Cross-posted on Ricochet:
Religion News‘s David Gibson believes that the current pope’s crude and demagogic attacks (to be clear: that’s not exactly the way that Mr. Gibson appears to see them) on the free market have a useful supporter in Marx. That’s Cardinal Marx, Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich. Did you think I meant anyone else?
After taking a few, largely ludicrous, swipes at the pope’s critics on the right, Mr. Gibson gets to the point:
Cardinal Reinhard Marx …says the idea that capitalism has never been properly tried is silly — and he says it in the latest edition of the Vatican daily, L’Osservatore Romano:
“To think that somewhere there are pure markets which give rise to the good through free competition is mere ideology,” wrote Marx, who is one of the pope’s “Gang of Eight” special advisers. “Capitalism should not become the model of society” because “it does not take into account individual destinies, the weak and the poor.”
He noted that “The call to think beyond capitalism is not a struggle against the market economy,” but, according to Catholic World News, he wrote that an economic vision that “reduces economic action to capitalism has chosen the morally wrong starting point.”
And such an economic vision is practiced where, exactly, Cardinal?
Marx then goes on to deny most of postwar European history:
Catholic social teaching offers the “spiritual foundations of a social market economy” but “these ideas have never played a real role.”
Oh come off it.
Marx is an educated man. We thus must assume that he is a knave rather than a fool. As he knows perfectly well, Western Europe’s economies have been run on a ‘social market’ basis since the fall of Hitler, and, indeed, in some places sometimes before, a social market that, at least in Roman Catholic Europe, owed a clear debt to Catholic social teaching, and more specifically to that set out in Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum.
It’s worth adding, perhaps unkindly, that the economic ideology running through some of the variants of prewar European fascism can also be seen as a mutation of those very same ideas, a mutation that was profoundly influential in shaping the Peronism that flourished in the Argentina of the future Pope Francis’s youth.
And Cardinal Marx—selected, as Mr. Gibson mentions above, by Francis as one of his eight wise men to assist in the overhaul of the curia— is someone of whom this pope clearly approves.
Make of that what you will.
Oh yes, there’s one other thing. As the Huffington Post noted last October:
Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich’s archdiocese spent around $11 million renovating the archbishop’s residence and another $13 million for a guesthouse in Rome.
And make of that what you will.