name partly to evoke the
memory of Saint Benedict who could reasonably lay hold to the claim that he was
the father of Europe. His Benedictine monks, through great learning, and with
great courage preserved the learning of the ancient world, mixed with piety,
and used it to lay the foundation of what eventually became Europe.
So today, while on an investment
committee conference call, when the white smoke appeared and shortly thereafter
we learned that an Argentinian Cardinal named Jorge Bergoglio had been elected
and had chosen for himself the name Pope Francis, I decided that this time I
was going to share my first thought with friends and colleagues on the call.
Here it is: the Pope will probably move the Church culturally to the right, and
more likely move it economically to the left.
In other words, the age old answer
to the question, “Is the Pope Catholic?” is, “Yes.” But the answer to the
question, “Is the Pope capitalist?” is, “Probably not.”
First, there’s the basic
biographical particulars: He’s a Jesuit from South America, Argentina in
particular. Both facts on their own represent intellectual and ideological
milieus which are decidedly unconducive to creating appreciation for the
virtues of the market system. The movement known as ‘liberation theology’ ,
which splices Marxist economic theory onto Christian vocabulary, has strong
roots both among Jesuits and Argentinians. This is not to say that Cardinal
Bergoglio was in any sense a liberation theologian, let alone a Marxist. He
resisted that tendency, and was often criticized by the hard left. Then again,
entering fully into liberation theology would have been a bridge too far,
outside of the good graces of the Church entirely. But one can be a fierce
critic of the market system and still remain within orthodox Roman Catholicism.
And that appears to be the case with
Cardinal Bergoglio. Although he’s been criticized by the hard left, his
biographer, Sergio Rubin (who no doubt is a very happy man right now), says
that such complaints should be put in context:
This kind of demonization is unfair,
says Rubin, who wrote Bergoglio’s authorized biography, “The Jesuit.”
“Is Bergoglio a progressive — a
liberation theologist even? No. He’s no third-world priest. Does he
criticize the International Monetary Fund, and neoliberalism? Yes.
Neo-liberalism is a term used by the
left to describe the modern school of economics which attempts to move the
world towards free-markets (classical liberalism) and away from various forms
of central control. But the Argentine political debate tends to take place
between two statist camps: Peronism on the ‘right’ and Marxism on the left.
According to the Catholic Herald the
former Cardinal’s ideological orientation is more from the anti-market right
than from the anti-market left:
“Where do his political sympathies
lie? Certainly not on the Left. Those who know him best would consider him on
the moderate Right, close to that strand of popular Peronism which is hostile
to liberal capitalism. In the economic crisis of 2001-2002, when Argentina
defaulted on its debt, people came out on to the streets and supermarkets were
looted, Bergoglio was quick to denounce
the neo-liberal banking system which
had left Argentina with an unpayable debt.”
The liberal National
Catholic Reporter says that “Bergoglio has supported the social
justice ethos of Latin American Catholicism, including a robust defense of the
poor…” and approvingly quotes him as saying,
“We live in the most unequal part of
the world, which has grown the most yet reduced misery the least. The unjust
distribution of goods persists, creating a situation of social sin that cries
out to Heaven and limits the possibilities of a fuller life for so many of our
brothers.”
The former Cardinal placed a strong
emphasis on the distribution of wealth, not the creation of it. Spiritually he
places emphasis on identification with the poor and the spiritual benefits of
living a life of poverty. His decision to choose the name Francis squares well
with that. Conflicting press reports claim that he either chose the name to
honor Francis Xavier, the founder of his order, or to honor Saint Francis. I
think probably the latter is true. Francis built a monastic movement on vows of
poverty, recruiting men, many of them wealthy nobles, to imitate Jesus’ life
without property. Resisting the Albigensian heresy which held that poverty is
morally obligatory and that private property is immoral, the Franciscans stayed
within orthodox Church teaching. Nevertheless, Francis has become a revered
figure among the Catholic left partly because of his practice of voluntary
poverty.
There is nothing remotely untoward
in St. Francis’ simple lifestyle. There is nothing remotely untoward in
Cardinal Bergoglio’s simple life, cooking his own food, living in a modest
home, using public transit, spending time in the slums. In fact, both men are
wonderfully admirable for this choice.
But let’s not ignore the fact that
the poor profoundly benefit when the economy grows; more so, even than when the
church offers them a soup kitchen to visit. Neither the rightist Peron, nor the
current leftist administration of Argentina has done much good for the poor. A
century ago it was one of the world’s more prosperous countries, but it’s
repeated rejection of both classical liberalism and (later) neo-liberalism, caused
its prosperity to plummet compared with much of the rest of the world.
It is no coincidence that
Argentina’s score of 47 on the Index of Economic Freedom (placing it as a
miserable 160th of the freest counties in the world) accompanies its terrible poverty.
Even mild attempts at ‘austerity’ were criticized by the Cardinal and much of
the Argentine Church, but when austerity was abandoned and the currency
devalued and debt reneged upon, the lot of Argentina’s poor became even poorer.
“At the celebration of the Te Deum
at the most recent national feast, last May 25th, there was a record audience
for Cardinal Bergoglio´s homily. The cardinal asked the people of Argentina to
do as Zacchaeus had done in the Gospel. Here was a sinister loan shark. But,
taking account of his moral lowliness, he climbed up into a sycamore tree, to
see Jesus and let himself be seen and converted by him.”
For a country that is in an almost
constant state of conflict with investors who have loaned money to it, and who
actually have the “nerve” to insist that the funds be repaid according to
contract, the image of a ‘sinister loan shark’ is, well, sinister, and
politically charged.
The problem is that this is not
actually what the gospel says about him.
“Jesus entered Jericho and was
passing through. A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax
collector and was wealthy.”
Not a lender, but a tax collector.
Seems like Argentina with its appallingly low score of 52 out of 100 on
controlling its government spending, and its craterously low 30 out of 100 on
investment spending, might want to turn its attention away from the alleged
loan sharks of the international investment community and the bogeyman of
excessive neo-liberal deregulation, and towards its own Zacchaeus’s in its bloated
government sector.
The new pope seems like a wonderful
man. Humble, simple, decent. But if he is going to help the Church do as much
as it possibly can for the poor, he’d do well, not just to look to the
wonderful St. Francis, who became poor to serve the poor, but also to the John
Paul the Great who, having lived under socialism in its most virulent form,
embraced the market economy for its ability to liberate the poor.
http://affluentinvestor.com/2015/09/what-i-wrote-about-pope-francis-when-he-was-elected/
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