If Kevin Rudd wanted to impress Pope Benedict with his support for Blessed Mary MacKillop’s canonisation, he might have picked the wrong topic. In the lead up to the G20 meeting, the Pontiff had other things on his mind – justice and the world economy, for instance. His third encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, was deliberately timed to be released just in advance of the meeting of world leaders in L’Aquila. An excerpt:
The global market has stimulated first and foremost, on the part of rich countries, a search for areas in which to outsource production at low cost with a view to reducing the prices of many goods, increasing purchasing power and thus accelerating the rate of development in terms of greater availability of consumer goods for the domestic market. Consequently, the market has prompted new forms of competition between States as they seek to attract foreign businesses to set up production centres, by means of a variety of instruments, including favourable fiscal regimes and deregulation of the labour market. These processes have led to a downsizing of social security systems as the price to be paid for seeking greater competitive advantage in the global market, with consequent grave danger for the rights of workers, for fundamental human rights and for the solidarity associated with the traditional forms of the social State. Systems of social security can lose the capacity to carry out their task, both in emerging countries and in those that were among the earliest to develop, as well as in poor countries. Here budgetary policies, with cuts in social spending often made under pressure from international financial institutions, can leave citizens powerless in the face of old and new risks; such powerlessness is increased by the lack of effective protection on the part of workers’ associations.
Elsewhere: Analysis at Salon and The National Catholic Reporter (and Rich Heffern on the consonance between the document and the Green vision), full text of the encyclical here.
Alan Kohler was also yesterday writing about B16 stepping up to the mark with a contribution. His take-out, framed as “the Pope is joining the calls for a capitalism rethink” has Ratzo reckoning
B A Santamaria must be spinning in his sarcophagus: that sounds suspiciously like some sort of socialism.
Sounds like the Pope is nearly there – he just needs to move beyond the Catholic obsession with breeding us into a Malthusian hell.
Yes, I agree with the Vicar of Rome’s sentiments. Though it’s obviously easier for him to speak out like that than it is for his visitor—the Vatican City doesn’t have to worry about speculation about credit ratings, or media campaigns for ‘responsible policy’, etc.
Urrrgh, I don’t want to become the resident apologist for the frickin’ ‘Dirty Lousy Parasites’, but that mad self-publicist Bob Santamaria did campaign in support Chifley’s bank nationalisation, and was happy to boast about it ’til the day he died. He wasn’t quite an economic liberal.
Personally I blame the teachers’ unions.
Ratburger’s speech reads to me like one of Bush’s “state of the union” addresses. It was written by someone else, Ratburger doesn’t mean a single word of it, and absolutely none of it will be implemented or affect future Vatican policy in any way at all.
From which I deduce that Danny has never read a word written by the actual, real-life BA Santamaria.
To be fair, cartoonish stereotyping is a flaw to which we’re all prone. Frex, before LP opened, I’d mentally filed Comr. Bahnisch years ago as a lapsed-Catholic atheist (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Whereas my eyes have been opened by his recent bloggings. So now, if forced at gunpoint to categorise Mark’s position theologically, it’d be something like “That if God did exist, the Pope would be Her vicar on earth”.
Having said that, Danny, if you substituted “Tony Abbott” or “Christopher Pearson” for Yoda in that statement, you’d be on the money, so to speak. Both are self-professed Santamarian acolytes (but then so too is Race Matthews), and both do demonise socialism and glorify laissez-faire capitalism, unlike BA himself.
Notice that Pell has been silent on climate change denialism since World Youth Day ? Benedict basically told him to lay off.
Pell is a loyal and obedient Catholic. He’ll be well quiet on this topic now.
Ratso supports a unified corporate state and yearns for the glory days of “my country” and the thousand year rule ?
Am I being unfair?
Huggy
Ratso heads a deeply mysogynist and homophobic organisation and I’m supposed to believe and care about his take on the world? It nauseates me.
Taken as a social fact, hundreds of millions of people on this planet regard this bloke’s statements as the voice of God.
I don’t agree with much bin Laden says, but if he speaks for millions of Muslims, I’d be a dill to shut it out.
Speaking now as a non-Catholic, it has been pointed out to me that the “social teachings” of the Catholic church have often encompassed quite critical views on raw capitalism. I find B16’s excerpt unsurprising.
OT but Santa is such a temptation!! BA Santamaria had (apparently, early on) a yearning for some kind of idyllic, communal, rural ’socialism’ (not industrial, not proletarian-based). I’m told there were even small groups living in Gippsland, trying to live out these ideas. Vague ideals, perhaps.
This is pre-Movement I think. Santamaria, after the NCC days, seemed to take all sorts of positions that might surprise anyone who subscribed to a simple NCC/anticommunist/anti-ALP/pro-Liberal reading of his political persona.
The Catholic church is – how you say? – “a very broad Church” !!
Santamaria’s ‘rural socialism’ was no such thing. He was much closer to the Fascist doctrines of Mussolini and Franco. They ain’t socialism.
(At least, that’s the impression I got from Gollan’s Revolutionaries and reformists.
Wonder how B16 would react if Liberation theology raised its head again in South America? As I understand it, the Vatican stamped out this Marxist version of Christianity.
And I ask politely: is Gollan likely to provide an accurate rendering of Santamaria’s social and political views? He may, I’m just not sure.
Er, Paul, you don’t think the ideals of Santa’s National Catholic Rural Movement could just as easily be compared to William Morris’ News From Nowhere as to the falangists?
Also, haven’t you heard of Godwin’s Law? Okay, the post-split ALP orthodoxy was breaching Godwins forty years before the www was invented, what with all the talk of the DLP being fascists—but LP comments threads aren’t really governed by ALP orthodoxy, now are they?
Cobber, I’ve read a lot of what you write here, and I’m convinced your dominant theme is your beef with the fact that socialism was always a weak & largely ignored philosophy within the workers party/unions here in Oz. The Groupers and the Movement were never particularly anti-socialist—they didn’t create the antipathy towards that ideology, it was always there.
Though I suppose the DLP became the perfect whipping boy for a `Popular Front’ type Left organisation which included some actual socialists (though very militantly anti-fabian socialists, at that.)
Thanks Nickws
I’m not sure if Paul B thinks this way, but there’s a tendency in some quarters to feel that anyone (DLP, NCC, ALP right, etc) who was anti-communist, must have been anti-worker, or worse. Fascist perhaps?
That seems simplistic and wrong-headed to me. Plenty of folk who wanted workers’ advancement saw communism as a dead-end, and abhorred CPA methods. They may have observed CPA tactics up close in their own union (in other words they had no need of the “capitalist press” to persuade them something was rotten in the state of Moscow).
I’m going by what I’ve read about 1930s-1960s Australia, including laudatory biographies of CPA leading lights, reminiscences by CPA and ALP leading lights, etc. Many quite revealing and self-critical.
I just can’t buy this “CPA-good, all-their-opponents-evil” mindset. More accuracy and nuance, I’d like to see that! And incidentally, I don’t think Santamaria or Evatt or Menzies or Mannix were blameless.
But I must check my facts with Mr Molotov……….
Catholicism… whatever. I tend to like my archaic rituals a little more spicey. Bring back the Bacchae I say.
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On the topic of the Pope’s concerns, the BWIs during the reign of neoliberalism tended to mandate certain policies for countries requiring aid. Basically no public spending, no regulation, no tariffs etc.
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If you were charitable you’d say these were the result of a certain misconceptions about economic history, exposed by Ha-Joon Chang, and that, to my astonishment are still subscribed to by people who should know better. This boils down to the idea that laissez-faire leads to the development of viable domestic industrialization. It doesn’t.
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If one was less charitable one would simply say the BWIs are instruments of Imperium. (Nooooo.)
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Anyway Neoliberlism’s fading. American hegemony has taken a beating and China seems set to be the World’s creditor. This will mean that they will get a seat at the table. Whether this changgs things for workers in developing countries remains to be seen. I doubt it. I think the PRC is looking to use Africa the way the West used Asia.
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I do suppose that the road to emancipation will be the same one trod by everyone – organized labour, civil conflict, repression and then victory. I imagine that the more forward thinking unionists are considering globalising labour as capital has been globalized?
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In any event I do find it amusing that the Pope speaks out against 3rd world poverty whilst mandating an absolute morality guaranteed to perpetuate it. Amusing, not surprising. As a Catholic myself I’m all too familiar with just how full of shit Holy Mother Church really is. But then it’s a religion innit.
Huggybunny is not being unfair @ 8, but spot on. Since the late 19th century Catholic social/economic policy comes much closer to early Fascism (with its corporatist bent) than to laissez-faire social or economic liberalism. It has always sought stable, hierarchic class relations for a start, which libertarians and lefties alike hold to be both impossible and undesirable.
So by all means have an alliance of convenience with the old misogynists, but don’t mistake them for your friends.
Yes, silly Rerum Novarum. It’s obviously proto-fascism.
Anyone you can’t see that is some kind of apologist who opposes the principles of True Freedom. Fap fap fap.
(And wtf is with all those footnotes for some guy called Matt? I bet he was a real statist motherfucker—only a vicious strongman goes around calling himself by one name.)
“…the market has prompted new forms of competition between States as they seek to attract foreign businesses to set up production centres, … These processes have led to a downsizing of social security systems as the price to be paid for seeking greater competitive advantage in the global market,…”
Amen, Ben.
At a time when increased automation of the production process demands increased income redistribution (if we are to avoid further wealth concentration and sustain a consumer economy), states engage in a “competitive advantage” race to the bottom.
With an increased range of industries to support, consumers need more income, not less.