Replies

VATICAN CITY—The Vatican on Wednesday said it was preparing a series of proposals for reforming the global financial system that would include the creation of a “public authority with universal competence.”
A document entitled “For a reform of the financial system through the perspective of a public authority with universal competence” will be presented on Monday by the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.
The council’s head, Ghanaian cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson, will present it, the Vatican press office said without adding further details.

Pope Benedict XVI has repeatedly called for an “intervention” by governments to tame financial markets and has emphasized the need to restore a fragile global economic system that is hurting poorest people the hardest.

"...in the end, the final answer to the question of "So is the Pope above criticism? Is he infallible?" is "Shut up and kiss the ring." No one is permitted to question the Vicar of Christ's guidance. If he says that
- food and the access to water are a universal right of all humans,
- abandoning mechanisms of wealth redistribution will hinder the achievement of lasting development
- technologically advanced societies can and must lower their domestic energy consumption
- labor unions should expand their influence over those outside their membership, and beyond national boundaries,
- a reform of the United Nations Organization is necessary, likewise a reform of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the "family of nations" can acquire real teeth.
as he did in his recent encyclical Caritas in veritate, you'll be expected to step aside and let the centralists and socialists take over. Your eternal salvation is in jeopardy if you don't go along with whatever he says, whenever he says it."
-- Alex Murphy, August 21, 2009

the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace

People don't understand the Vatican. The Council for Justice and Peace doesn't speak for the Pope or for all Catholics. Councils and individual Cardinals regularly mouth off at will, expressing a variety of philosophical assumptions in a truly Italian display of rhetorical disorder. But they have no authority. The Popes have real authority, but they generally restrict their comments to the core of the Faith, or to broad principles that (usually) transcend politics. There are exceptions. I have read what I considered unwise Papal assertions about capital punishment (John Paul II) and heroic denunciations of National Socialism and fascism when it had become dangerous to do so (Pius XI, Pius XII). They were serious opinions, but were not presented as required for Catholics to believe.

Cardinals and councils at the Vatican may announce their belief in One World Government, but the Vatican doesn't believe in One World Opinion, even within itself. Other than outright heresy, the Popes don't seem to regulate policy assertions by the Cardinals.

A great many outsiders think that because the Pope or a Vatican official says something, its infallibility is being asserted. It's not. Liberals and misinformed conservatives who believe this are being more "Papal" than the Pope. Only the Pope's ex cathedra pronouncements are binding on all Catholics, and they're all on faith and morals—which are individual, not political matters.