Bergoglio’s Pendulum, Between Capitalism and Revolution
Bergoglio’s Pendulum, Between Capitalism and Revolution
Marxist, libertarian, Peronist. They have applied the most disparate
labels to him. The contrasting judgments of the Acton Institute and the
“Friends of Pope Francis”
by Sandro Magister
ROME, December 19, 2014 – Another of the mysteries of "Pope" Francis concerns his vision of the global economy.
There
are some who have placed him among the impenitent Marxists, after
having read the agenda-setting document of his pontificate, the
apostolic exhortation "Evangelii Gaudium.” And there are those who have
drawn the opposite conclusion from the same document, depicting a Jorge
Mario Bergoglio who is a great friend of the free market.
The
"pope" has repeatedly distanced himself from the first of the two
definitions, that of being a communist, to the point of joking about it.
From the second, that of pro-capitalist, he has not. But it is not at
all sure that this corresponds to his thinking.
Francis
has been identified as a champion of the free economy not by some
isolated eccentric spirit, but by the Acton Institute, a “think tank” of
the United States whose core idea is that capitalism flourishes all the
more to the extent to which the society in which it works is free and
religiously inspired.
Last December 4, the Acton Institute
awarded its highest annual recognition, the 2014 Novak Award, to a
brilliant young Finnish economist, Oskari Juurikkala, who delivered his
acceptance speech on the theme: “A Free-Market Appreciation of "Pope"
Francis.”
The prize was awarded in Rome, at the Pontifical
University of the Holy Cross, the academy of Opus Dei, a few steps from
the Vatican.
Juurikkala’s thesis is that the message of
Bergoglio, with its emphasis on the poor, not only is not in
contradiction with the free market, but enhances it, because it helps to
“purify and enrich it.”
Juurikkala’s speech was counterbalanced,
at the same event, by Carlo Lottieri, a philosopher of law and a member
of the Istituto Bruno Leoni, another strongly libertarian think tank.
Lottieri,
who teaches at the University of Siena and in Switzerland at the
theological faculty of Lugano, continues to see Francis not as a friend
but as an adversary of economic liberties, not least because of the
“Peronist” experience that he assimilated in Argentina, “never truly
concluded and disastrous on the whole.”
But that's not
all. For a couple of months there has been established in Rome a “Circle
of friends of "Pope" Francis” that boasts among its most assiduous
members cardinals Walter Kasper and Francesco Coccopalmerio, director of
"La Civiltà Cattolica” Antonio Spadaro, and secretary of the pontifical
council for justice and peace Mario Toso.
They dedicated their
most recent meeting, last December 10, to what they maintain to be the
true revelatory manifesto of the pope’s economic and political vision:
not “Evangelii Gaudium,” but the speech he gave at the Vatican on
October 28 to the “popular movements,” a speech they have called
“historic” and “revolutionary.”
Listening to and applauding "Pope"
Francis that day was a cross-section of the far left, from the
Zapatistas of Chiapas to the Leoncavallo social center of Milan.
Particularly numerous were the South Americans (see photo from
“L'Osservatore Romano”), including Bolivian president Evo Morales in his
capacity as “cocalero” leader.
And what did the "pope" say? That
the renewal of the world belongs to them, to the “peripheries” that are
“redolent of the people and of the fight,” to the multitude of the
excluded and the rebels, thanks to a process of their rise to power that
“transcends the logical procedures of formal democracy.”
There
is a striking similarity between this speech of "Pope" Francis and the
theories upheld by the political philosopher Toni Negri and by his
disciple Michael Hardt in a 2001 book that caused a stir and was
translated into a number of languages: “Empire.”
Both Francis and
Toni Negri identify true global sovereignty in a transnational dominion
of money that fosters war in order to swell its own profits, against
which only the multitude of the “popular movements” can bring a
“reappropriation of democracy,” not formal, but substantial.
Also
in Strasbourg, in the speech that he gave on November 25 to the
European parliament, Pope Francis did not fail to stand up against “the
standardizing systems of financial power at the service of unknown
empires.”
But then, a few days later, he received at the Vatican
with full honors Christine Lagarde, the head of that International
Monetary Fund which is precisely the emblem of the denigrated empire.
The mystery is far from being unraveled.
Obama & "Pope" Francis - Marxist Comrades
__________
This
commentary was published in "L'Espresso" no. 51 of 2014, on newsstands
as of December 19, on the opinion page entitled "Settimo cielo"
entrusted to Sandro Magister.
The
speech of "Pope" Francis of October 28, 2014, called “revolutionary” by
Archbishop Mario Toso, secretary of the pontifical council for justice
and peace, which organized the meeting:
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