Capitalism, the Pope and the Problem of Oversimplification

By Published on September 25, 2015

We agreed with the “God bless America” part. Pope Francis has his politics, and they are, broadly speaking, not our politics. This isn’t to say that we disagree with his principles or his goals, which are, in the main, shared by all people of good will: less poverty and better care for the poor, more opportunity, good stewardship of the environment, peace that is more than the mere absence of war. But that isn’t really politics; politics is the fight over how we get from here to there.

The pope’s remarks as delivered today to Congress were marginally less hostile to capitalism than one might have expected: There was praise for the power of enterprise, and a line about making politics “a slave to the economy and finance” was omitted. That the pope chooses to be strident on some issues (the environment and, of all things, the arms trade) and more oblique about others (marriage) is of some interest: He pronounced himself enthusiastically in favor of abolishing the death penalty but talked around abortion, even though the Church takes an absolute position on the latter but not the former, and even though many of those professing Catholic Democrats in his audience had just expended some considerable effort to prevent the passage of modest abortion regulations less restrictive than those of France or Sweden. The pope is on his way to Philadelphia to attend the World Meeting of Families, so perhaps these issues will find their way to a higher place on his agenda at that time.

Read the article “Capitalism, the Pope and the Problem of Oversimplification” on nationalreview.com.

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