Promoting Common Good Includes Regulating Economy, Cardinal Says

Catholic News Service – July 28, 2009 – By Cindy Wooden

ROME (CNS) — The fastest way to recover from the current economic crisis and the only way to ensure that a similar financial meltdown does not occur again is for governments to take seriously their role as regulators, the Vatican secretary of state told members of the Italian Senate.

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, secretary of state, outlined the contents of Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical “Caritas in Veritate” (“Charity in Truth”) at a special meeting of the Senate July 28.

He said the encyclical was not calling for government control of the economy or the market, but for an awareness of the fact that democratic governments have an obligation to protect and promote the common good of their citizens, including their economic well-being.

In addition to asking governments to take their regulatory responsibilities seriously, the cardinal asked governments “to allow, or rather to favor, the birth and growth of a pluralistic financial market, a market in which subjects that have different goals for their activities can operate in conditions of parity.”

In particular, he said, governments must look at how their regulations may have hindered the activities of credit unions, micro-credit lenders, cooperative banks and ethical investment funds.

Such institutions “play a complementary role to agents of speculative finance and, therefore, provide equilibrium,” Cardinal Bertone said.

“If financial authorities would have removed the many restrictions that weigh on subjects of alternative financing over the past few decades, today’s crisis would not have had the devastating power we are seeing,” he said.

Cardinal Bertone said a main point in the pope’s encyclical is that the crisis is the result of human greed and a mistaken idea that the maximization of profit is the only value a free market is ethically obliged to follow.

“This has resulted in giving legitimacy to greed — which is the best known and most widespread form of avarice — as a sort of civic virtue: the greed market instead of the free market,” the cardinal said.

The pope recognizes that the market economy is the economic model most respectful of human freedom and democracy, he said, but he also recognizes it is a fallacy to believe that the economy can or should operate independently of human values.

“An economic activity that does not take the social dimension into account would not be ethically acceptable, just as it also is true that a purely redistributive social policy that does not take the availability of resources into account would not be sustainable,” Cardinal Bertone said.

The pope’s encyclical calls people to recognize that, because the market is a human invention involving human participants and having an impact on other human beings, it must be guided by and judged according to its impact on people, he said.

In calling attention to the moral obligation to promote the common good, Pope Benedict calls for a movement from solidarity to fraternity, he said.

Motivated by solidarity, people recognize the disadvantages of people worse off and offer help while keeping a certain distance, he said. On the other hand, those who are motivated by fraternity recognize everyone as brothers or sisters and provide for their needs, he said.

Cardinal Bertone said societies need a sense of fraternity in order for all their members to prosper and that value is best learned at home in one’s family.

That is why, he said, the pope calls on governments “to enact policies promoting the centrality and the integrity of the family founded on marriage between a man and a woman, the primary vital cell of society, and to assume responsibility for its economic and fiscal needs, while respecting its essentially relational character.”