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The Holy Father has come and gone. He said exactly what we all expected and it
wasn’t very helpful.
It’s clear to me the Roman Catholic Church, as a Western
institution is gone. I’m going to have to
get used to a whole new church. The
church’s membership growth is concentrated in the Third World, it’s leadership
as well, and its views of how the world works are no longer those of
traditional Euro-American sophistication.
My Pope’s personal approach can be summed up by the
following snippet from a Reuters post.
Pope Francis to reporters in Paraguay…”I have a great allergy to
economic things.”
This is a great pity because while being allergic to
economics the pope chooses to center much of his message to humanity in
economic terms.
The pope uses the language of socialism to critique the
universal human propensity toward greed and the maximization of advantage. He wants an economics of cooperation and
solidarity. And to that end he is
advancing the latest version of the old Catholic romance with cooperatives. The church as been pushing this exercise in
reviving medieval guilds for a century and apart from some limited success with
farmers in poor countries, nothing much to show for it.
Since the science of economics and modern management gives
His Holiness a headache, the church must look somewhere to justify it’s impulses.
At this point the trouble starts. The modern Papacy, unlike the Papacy of old
doesn’t really run anything or manage a society as such. When the church seeks to speak with authority
about processes that are beyond it’s direct knowledge, it relies on Bishops and
Cardinals, who in tern, rely on expert counsel.
So who are these experts?
I might expect to see learned and obscure experts drafted in
from the finest Roman Catholic Universities.
At least I could hope for self-effacing scholars with no public or
private chips on the table. And I would
be wrong. Here are some of the Popes
expert advisors.
Jeffery Sachs. Is described as “An American economist and
director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is known as one of the worlds leading
experts on economic development and the fight against poverty.” He is the author of three New York Times best
sellers on ending world poverty. None of
these is about how anyone actually ended poverty, but perhaps that’s not the
point.
He is the guru of “Sustainable Development,” movement within
the academy, NGO’s and governments. As
an approach to self-promotion, sustainability is a useful concept, especially
if your goal is to get lots of funding for your own little piece of academic
turf and invitations to the Charley Rose show.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Sachs
Naomi Klein. Naomi Klein is described as “A Canadian
author, social activist and filmmaker known for her political analyses and
criticism of corporate globalization and of corporate capitalism.” She may be an even better self-promoter on
the backs of the poor than Sachs. She
gets on the Charley Rose show, advises the Pope and plays the expert all while
being a college dropout. That’s an
accomplishment.
Cardinal Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga. Cardinal Maradiaga is a close advisor and
confident of Pope Francis. He is the
Pope’s point man as it were, on immigration and international capitalism. Unlike Naomi Klein or Jeffery Sachs, he does
not aspire to be a TV celebrity. He is
even a Catholic. He is highly educated,
with multiple degrees in some things that actually exist. He seems to have been
an effective force in cleaning up the Roman Curia, a real feat.
Unfortunately he seems to have about the same understanding
of free markets as the pope. I believe
this stems from his background in Honduras.
Central America is a poor place to learn about capitalism and functioning
societies. The corrupt, mercantilist
version of markets in that part of the world can twist the perceptions of even
the strongest intellect. To top this off
he was stuck as the Vatican spokesman at the World Bank and the International
Monetary fund seeking third world debt relief. After dealing with these
characters, it’s remarkable that he isn’t an avowed communist. Suffice it to say that he views economics as
a zero sum game where in order for Latin Americans to thrive, they have to come
here and eat more of our pie.
An Article from the Catholic news sums up the quality and
strange bedfellowness’ of the church’s search for expert advice.
The author and two of the identified Papal advisors want us
to know that the pope’s message rests on three equal legs. They see
immigration, income inequality, and global warming as part of a triad of new
initiates, all crucial to the Church’s plans.
Here is a bit of the flavor of the church’s wise counsels.
“Kalee Kreider, policy
adviser for climate science at the United Nations Foundation, said the three
issues -- hunger, the environment and immigration -- are connected and
encouraged reporters for secular news organizations to read "Laudato Si',
on Care for Our Common Home" to get a taste of the case the pope will make
and how he touches on the three topics.”
She went on
to say;
“She described it as part of
an "arc" that began Aug. 3, when U.S. President Barack Obama unveiled
the "Clean Power Plan," a pledge by his administration to reduce the
country's carbon dioxide emissions and combat climate change. It continues with
the pope's message on the environment during his visit to the United States in
September and whose influence may result, as environmentalists hope, in some
form of global action during the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris in
late 2015.”
So who are
these people?
Kalee Kreider. She is from the United Nations Foundation and
an advisor to the bishops. Before that
she worked for Al Gore for six years in media management, especially on An
Inconvenient Truth. Previously worked at
Fenton, a “Social Change communications company.”
Yup, nobody here but us scholars!
Demetrios G. Papademetriou. Demetrios is President
Emeritus of MPI = Migration Policy Institute.
When not helping Europe do away with itself, he sits on the board of
Geroge Soros’s Advisory Board of the Open Society Foundations’ (OSF)
International Migration Initiative.
Who could have a more Catholic perspective than that?
So for a while we are in for a bumpy Papacy. The Catholic Church gave the world St. Thomas
Aquinas, Mendel, and Thomas More. Now we
go in search of “experts” from the ranks
of self-interested celebrity do-gooders from the New York Times.
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