"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Lord Acton

IBD: Papal Bullishness

Posted by John Couretas
on Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Following up on our coverage of Pope Benedict’s economic “prophecy,” here’s a snip from yesterday’s “Papal Bullishness” editorial in Investor’s Business Daily. Read then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s 1985 article “Market Economy and Ethics” here.

The Pope gave a “prediction that an undisciplined economy would collapse by its own rules,” the ex-socialist lawyer and economics professor nonsensically claimed at Milan’s Cattolica University last week.

Tremonti conveniently omitted that elsewhere in the Pontiff’s 2,300-word analysis he grumbled that Theodore Roosevelt and Nelson Rockefeller spread “the notion that only Protestantism can bring forth a free economy — whereas Catholicism includes no corresponding education to freedom and to the self-discipline necessary to it, favoring authoritarian systems instead . . .”

Furthermore, the only apparent English translation of the paper is on the Web site of Fr. Robert Sirico’s Michigan-based Acton Institute. Why would a think tank devoted to emphasizing the free market’s spiritual underpinnings tout an anti-capitalist tract?