A week or so ago (yes, I’ve been away) Pope Francis’s views on economics took an even deeper turn into the swamplands of conspiracy theory.
Business Insider reports:
The 77-year-old leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics said some countries had a youth unemployment rate of more than 50 percent, with many millions in Europe seeking work in vain.
“It’s madness,” the pope said in an interview with the Barcelona-based Vanguardia daily’s Vatican correspondent Henrique Cymerman.
Well, that’s not entirely unfair; it is madness that so many are unemployed in countries such as Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece. But the madness is that these high levels of unemployment are in no small part the consequences of the euro, a currency that is in many ways the antithesis of the free market economics that the pope so disdains.
But I don’t think the struggling single currency union is what the pope is really referring to when he talks about “an economic system that no longer endures”.
No, what the pope is talking about is free market capitalism;
“We discard a whole generation to maintain an economic system that no longer endures, a system that to survive has to make war, as the big empires have always done,” Francis said.
“But since we cannot wage the Third World War, we make regional wars. And what does that mean? That we make and sell arms. And with that the balance sheets of the idolatrous economies — the big world economies that sacrifice man at the feet of the idol of money — are obviously cleaned up.”
Nonsense, of course, poisonous nonsense, but skilfully deployed.
With a leftist Pope, it would seem that now more than ever would a Secular Right website be valuable. Thank you Andrew for keeping this site alive, but I’m wondering given the lack of comments if it might be time to throw in the towel.
If only we could offer free beer.
Thank you, BehindTheLines! Perhaps optimistically, I like to think that for some people Secular Right is in some (very) small way an equivalent of sorts to the American flag on the Moon. They may not go and see it, but they like to know that it is there.
I religiously check SR for updates and am grateful whenever you see fit to write. Please continue the good work.
Religiously? (-: Many thanks, Bill…