Pope Francis died recently. His legacy will be debated for years. I want to focus on his hatred of capitalism and how Catholic Christians should respond.
It has been widely reported that the Pope called capitalism the "dung of the devil." That's not exactly what he said. Here is the section of a speech in which he used the phrase:
"The earth, entire peoples and individual persons are being brutally punished. And behind all this pain, death and destruction there is the stench of what Basil of Caesarea called “the dung of the devil.” An unfettered pursuit of money rules. The service of the common good is left behind. Once capital becomes an idol and guides people’s decisions, once greed for money presides over the entire socioeconomic system, it ruins society, it condemns and enslaves men and women, it destroys human fraternity, it sets people against one another and, as we clearly see, it even puts at risk our common home."
One can't get the idea that he equated the phrase with capitalism because he uses Marx's definition of capitalism to describe the dung. Pope Francis was a devotee of liberation theology, which was nothing more than Marxism swaddled in Christian clichés developed in the 1960s. Liberation theologians believed everyone on the planet would go to heaven. There is no need for spiritual salvation. So the only salvation people need is from poverty.
Liberation theology was only the latest and a Latin American Catholic economic theology. A variation on it today is black liberation theology espoused by former President Obama. But Catholics in Europe had been Marxists for nearly a century before Latin American liberation theology. The greatest economist of the 20th and 21st centuries, Ludwig von Mises, despised Christianity because all the Christians he knew in the first half of the 20th century in Vienna were Catholic Marxists. Also, he was a Jew and new of the many persecutions of Jews by Christians throughout history. Liberal Protestants, those who denied the deity of Christ, also baptized Marx as the savior instead of Christ in the late 19th century. So liberation theology was a late comer.
Anyone who adopts Marx's definition of capitalism should despise the system. But Marx lied. I can't find anything in Marx's writings that was true and not trivial. He lied about everything. Why did people believe him? They were consumed with envy. The science of economics has proven Marx wrong on every detail for 150 years, yet people still worship him.
Like most socialists, Francis was full of contradictions. He received a lot of press for asking who was he to judge homosexuals. Yet, he had no problem judging business people as idolaters. He warned about making money an idol. He should have worried about making Marx his idol. He enjoyed being portrayed as the Pope for the poor. Yet, he championed socialism that has always and everywhere impoverished the poor. Argentina, the Pope's home country, was once one of the richest countries in the world. But socialism destroyed that wealth and oppressed the poorest.
How should Catholics respond to economic nonsense from a Pope. Dr. Tom Woods provides a guide in his book, The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy. In it, Dr. Woods, a devout Catholic, demonstrated that the Pope has authority over theology and morals, not science. If the Pope could infallibly declare good science ex cathedra, we wouldn't need scientists. But the Pope can no more expound on economics without studying it than he can speak about nuclear physics. In getting out of his lane, the Pope should have consulted good economists, like Dr. Woods. Instead, he devoted his life to the ravings of a mad, alcoholic atheist.
Would the Pope have accepted an atheist's definition of Christianity? Clearly not! But he accepts the definition of capitalism from a lunatic who hated capitalism as much as atheists hate Christianity.
Capitalism is not what businessmen do. It's not business for profit. It's not what large corporations do. It's not the current system in the US because we haven't seen capitalism in over a century. Capitalism is a system of government that takes Thou shalt not steal seriously. It keeps the rich from stealing from the poor and the government from stealing from anyone. It's the system discovered by the Catholic theologians at the University of Salamanca during the Reformation and implemented first by the Dutch Republic.
Capitalism is the system of government that lifted hundreds of millions of people from frequent cycles of famine and mass starvation. Slightly freer markets, not capitalism, lifted over 500 million from starvation in Asia over the past generation.
Had Pope Francis been truly humble as advertised, he would have learned economics, the most advanced of the social sciences and given up on Marx.
