Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome IX: Glenn Beck needs a team to teach him about Catholicism.

lenn Beck, with the self­less char­i­ty of one who thinks well of him­self, has offered to put togeth­er a “team” that will teach Pope Fran­cis what cap­i­tal­ism real­ly is. Oh boy. Here we go again. I will quote the free part of the audio, pro­vid­ed by The Blaze, with the ban­ter and guf­faws left out. This is Mr. Beck speak­ing:

I met with some­body who is high-up with the pope. … And I said, “So tell me. Is the pope … a com­mu­nist?’ ” And he [said], ‘No. Uh. No.’ ”

Mr. Beck does not tell us who this source is. I get that. But then, no one can check any of this out or know how reli­able this per­son is whom Mr. Beck is press­ing for inside infor­ma­tion. This has the tone of the anec­do­tal.

The pope has lived in Latin Amer­i­ca, where he has seen crony­ism. He has seen that, and he’s seen Marx­ism. He does­n’t like Marx­ism; he does­n’t like crony­ism, which he defines as cap­i­tal­ism. He’s not seen let-me-serve-you cap­i­tal­ism. So I have asked the pope’s peo­ple if I could put togeth­er a team of peo­ple that could actu­al­ly teach the pope and find exam­ples, left and right, and go vis­it the pope and say, “This is what cap­i­tal­ism is. And it’s not being done.”

If it’s not being done, where are the exam­ples to be found? When­ev­er I see stuff like this, I always won­der whether those say­ing it have read the pope’s words first-hand. Have they read Church social teach­ing, in the Church’s own words? Do they think they need to? Or do they get all their infor­ma­tion about the Church and the pope from the sec­u­lar press? Ver­i­tas? Quid est ver­i­tas? Rush Lim­baugh held firm to his con­vic­tion that the pope is a Marx­ist based sole­ly on a mis­quo­ta­tion in Reuters. He was asked to check the tran­script. He did not, though he him­self con­firmed that he was asked. (See here and here for my two dis­cus­sions of this. Fr. John Trig­ilio also dis­cussed the top­ic on his blog here. And Mark Shea also weighed in, on his blog at the Nation­al Catholic Reg­is­ter, here.)

But maybe I am wrong. Maybe Mr. Beck has read Evan­gelii Gaudi­um. (It’s on the Vat­i­can Web site here. EG was the papal doc­u­ment that start­ed all this talk.) If Mr. Beck has read it, then I would ask him to quote the pope’s actu­al words. Where does the pope say “crony­ism is cap­i­tal­ism”? Where? Any­where? Buehler? I did a key­word search of the entire doc­u­ment; I can’t find the word “crony­ism” or the word “cap­i­tal­ism” in the text. Maybe it’s not in EG. Maybe Pope Fran­cis says “crony­ism is cap­i­tal­ism” some­where else. Mr. Beck should tell us where. There are a whole lot of papal state­ments at the Vat­i­can’s Web site, just wait­ing for Mr. Beck to comb through them all and find this papal utter­ance.

Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt

Now, there are two places in Evan­gelii Gaudi­um where one could attempt to come to the con­clu­sion that the pope attacks cap­i­tal­ism. Here’s the first:

[S]ome peo­ple con­tin­ue to defend trick­le-down the­o­ries which assume that eco­nom­ic growth, encour­aged by a free mar­ket, will inevitably suc­ceed in bring­ing about greater jus­tice and inclu­sive­ness in the world. This opin­ion, which has nev­er been con­firmed by the facts, express­es a crude and naïve trust in the good­ness of those wield­ing eco­nom­ic pow­er and in the sacral­ized work­ings of the pre­vail­ing eco­nom­ic sys­tem. (§54)

Some might read this and say, Wait! the pope con­demns “trick­le-down”! That is cap­i­tal­ism! Except: No, it’s not. Trick­le down is noth­ing oth­er than a sub­set of cap­i­tal­ist the­o­ry which did not come into promi­nence until the 1980s, thanks to econ­o­mists like Arthur Laf­fer. It has to do with the sup­posed ben­e­fit of tax cuts in an eco­nom­ic sys­tem that is already cap­i­tal­ist. So the two are not one and the same. You can have cap­i­tal­ism with or with­out trick­le-down.

Nor does the pope say that trick­le down, of itself, is nec­es­sar­i­ly bad. What he rejects is the idea that it will inevitably bring about a more just soci­ety. That’s his own word. He rejects the idea that all one has to do is cre­ate the per­fect eco­nom­ic sys­tem and tax laws, leave them to their own work­ings, and one is then free to neglect his per­son­al oblig­a­tion to the poor. That is what the pope is get­ting at here.

But wait! some­one else will say. The pope has harsh words about “the pre­vail­ing eco­nom­ic sys­tem.” Isn’t that cap­i­tal­ism?

Well, no. If you lis­ten to what Glenn Beck says, it’s not. Mr. Beck, on his tele­vi­sion pro­gram, says that true cap­i­tal­ism is “not being done.” Well, if it’s not being done, it can hard­ly be the “pre­vail­ing eco­nom­ic sys­tem.” Can it? The pope attacks what is being done, not what has been left untried.

So one has a prob­lem if he wants to read an attack on cap­i­tal­ism into this pas­sage.

A sec­ond pas­sage from the text that one could cite would be this one:

The caus­es of this break­down [in how the Catholic faith is passed on] include: a lack of oppor­tu­ni­ty for dia­logue in fam­i­lies, the influ­ence of the com­mu­ni­ca­tions media, a rel­a­tivis­tic sub­jec­tivism, unbri­dled con­sumerism which feeds the mar­ket … (§70)

This pas­sage is the clos­est I can find to an attack on what the sec­u­lar media false­ly quot­ed as “unfet­tered cap­i­tal­ism.” But the pope did not say that; he did not use those words. What he attacks here is con­sumerism. He attacks greed. Well, in case Mr. Beck is not aware of this, the Church has attacked greed for a long time now. You may recall that it’s one of the Sev­en Dead­ly Sins—a list that dates back to the fourth-cen­tu­ry monk Eva­grius Pon­ti­cus. (Of course, Jesus attacks greed too, but let’s not remind our­selves of that. Mr. Beck might wor­ry that Christ was a com­mie.)

But wait! you say. The pope attacks the greed which “feeds the mar­ket.” So, see! That’s cap­i­tal­ism!

Again, no. This is not an attack on the mar­ket. This is an attack on the mar­ket’s diet. The mar­ket has fed itself on peo­ple’s lust for more and more stuff. And if you want to tell me that the mar­ket can exist only on greed, and must starve on any­thing else, then the mar­ket is not worth keep­ing alive. But that is not what Mr. Beck claims about the mar­ket, if I under­stand him right.

The pope’s real con­cern is obsta­cles to evan­ge­liza­tion, and he names one of them as “the idol­a­try of mon­ey”:

We have cre­at­ed new idols. The wor­ship of the ancient gold­en calf (cf. Ex 32:1–35) has returned in a new and ruth­less guise in the idol­a­try of mon­ey and the dic­ta­tor­ship of an imper­son­al econ­o­my lack­ing a tru­ly human pur­pose. The world­wide cri­sis affect­ing finance and the econ­o­my lays bare their imbal­ances and, above all, their lack of real con­cern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: con­sump­tion.

There’s no men­tion of cap­i­tal­ism here, not as an eco­nom­ic the­o­ry in its own right, apart from how it is prac­ticed. The pope does not say, “All this comes of Adam Smith.” Bene­dict XVI, it should be said, also attacked the “idol­a­try of mon­ey” in his encycli­cal Car­i­tatis in Ver­i­tate (here). So has just near every pope who has ever poped. Jesus con­demned it, for Christ’s sake! Pope Fran­cis does have harsh words for the “imper­son­al econ­o­my” which pre­vails, but remember—listen to what Mr. Beck tells us—that can­not be cap­i­tal­ism; since, search the the Earth from shore to shore, you won’t find cap­i­tal­ism any­where. It’s not being done!

Well, a‑Bless My Soul!

If Mr. Beck wants to find a papal attack on cap­i­tal­ism, I would sug­gest he go, not to Pope Fran­cis, but to Pope Bene­dict XVI. Here is what the for­mer pope had to say, on Jan­u­ary 1, 2013:

“[T]he world is sad­ly marked by hotbeds of ten­sion and con­flict caused by grow­ing instances of inequal­i­ty between rich and poor, by the preva­lence of a self­ish and indi­vid­u­al­is­tic mind­set which also finds expres­sion in an unreg­u­lat­ed finan­cial cap­i­tal­ism.”

So Bene­dict XVI equates “unreg­u­lat­ed finan­cial cap­i­tal­ism” with self­ish­ness. Now, would that be crony­ism? Pope Benedict—he’s from Ger­many, right? That’s not in Latin Amer­i­ca. Some­how I don’t recall any out­cry from Rush Lim­baugh, or Glenn Beck, in 2013. Per­haps Mr. Beck should send his team to Cas­tle Gan­dol­fo.

I want to know who put Glenn Beck in charge of papal inter­ven­tions. That has me wor­ried.

You Load Sixteen Tons; What Do You Get?

I am always intrigued by this idea—it’s not a new one—that Pope Fran­cis con­fus­es crony­ism with cap­i­tal­ism because he’s from Latin Amer­i­ca. That kind of stuff is rife there, we are told. Please. What do peo­ple think is rife in non-Latin Amer­i­ca? Can we hear what Sarah Palin has to say on this? She sure seems to think there can be a crony form of cap­i­tal­ism, prac­ticed right here in the good ol’ US of A. Does she also need the help of Glenn Beck­’s team?

Pope St. John Paul II was from Poland. Mr. Beck might know that. In Poland, the free mar­ket was sup­pressed for years by the Sovi­et. And yet read what he had to say in his 1991 encycli­cal Cen­tis­simus Annus (here):

Can it per­haps be said that, af­ter the fail­ure of Com­mu­nism, cap­i­tal­ism is the vic­to­ri­ous so­cial sys­tem, and cap­i­tal­ism should be the goal of the coun­tries now mak­ing ef­forts to re­build their econ­omy and so­ci­ety? If by cap­i­tal­ism is meant an eco­nomic sys­tem, which rec­og­nizes the fun­da­men­tal and pos­i­tive role of busi­ness, the mar­ket, [and] pri­vate prop­erty … then the an­swer is cer­tainly in the af­fir­ma­tive. … [Now watch what fol­lows.] But, if by “cap­i­tal­ism” is meant a sys­tem in which free­dom in the eco­nomic sec­tor is not cir­cum­scribed with­in a strong ju­ridi­cial frame­work … the core of which is eth­i­cal and re­li­gious, then the re­ply is cer­tainly neg­a­tive. (§42)

So here John Paul II rec­og­nizes two poten­tial forms of cap­i­tal­ism. And one of them is the “crony­ism” Mr. Beck seems to think is just some odd con­fu­sion on the part of Pope Fran­cis. But it is not just John Paul II; the very Cat­e­chism itself (no doc­u­ment of Latin bish­ops alone) also attacks crony­ism:

A the­o­ry that makes prof­it the ex­clu­sive norm and ul­ti­mate end of eco­nomic ac­tiv­ity is moral­ly un­ac­cept­able. The dis­or­dered de­sire for mon­ey can­not but pro­duce per­verse ef­fects. It is one of the caus­es of the many con­flicts which dis­turb the so­cial or­der. A sys­tem that “sub­or­di­nates the ba­sic rights of in­di­vid­u­als and of groups to the col­lec­tive or­ga­ni­za­tion of pro­duc­tion” is con­trary to hu­man dig­nity. Every prac­tice that re­duces per­sons to noth­ing more than a means of prof­it en­slaves man, leads to idol­iz­ing mon­ey, and con­tributes to the spread of athe­ism. “You can­not serve God and mam­mon. (CCC 2424)

I won­der whether Mr. Beck would say that the Cat­e­chism of the Catholic Church thinks that crony­ism is cap­i­tal­ism. Who approved that book? … Oh, yeah. John Paul II.

In fact, none of this is new at all. There is a con­sis­tent teach­ing on these points, in which pope after pope, and doc­u­ment after doc­u­ment, have all said the same thing, going back to Pope Leo XII­I’s 1891 encycli­cal Rerum Novarum. Leo XIII was the first pope to talk about the new chal­lenges posed to the Church by an econ­o­my devel­op­ing out of the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion.

It is beyond my pur­pose here to go into more detail about those ear­li­er texts. I have, in part, done so here. It is enough to say that the cur­rent pope, far from giv­ing us some new and shock­ing teach­ing, is sim­ply telling us what the Church has always told us.

And what she tells us is this: Greed is bad. The idol­a­try of mon­ey is bad. If these are the engines which pow­er your eco­nom­ic sys­tem, what­ev­er its oth­er virtues, then some­thing has gone amiss, and you do not help the poor. That does not make the pope a com­mie. It makes him a Catholic.

Maybe Mr. Beck should send his team to teach the Holy Spir­it. I’m sure the Holy Spir­it has a lot to learn from Mr. Beck.

I Owe My Soul to the Company Store

In Cen­tis­simus Annus, John Paul II said that a cap­i­tal­ism that rec­og­nized “the pos­i­tive role of busi­ness” was a good cap­i­tal­ism. It is the kind of cap­i­tal­ism that Mr. Beck describes as “let-me-help-you cap­i­tal­ism.”

So you may ask: Is there any­where in Evan­gelii Gaudi­um where Pope Fran­cis speaks of this? I’m glad you asked—because, in fact, there is:

“Busi­ness is a vo­ca­tion, and a no­ble vo­ca­tion, pro­vided that those en­gaged in it see them­selves chal­lenged by a greater mean­ing in life; this will en­able them tru­ly to serve the com­mon good by striv­ing to in­crease the goods of this world and to make them ac­ces­si­ble to all. (§203)

Why, that sounds just like … let-me-help-you cap­i­tal­ism!

Pope Fran­cis does not need Glenn Beck to teach him any­thing.