Catholic Church: On the same side as OWS?

Does the Catholic Church support the Occupy Wall Street movement? asked E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post. That certainly would appear to be the case, after the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace issued a powerful critique of unchecked capitalism last week that closely echoes the sentiments of the protesters. The council calls for an end to “selfishness, collective greed, and the hoarding of goods,” and for the establishment of a “world central bank” to regulate the flow of capital. Like the protesters in Zuccotti Park and more than 100 cities, the Vatican council challenges the morality of widening income inequality, and calls for the economic system to serve the “global common good,” not the interests of a few. Not surprisingly, my conservative Catholic friends are horrified, and are now trying to “wriggle around the fact” that the church—and Pope Benedict XVI—are progressive in matters of social justice.

“Rubbish,” said George Weigel in NationalReview.com. This document “doesn’t speak for the pope, it doesn’t speak for ‘the Vatican,’ and it doesn’t speak for the Catholic Church.” It is not a papal directive, but a “note” from a “rather small office” in the sprawling Vatican bureaucracy. To suggest that obscure bureaucrats’ musings align the pope with Occupy Wall Street is “grossly ill-informed or tendentious to the point of irresponsibility.” How can anyone take this document seriously? said Samuel Gregg, also in NationalReview.com. As a solution to inequality and recessions, it recommends a global superbank—a notion left over from leftist utopian thinking of the 1930s. “There’s nothing new” in this naïve text, and it can be safely ignored.

You may ignore it if you like, said Catholic theologian Thomas J. Reese in NPR.org, but the reality is that “when it comes to economic justice, Pope Benedict XVI is to the left of President Obama. Heck, he is even to the left of Nancy Pelosi.” In a 2009 encyclical, the pope decried the fact that “inequalities are on the increase” across the globe, and called for economics to be guided by “an ethics which is people-centered.” When it comes to sexual matters, conservatives love to cite the Vatican’s moral authority, said Andrew Sullivan in TheDailyBeast.com. But when the church comes out against the Iraq war, torture, and now the economic inequality that’s fueling worldwide protests, the Right pretends not to hear. “And they call others ‘cafeteria Catholics.’”

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