American conservatives sometimes complain that the Vatican should recognize liberal activists and social engineers as enemies of the faith. There’s justice in that complaint, but the argument works both ways.

What capitalists should learn 

from the Pope's critique

By Phil Lawler 

By the end of the day I expect to hear at least a half-dozen complaints that Pope Francis has sided with socialists, because of his Thursday address denouncing the “cult of money.”

The same problem arises whenever a Pope—or any other Christian leader—denounces selfishness and materialism. Political pundits, accustomed to viewing everything in terms of contemporary policy debates, leap to conclusions. Socialists denounce selfishness, they observe. So if the Pope denounces selfishness, he must be a socialist. Non sequitur. That syllogism is fatally flawed.

The Judeo-Christian condemnation of false idols, which Pope Francis invoked today, stretches back to the Book of Exodus. The moral imperative to care for those in need, for widows and orphans—yes, and for aliens living in a strange land—runs through the Psalms and is amplified in the Gospels. The Church is not imitating the rhetoric of the socialist movement; the socialists are exploiting the teachings of the Church.

But why have socialists been so successful in that endeavor—so successful, in fact, that today we are tempted to think of a “Good Samaritan” as someone operating a government-funded program, rather than as an exemplar of Christian charity? Why haven’t the defenders of capitalism been able to express their own economic arguments in the language of the Gospels?

Too often, I’m afraid that—as Pope Francis suggested today—the rich and powerful are not particularly interested in the Gospel message. But that doesn’t really answer the question, because socialists aren’t much interested either—as is evident from their penchant for alliance with the proponents of abortion, homosexual marriage, etc. The Word of God is a two-edged sword, and there are enough moral challenges in the New Testament to make any ideologue uneasy.

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