Opinion: Time for an economy with ethics

In his new social encyclical “Caritas in Veritate“ Pope Benedict XVI argues that new problems faced today include “badly managed and largely speculative financial dealing…and the unregulated exploitation of the earth’s resources”.

He says that there is a need for a profound revision of the current economic model, and that this is “demanded by the earth’s state of ecological health”.

The vision set out in the document is rooted in respect for the human person and for human dignity, and says that love – or Caritas – is “an extraordinary force which leads people to opt for a courageous and generous engagement in the field of justice and peace”.

He reminds us that development is not just about economic growth, because people are both body and soul. Spiritual welfare has to be taken into account in order for authentic development to take place.

The Pope stresses that globalisation is not “the product of anonymous impersonal forces or structures independent of the human will”.

Humans should not be victims of systems, but protagonists. They should not be slaves to a system, but take charge of it and, in particular, make it work for people who are poor so that nobody goes hungry. “It is an ethical imperative” he says, “to feed the hungry”.

He talks too about our responsibility for the environment and the need to “respect the intrinsic balance of creation”. “The Church” he says, “has a responsibility towards creation and she must assert this in the public sphere”.

He calls on advanced nations to reduce their energy consumption and argues that those responsible for using up shared resources should also be responsible for the ongoing economic and social costs of doing so, not leave future generations or poorer countries to pay.

As is usual in Catholic social teaching Benedict XVI builds on previous teaching, and here he emphasizes the importance of maintaining workers’ rights even in the midst of an economic crisis, including their right to organise.

He says that outsourcing work reduces the employers’ sense of responsibility, and that business should be responsible to all its stakeholders, including workers and consumers, rather than just to shareholders.

The Pope says that we need “a profoundly new way of understanding business enterprise”, and adds that “grave imbalances are produced when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution”.

Any wealth created should be used for the benefit of all and should be created in a sustainable way.

On the eve of the G8, he reminds world leaders that they need a moral framework for any economic system, a moral framework that puts the human person at its heart and as its driver, a moral framework that meets the needs of the world’s poorest and, indeed, feeds the hungry.

Posted by Linda Jones, CAFOD’s head of spirituality