Morality: Pope Francis chose the U.S.-Mexican border for his angriest attack yet on the free market, comparing private employers to slave owners. Pope St. John Paul II, who lived under statism, knew better.
Speaking to Mexican businessmen and union officials on his final day after nearly a week in Mexico, in the heavily industrialized Ciudad Juarez across the Texas border from El Paso, the Catholic Church's Supreme Pontiff declared, "God will hold the slave drivers of our days accountable." He added that "the flow of capital cannot decide the flow of people,” and blasted a “prevailing mentality" in favor of "the greatest possible profits, immediately and at any cost.” He later celebrated Mass practically on the border.
The message couldn't be clearer: The people of God are south of that line, and their oppressors are north of it.
This most casual of Popes has a now-infamous penchant for ill-considered, off-the-cuff remarks that the Vatican's damage control operation routinely has to walk back or explain away. But in this case the sentiments were too well-planned and orchestrated for excuses to work. Francis is an enemy of economic freedom and many of the policies that have made America and the rest of the Western industrialized world great.
One might be tempted to charge that he is bringing the Catholic Church's moral teaching back to the "dark ages" of many hundreds of years ago, before man liberated himself economically and conquered so much poverty via technological progress.
In fact, even in the Middle Ages the Catholic Church strongly defended the principle of private property.
St. Thomas Aquinas, a doctor of the Church still held as its greatest theologian, wrote in his Summa Theologica: "Because the division of possessions is not according to the natural law, but rather arose from human agreement ... the ownership of possessions is not contrary to the natural law, but an addition thereto devised by human reason."
The Church's traditional concerns with capitalism have focused on abuses that are alien to modern-day America, such as lack of a just wage, rest time and days off, an unhealthy workplace, the absence of unemployment benefits, pensions and health insurance, and no right to form a union.
Pope Leo XIII in his 1891 encyclical "Rerum Novarum" stated that "the poor and badly off have a claim to especial consideration ... and must chiefly depend upon the assistance of the State. And it is for this reason that wage-earners, since they mostly belong in the mass of the needy, should be specially cared for and protected by the government."
In 1991, Pope St. John Paul II wrote an encyclical commemorating the 100th anniversary of Leo's, titled "Centennimus Annus." And in that teaching, he asked if it could be held that "after the failure of Communism, capitalism is the victorious social system, and that capitalism should be the goal of the countries now making efforts to rebuild their economy and society? Is this the model which ought to be proposed to the countries of the Third World which are searching for the path to true economic and civil progress?"
According to John Paul, "The answer is obviously complex. If by 'capitalism' is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a 'business economy,' 'market economy' or simply 'free economy.'"
That Pope, unlike the current one, was a Pole who lived under both the Nazis and a collectivist state ruled by Moscow. The current Pope ought to consider the reflections of his saintly predecessor.
