A friend recently sent me a copy of a story that appeared last week on the website www.chiesa. It describes a fascinating proposal by Italian economist and banker Ettore Gotti Tedeschi that calls for the creation of an international bank that would invest large amounts of capital in the economies of developing countries as a way of pulling the world out of the financial crisis into which it has sunk, basically, because of greed. The proposal has attracted the attention of both Pope Benedict XVI and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
The story includes this killer statement about the financial crisis from Pope Benedict XVI at a meeting with priests in Rome last Thursday, February 26:
"It is the Church's duty to denounce the fundamental errors that have now been revealed in the collapse of the major American banks. Human greed is a form of idolatry that is against the true God, and is a falsification of the image of God with another god, Mammon. We must denounce this courageously, but also concretely, because grand moralizations are not helpful if they are not supported by a familiarity with reality, which helps us to understand what can be done concretely. The Church has never simply denounced evils, it also shows the paths that lead to justice, to charity, to the conversion of hearts. In the economy as well, justice is established only if there are just persons. And these persons are assembled through the conversion of hearts."
The entire story can be found at:
http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1337349?eng=y
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