The press on the Pope’s new encyclical, Caritas in veritate, is downplaying the message and importance of the document mainly because he does not say what the Obamaite/left wants him to say.
The message of the large and theologically substantive statement is reduced, in the hands of the press, to a caution about profitability as an institution and the affirmation of the need to care for the poor. In fact, lacking anything to latch onto to confirm their worldview, The New York Times is happy to just make up the news, as when it claims that the document “lamented that greed had brought about the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.”
Guess what? The word greed never appears even once in the document at all. The reliably “progressive” Jesuit publication couldn’t really find much to help their cause either but at least they are more honest about it.
Fortunately, everyone can read the document for himself to discover that the Pope refuses to reject the idea of economic development and in fact praises economic development, blaming the economic crisis not on neither greed nor the market but on “the damaging effects on the real economy of badly managed and largely speculative financial dealing” (21). He specifically rejects the idea that the market depends on impoverishing people. “Society does not have to protect itself from the market,” he says in 36. He praises globalization and attacks protectionism by name (42). He praises international trade: “the possibility of marketing their products is very often what guarantees their survival in both the short and long term. Just and equitable international trade in agricultural goods can be beneficial to everyone.” (58). Profit as an economic institution is affirmed as is the market generally (“permits encounter between persons” – 35). He further attacks the view that changing institutions alone will fix all problems (“Man does not develop through his own powers, nor can development simply be handed to him” – 11). He warns against the tyrannizing effects of the welfare and regulatory states (57) and calls for radical decentralization to remedy them.
Most exciting for me is this wonderful passage: “On the part of rich countries there is excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property, especially in the field of health care” (22). I wish it had gone further to reject the whole idea of a IP but this is an excellent statement as far as it goes.
Overall, this encyclical–save one error concerning “equivalent value” in exchange–makes no great mistakes in economic analysis and offers no political blueprint that helps those who want to overthrow market institutions. Its focus is ethical and theological — which is sort of what one hopes for from the Pope.
