Today Perhaps?

Pope Benedict XVI has proposed a new world political authority “with real teeth”, possibly in place of the United Nations, to enforce an ethical financial order and end the global financial crisis. Calling for more aid, a bigger role for trade unions and an economic system aimed at the common good as well as profit, the Pope said only a moral market could end the crisis and solve world poverty. The proposals were in his long-awaited encyclical – the second-highest level of papal teaching – released in Rome yesterday morning Australian time, before the G8 leaders gathered in Italy to discuss the global crisis. The conviction that the economy must be autonomous and shielded from moral influences had led humanity to abuse the economic process in a destructive way, the Pope said in the encyclical Caritas in Veritate (Love in Truth).

The Pope’s Stunning Call For A New World Order
As we said, Benedict’s encyclical, titled “Charity in Truth,” is stunningly radical, notably in its prescriptions for the temporal order. There’s no doubt that in urging the creation of something akin to a world government, he has established a landmark for his papacy and for Catholicism. Cumulatively, Benedict’s diagnoses of global economic ills lead to a call for nothing short of “a profoundly new way of understanding human enterprise.” He would move toward markets geared to “redistribute” wealth from advanced to poorer countries and sees “urgent need of a true world political authority” to, among other tasks, “manage the global economy.” Pope Benedict’s encyclical on economic justice, delivered amid the global financial meltdown, is an extraordinary document, both in its tough challenges and in the remarkably radical solutions it prescribes. The pontiff focuses on moral dimensions of markets, globalization, consumerism, environmental protection, the role of technology, workers’ rights and more. To call the document sweeping is an understatement. Individually, many of Benedict’s teachings are profound ethical and social statements…

a few examples:

- “Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.”

- “… there is no doubt that foreign workers, despite any difficulties concerning integration, make a significant contribution to the economic development of the host country.”

- “What is meant by the word ‘decency’ in regard to work? It means work that expresses the essential dignity of every man and woman in the context of their particular society: work that is freely chosen, effectively associating workers, both men and women, with the development of their community; work that enables the worker to be respected and free from any form of discrimination; work that makes it possible for families to meet their needs and provide schooling for their children. …”

- “Financiers must rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity, so as not to abuse the sophisticated instruments which can serve to betray the interests of savers.”

Cumulatively, Benedict’s diagnoses of global economic ills lead to a call for nothing short of “a profoundly new way of understanding human enterprise.”

He would move toward markets geared to “redistribute” wealth from advanced to poorer countries and sees “urgent need of a true world political authority” to, among other tasks, “manage the global economy.”

As we said, Benedict’s encyclical, titled “Charity in Truth,” is stunningly radical, notably in its prescriptions for the temporal order. There’s no doubt that in urging the creation of something akin to a world government, he has established a landmark for his papacy and for Catholicism.