Vatican City, May 17, 2018 / 12:20 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Two Vatican offices called Thursday for the development of new forms of economy and finance with regulations directed to the common good and respect for human dignity.
“It is especially necessary to provide an ethical reflection on certain aspects of financial transactions which, when operating without the necessary anthropological and moral foundations, have not only produced manifest abuses and injustice, but also demonstrated a capacity to create systemic and worldwide economic crisis,” read Oeconomicae et pecuniariae quaestiones, (Economic and financial issues), a document of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development presented May 17.
The document, signed Jan. 6, presents considerations for an ethical discernment of economics and finances, and argues that profit should not be an end in itself, but must be pursued with the goal of achieving greater solidarity and a more equitable distribution of wealth.
It presents fundamental considerations, such as the need for ethics for the economy to function correctly, and treats at length of specific ethical issues in financial and economic markets.
It was presented during a press conference by Archbishop Luis Ladaria, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Cardinal Peter Turkson, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.
Sitting alongside the prefects were professors Leonardo Becchetti from Rome’s Tor Vergata University and Lorenzo Caprio, from the Catholic University of Milan.
Archbishop Ladaria said the aim of the document is to provide a correct anthropological vision for the current market, since “the common good has disappeared” from many areas of economics and finance.
According to Becchetti, the document also identifies a major problem in the global economy: “we have a growing global wealth, which is a good thing, but we have a huge problem of distribution.”
“Regulation is key” to bringing more balance, he said, citing the need to be attentive to a growing dependence on technology while also ensuring people have work. The main problem, he said, “is fiscal,” and he stressed the need to give attention to areas with fewer resources.
The document frequently cites Pope Francis and Benedict XVI, but also includes citations from Pius XI, the Second Vatican Council, and the subsequent magisterium.
Oeconomicae et pecuniariae quaestiones cites the growing influence of financial markets, saying there is a need for “appropriate regulation of the dynamics of the markets and, on the other hand, a clear ethical foundation that assures a well-being realized through the quality of human relationships; rather than merely economic mechanisms, which by themselves cannot attain it.”
The recent global financial crisis, the text read, is an invitation to “develop a new economy, more attentive to ethical principles, and a new regulation of financial activities that would neutralize predatory and speculative tendencies and acknowledge the value of the actual economy. ”
What is at stake is the well-being of men and women throughout the planet who risk being excluded and marginalized from true well-being, while a small minority, “indifferent to the condition of the majority, exploits and reserves for itself substantial resources and wealth.”
The document said the time has come to begin recovering “what is authentically human,” and to expand minds and hearts to they recognize what is both true and good, “without which no social, political and economic system could avoid bankruptcy, failure, and, in the long term, collapse.”
Competent and responsible authorities, the text read, have the duty “to develop new forms of economy and of finance, with rules and regulations directed towards the enlargement of the common good and respect for human dignity along the lines indicated by the social teachings of the Church.”
The text flagged erroneous and misguided approaches to the economic and financial markets such as consumerism, materialism, and an over-emphasis on profit, citing them as mentalities which endanger the common good and increase inequalities throughout the world.
“Our contemporary age has shown itself to have a limited vision of the human person, as the person is understood individualistically and predominantly as a consumer, whose profit consists above all in the optimization of his or her monetary income. The human person, however, actually possesses a uniquely relational nature and has a sense for the perennial search for gains and well-being that may be more comprehensive, and not reducible either to a logic of consumption or to the economic aspects of life.”
“No profit is in fact legitimate when it falls short of the objective of the integral promotion of the human person, the universal destination of goods, and the preferential option for the poor,” the text said, stressing that a legitimate economic system “thrives not merely through the quantitative development of exchange but rather by its capacity to promote the development of the entire person and of every person.”
On this basis, the document urged that universities and business schools provide as a foundation an education by which students will “understand economics and finance in the light of a vision of the totality of the human person”, avoiding “a reductionism that sees only some dimensions of the person.”
Well-being has to be measured by more than just Gross Domestic Product but must also take into account safety and security and “the quality of human relationships and of work. Profit should be pursued but not ‘at any cost’, nor as a totalizing objective for economic action.”
Profit and solidarity “are no longer antagonists,” the document said. However, “where egoism and vested interests prevail, it is difficult for the human person to to grasp the fruitful interchange between profit and gift, as sin tends to tarnish and rupture this relationship.”
“It is impossible to ignore the fact that the financial industry, because of its pervasiveness … is a place where selfishness and the abuse of power have an enormous potential to harm the community.”
The documented lamented that “Capital annuity can trap and supplant the income from work, which is often confined to the margins of the principal interests of the economic system. Consequently, work itself, together with its dignity, is increasingly at risk of losing its value as a ‘good’ for the human person and becoming merely a means of exchange within asymmetrical social relations.”
It pointed out an inversion between means and ends, in which work has become an instrument, and money an end.
Oeconomicae et pecuniariae quaestiones said that credit has an “irreplaceable social function,” but that “applying excessively high interest rates, really beyond the range of the borrowers of funds, represents a transaction not only ethically illegitimate, but also harmful to the health of the economic system. As always, such practices, along with usurious activities, have been recognized by human conscience as iniquitous and by the economic system as contrary to its good functioning.”
Instead, financial activities are called to serve the real economy, “to create value with morally licit means, and to favour a dispersion of capital for the purpose of producing a principled circulation of wealth.”
“What is morally unacceptable is not simply to profit, but rather to avail oneself of an inequality for one’s own advantage, in order to create enormous profits that are damaging to others; or to exploit one’s dominant position in order to profit by unjustly disadvantaging others, or to make oneself rich through harming and disrupting the collective common good.”
The text then highlights the need for greater communion, collaboration, and solidarity in the market, and offers suggestions for ways in which these can be implemented.
In a healthy market “it is easier to respect and promote the dignity of the human person and the common good,” the Vatican offices wrote.
The experience of recent decades has demonstrated the need for both ethics and regulation, the document states.
With an increased globalization of financial markets, the system “requires a stable, clear and effective coordination among various national regulatory authorities,” allowing them to share binding decisions when necessary, especially when it comes to threats against the common good.
“Where massive deregulation is practiced, the evident result is a regulatory and institutional vacuum that creates space not only for moral risk and embezzlement, but also for the rise of the irrational exuberance of the markets, followed first by speculative bubbles, and then by sudden, destructive collapse, and systemic crises,” Oeconomicae et pecuniariae quaestiones states.
The text condemned the tendency of business managers to establish policies which aim “not at increasing the economic health of the companies that they serve, but at the mere profits of the shareholders, damaging therefore the legitimate interests of those who are bearing all of the work and service benefiting the same company, as well as the consumers and the various local communities (stakeholders).”
The document suggested that ethical committees be established in banks to support the administration, and to help cushion them from the impact of losses.
The text then pointed to financial instruments such as derivatives and credit default swaps, which going unchecked, can lead to “unacceptable” consequences from an ethical point of view, essentially gambling with a person’s future.
Use of offshore accounts as tax havens was also condemned, though it was noted that tax systems throughout the world are not always equal, which can damage weaker parties in favor of wealthier ones.
Despite the fact that more nations are cracking down on offshore accounts, penalties have not been enforced and norms have either not been applied or they have not proved effective due to the political powers pulling the strings.
All of these problems are “not only the work of an entity that operates out of our control,” but are “in the sphere of our responsibilities.”
Oeconomicae et pecuniariae quaestiones states that it is “therefore quite evident how important a critical and responsible exercise of consumption and savings actually is.”
As an example, the text said shopping is a daily task by which we can choose to avoid purchasing products produced by chains which violate “the most elementary human rights,” such as sweat-shops.
“Through the gesture, apparently banal, of consumption, we actually express an ethics and are called to take a stand in front of what is good or bad for the actual human person.”
Likewise, persons are called to direct their savings to “those enterprises that operate with clear criteria inspired by an ethics respectful of the entire human person, and of every particular person, within the horizon of social responsibility.”
“Each one is called to cultivate procedures of producing wealth that may be consistent with our relational nature and tend towards an integral development of the human person.”
The document concludes with a call to hope in light of the challenges of the economy, saying, “every one of us can do so much, especially if one does not remain alone.”
“Today as never before we are all called, as sentinels, to watch over genuine life and to make ourselves catalysts of a new social behavior, shaping our actions to the search for the common good, and establishing it on the sound principles of solidarity and subsidiarity.”
[…]
Does wishing the Church were one, holy, catholic and apostolic again make me a backwardist?
Depends. But aren’t you proud to be one? I am. I think Deacon Ed Peltier is one too; for many months he added the word to his name.
meiron: I’m as backwardist as ever. In fact, my motto is: “Backwardist and proud.” I belong to the Backwardist Branch of the Catholic Church. (Please don’t confuse this as saying that I am an adherent to Mass celebrated in the Extraordinary Form as I am not. But I’m also against suppressing it.)
I’m fully intending to proselytize. In fact, the Backwardist Catholic Church believes that Jesus Christ is the only path to God; salvation is through Jesus Christ. He is the Way, the Truth and Life. I make no apologies to anyone that I am a follower of Christ. My aim is not to make other people feel better but to speak the truth at all times.
I hate the phrase me too, but me too. Since truth is eternal, an idea abhorrent to the synodal/syncretistic/pseudo-Catholic religion of this pontificate, we have to look backward to recognize ourselves.
There are only two philosophies. Everything else is derivative. Either God is a fool or we are. Were it the first, truth would be meaningless. Since it is the latter, it is for this reason that we fail to see that God did not and could not abandon us to a capricious understanding of how we ought to order our lives together. Moral truth never changes.
Those who primarily worship themselves rather than God lose or discover they never had faith in the idea that all truth originates exclusively within the mind of God, so they pursue revolutionary fantasies that promise to eliminate evil in the human condition once and for all.
Brilliantly said!
No, Brineyman. It makes you Catholic.
About the theologian Chiodi and his special-circumstances squint, the hole in the Titanic was only one-quarter of an inch wide…but also below the waterline and 300 feet long. (At least the little Dutch Boy on the leaking dike knew where to put his thumb.)
For helpful perspective, from an earlier Anglican (say what!) gathering we have the following from dissenters to the incremental approval of mutual masturbation (pontificated at the 1930 Lambeth Conference). Said the minority at a later such gathering in 1948:
“It is, to say the least, suspicious that the age in which contraception has won its way is not one which has been conspicuously successful in managing its sexual life. Is it possible that, by claiming the right to manipulate his physical processes in this manner, man may, without knowing it, be stepping over the boundary between the world of Christian marriage and what one might call the world of Aphrodite, the world of sterile eroticism?” (Cited in Wright, “Reflections on the Third Anniversary of a Controverted Encyclical,” St. Louis: Central Bureau Press, 1971).
And, how dare Chiodi refer to some homosexual relations as “fruitful” !? Indeed, a backwardist, fixistic, bigoted, and homophobic double-entendre of hurtful slang.
What more needs to be said about this papacy? We await…
I strive often to maintain a charitable perception of Pope Francis. However, when I read the following paragraph, “Chiodi was made a theology professor at the Pontifical John Paul II Theological Institute for Marriage and the Family Sciences in 2019 following its refounding by Pope Francis. He has also been a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life since 2017.”
Saint John Paul II was not simply a spiritual giant to me and whose writings led to my conversion to the Church, but he was a towering academic relative to Bergoglio. When Bergoglio “refounds” Pope John Paul II’s Theological Institute for Marriage and the Family Sciences, staffing it with those similar to Chiodi, the jig is up and I cannot attempt to provide further charity. It is a pathway leading to heresey and acceptance of evil. I give up. I cannot continue to make excuses for Bergoglio.
Serious question here:
Has the Catholic Church ever before had a pope who was actively seeking to undermine the Church and subvert her teachings?
I know we’ve had corrupt, self-serving popes, but I don’t know whether any have been actively engaged in sabotage.
Before now, I mean.
The Renaissance popes kept their excesses between the sheets.
Peter: That’s not only true but humorous as well (although we should never conclude that sin is ever something that is funny.)
But even our good popes preceding Francis kept the excesses of dissenting theologians in place, without meaningful consequences to their careers, implicitly validating their corruption of young minds in universities while Baggio selected faithless men to be rubber-stamped into the episcopate. A fool ending up in the Chair of Peter is the logical result of a long process of indifference to real consequences.
brineyman: Please be ever-reminded that the election of one Jorge Bergoglio to the Chair of St. Peter was orchestrated by one Theodore Cardinal McCarrick (now known in the Church as MR. Theodore McCarrick a known homosexual predator).
I predict in 10 years or so, the Church will change her teachings on contraception–even is “okay” to use though not optional given certain marital conditions (rather like the Anglicans did so many years ago).
Folks who are loyal Catholics will say this is nothing to worry about since the teaching on contraception is part of natural law teaching and was never taught infallibly, etc.
Something like that.
I had thought that Humanae vitae’s teaching against willful contraception WAS infallible teaching. Maybe I was wrong. Paul VI was clear in what he said and wrote not like the current occupier of Peter’s Chair.
I think this is in doubt, “cuz reasons.”
I remember listening to a series of talks given at an NFP conference, and one of the speakers, a priest who was on the board of an NFP group, was asked the question about HV being “infallible.” And I clearly remember him saying that No, it was not, contraception being part of the natural law teachings–like you can’t go around putting water in the gas tank of your car and expect it to run properly (he didn’t say that last, but that is what I understood.)
.
Before I wrote the above, I looked up the part about contraception being infallible, and it would appear that points of view vary, unlike the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception–which I believe everyone understands to be infallibly taught.
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The overwhelming majority of Catholics–clergy and laity alike–do not support the “ban” on contraception and view it as nothing more than a nice traditional discipline or whatever, completely optional. So I think it will be somewhat “formally” loosened (like Fudicia Supplicans did for gay marriage) in 10 years, and then maybe officially overturned another 10 years after.
That is pretty much guaranteed.
The good news will be that people will flee the sinking ship, and join the SSPX and other Catholic societies. The bad new will be, that the Church will promote the damnation of God knows many by her false & deadly teaching.
People are capable of justifying any falsehood whatsoever. Justifying the belief that Jesus was only a great prophet, would be a much tougher proposition, but I don’t doubt the Church would try it, if need be. The Papacy has shown itself to be worthless as a guardian of and guide to religious truth.
The world has long gone the way of the Pied Piper of Gomorrah. The Vatican in relative slow motion. We know who the Piper is. Does the Vatican?
The Vatican stands as a pariah in the midst of the Apostolic faithful [to differentiate from the progressive], the remaining few in the pews and at the altar. Fr Maurizio Chiodi chosen as representative of a less unsophisticated, blunt perspective for a more finesse, intellectually appealing approach. He speaks of “homosexual relationships under certain conditions to enjoy good relations”, the exception in pleasant contrast to the rampant orgy that emblazons the morally dissolute.
Now we’ve dealt with Francis’ exceptions to the rule in Amoris Laetitia and know where that narrow exception has taken us. Obviously it’s not the exception that’s at issue, because an exception that undermines the rule is a new rule. It’s not a slippery slope analogy. That’s due to the destruction of the principles that make for the rule. In this case as explicated by Chiodi an unlawful act is instead by nature a moral good.
If the Lord will be propitious to us, what other assistance do we need -St. Basil.
The Church will not change her teachings and positions and what we see presently pushed at the forefront of everything will not survive. The latter is predicated on the 4 “outlooks” in Evangelii Gaudium which are heralded as “against proselytism” that at the same time teach being brought to God and the Commandments through sterilizing relationships and exchange that is “reality”. These 4 altogether and individually –
1. don’t totally reconcile with any one parable or the Beatitudes but also are internally self-contradicting
2. admit conventual and individualist processes not of the Gospel to transfix them as of some universal or destined virtue or moment or wonder
3. serve and advance the methods and causes of the enemies of salvation in their obliquity ratiocination and
4. misread the signs of the times.
See the sower and seed, or the prodigal son, or the widow’s mite, etc.
It substitutes the medicine of God for being medicinal and inclusionary. So as if to not offend the 1st Commandment as if by not offending the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 8th Commandments because it is a collectivity all at once.
(The St. Basil quote is from MAGNIFICAT of September 6 2007.)
If Fr Chiodi says God made same sex attraction, perceived as a divine good, then it becomes intrinsic with natural law. As Pope Francis told the gay seminarian God made you that way. As if to say if you’re born with no arms, with Downs Syndrome God intentionally made you that way. That mistakes of nature and all the ills of Mankind are not really the result of original sin.
Christ says differently as recorded in the Gospels, that he freed those born with or who acquired physical, mental defects – from ‘the grip of the devil’. In effect the result of evil coming into the world. Evil, moral as well as physical features of the kingdom of Satan.
Actually it was Fr Radcliffe OP who made the assertion that same sex attraction “is God given”.
“God given?” Do the math…
The percentage of anti-binary LGBTQ in recent age groups vastly outstrips (so to speak) the percentage in earlier age groups and times past. Since such sexual fluidity doesn’t spread biologically (!), then the what pray tell, might be the reason?
Maybe we can tease a clue from Andre Gide, prominent and conflicted bisexual novelist? About whom, a biographer wrote thusly:
“[Gide] emphatically protests that he has not a word to say against marriage and reproduction (but then) suggests that it would be of benefit to an adolescent, before his desires are fixed, to have a love affair with an older man, instead of with a woman. . . the general principle admitted by Gide, elsewhere in his treatise, that sexual practice tends to stabilize [!] in the direction where it has first found satisfaction; to inoculate a youth with homosexual tastes seems an odd way to prepare him for matrimony” (Harold March, “Gide and the Hound of Heaven,” 1952).
Is it God or, instead, is it sociological?
Sociological as in exploitation, sexual abuse, early-age experimentation and getting locked in (stabilized), and stuff like that? This is God? Ironically, Cardinal Hollerich might be onto something when he pontificates, “I believe that the sociological-scientific foundation of this teaching [basic sexual morality] is no longer correct.” https://www.newwaysministry.org/2022/02/04/leading-cardinal-in-synod-seeks-change-in-church-teachings-on-homosexuality/ What this luminary meant to say, surely, was that social research doesn’t so much upend sexual morality–as it might uncover the actual causes of the multiplying behavioral pandemic. Then there’s the role of locking-in brain chemistry associated with all kinds of addictions, even video games, and pornography which is found to be more addictive than cocaine.
Even Church hirelings are in the act of indirectly grooming (the double-speak of the DDF’s Fiducia Supplicans?). And, thereby outfitting themselves with fashionable millstone neckties to go with their red and purple hats.
“Since such sexual fluidity doesn’t spread biologically (!), then the what pray tell, might be the reason?”. This is such a telling indicator about the origins of LGBT, which points to psychology [or sociology as you suggest] and a growing mindset rather than a biological disorder from the normative.
EDWARD: Brilliantly said!
Thank You! Always like your comments too.