Pope Francis sees no reason to automatically accept the verdicts that markets deliver. He sees every reason to examine how markets actually operate -- and to challenge those operations that leave us staggeringly unequal.
We need, he writes, to reject "the absolute autonomy of markets" and confront "the structural causes of inequality." Until we take these essential steps, "no solution will be found for the world's problems."
Wealth works best when we share it.
A previous world-famous Francis -- the English philosopher and scientist Sir Francis Bacon -- advised us centuries ago that wealth, like manure, only does good when we spread it around.
Pope Francis agrees. His exhortation encourages those who sit at our economic summits "to ponder" the teachings of the ancient sage who told us that "not to share one's wealth with the poor is to steal from them." We must, Pope Francis advises, "say 'thou shalt not' to an economy of exclusion and inequality."
Adds the Pope: "Such an economy kills."
Inequality endangers us all, not just the poor.
Pope Francis, ever since arriving in Rome, has consistently reminded the world that "the majority of our contemporaries are barely living from day to day." His new exhortation eloquently decries the suffering of those "without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape."
But in an era where "the thirst for power and possessions knows no limits," his new statement also contends, anything that "stands in the way of increased profits" -- "like the environment" -- stands "defenseless before the interests of a deified market."
The security we all seek in our daily lives, Pope Francis notes, will remain unattainable so long as we remain perilously unequal. No "law enforcement or surveillance systems can indefinitely guarantee tranquility," he writes, until we reverse "exclusion and inequality in society and between peoples."
The reason, the Pope notes, goes beyond the reality that "inequality provokes a violent reaction from those excluded from the system."
"Just as goodness tends to spread," he explains, "the toleration of evil, which is injustice, tends to expand its baneful influence and quietly to undermine any political and social system, no matter how solid it may appear."
In unequal societies, social fabrics will always tear.
In relatively equal societies, where most people can afford to buy the same things, things in general tend not to matter all that much. But in unequal societies everything reverses. Things -- and the money to buy them -- become primary.
"The worship of the ancient golden calf," observes Pope Francis, "has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose."
In this economy, the Pope continues, "we end up being incapable of feeling compassion." Together, "unbridled consumerism combined with inequality proves doubly damaging to the social fabric."
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