Top finance magazine disagrees with pope but likes his style

'Francis may not be offering the right answers but he is asking the right questions'.

Spain:  FOR the Argentine pope, spontaneous gestures and remarks, and conversations with unlikely interlocutors, have become part of a well-established personal style, to the point where people are no longer surprised.

But with due allowance for all that, he said some remarkable things in a recent interview with La Vanguardia, a daily paper published in Barcelona which runs an impressive global news-gathering operation (you can read an English translation in the National Catholic Register).

Chatting comfortably in his native Spanish, he made some comments that were interesting enough, but broadly expected.

For example, he implied that the persecution of Christians was worse now than at any time in history, although it didn't "seem prudent to talk about" many of the things he knew.

He also made a strong, if qualified, defence of Pope Pius XII, who led the church during the second world war. "I don't mean that Pius XII did not make mistakes—I myself make many—but one needs to see his role in the context of the time..." Pius had hidden and protected many Jews, and he faced hard moral dilemmas over how openly he should confront the Nazis.

But the interview's real bombshell comes when he speaks of the global economic crisis and its causes.

After denouncing the "atrocity" of youth unemployment, he observed that: "We are discarding an entire generation to maintain an economic system that can't hold up any more, a system that to survive, must make war, as all great empires have done.

But as a third world war can't be waged, they make regional wars...they produce and sell weapons, and with this, the balance sheets of the idolatrous economies, the great world economies that sacrifice man at the feet of the idol of money, are resolved..."

By positing a link between capitalism and war, he seems to be taking an ultra-radical line: one that consciously or unconsciously follows Vladimir Lenin in his diagnosis of capitalism and imperialism as the main reason why world war broke out a century ago.

And there are plenty of counter-arguments one could offer. Many other ruling powers in history (from feudal warlords to secular totalitarian regimes) have had a more obvious stake in violence and confrontation than capitalism has.

And thinkers like Joseph Schumpeter and Karl Popper have argued forcefully that capitalism can consolidate peace, by offering non-violent ways to satisfy human needs.

But then, in contrast with his cerebral predecessor, Francis does not pretend either to be an academic philosopher, political scientist or economist; he is a more intuitive figure and his intuitions are often sound.

He observes what he calls the "idolatry of money" in some places and hungry children in others.

He is viscerally distressed by the waste of human talent and energy among the young. He concludes that economists must be missing some important point.

Francis may not be offering all the right answers, or getting the diagnosis exactly right, but he is asking the right questions. Like a little boy who observes the emperor's nakedness.

Source: The Economist Erasmus Blog