The Vatican's Frightening Call for an End to Economic Freedom

The Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace has long been a source of radical political thinking within the Catholic Church. This week's statement by the Council, “Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of Global Public,” confirmed the radical economic agenda of the leftist intellectuals who hold sway there.

Outside the classroom of a major university, it would be hard to find a more socialism-based economic plan than the one espoused in the statement.

Not only does it legitimize the various “Occupy” crowds, its criticism of capitalism goes beyond the Council’s past commentary on economics to call for nothing less than the abolition of economic freedom and the establishment of a new world economic system managed by the United Nations.

The plan, while couched in terms of a voluntary change for greater world good, would actually require that nations surrender their sovereignty to a new world body endowed with the authority to tax and manage all movement of capital between counties.

Unfortunately, by choosing the discredited United Nations as the vehicle to implement its call for a more just world economy, the Vatican statement demonstrated a distressing lack of connection with what has really gone on at the United Nations.

Gone would be the constitutional protections of freedom, life, and property that Americans now enjoy. In their place would be rules set by a new world governing body run by countries like Iran, Cuba, China, and Saudi Arabia.

If the United Nations Commission on Human Rights is any indication, implementing the Vatican statement would achieve exactly the opposite of the desired result.

Far from creating a more just world economic order and empowering the powerless, a supranational financial regulatory scheme run by the U.N. would deprive billions of people across the globe of their economic freedom and concentrate power in the hands of a few faceless international bureaucrats.

The Church intellectuals who advocate such means to achieve “social justice” never seem to get to the point where they reconcile the repression necessary to make it work with the spiritual freedom necessary to Christianity.

As in the past, this latest effort to use inherently coercive secular tools to achieve the Church’s social goals is much more likely to undermine the moral authority of the Church than it is to achieve social justice.