Pope Benedict calls for new world financial order

By Dan Collins

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

THE Pope has called for a new world financial order blaming the global crisis on the greed of financiers and investors.

Denouncing what he termed a profit-at-all-cost mentality, Pope Benedict XVI was also critical of governmental oversight and the absence of global regulation.

In the most socially rooted Vatican encyclical letter since 1967, the Pope wrote: "In the face of the unrelenting growth of global interdependence, there is a strongly felt need, even in the midst of a global recession, for a reform of the United Nations organisation, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth."

Benedict appealed to developed nations not to scale back aid to poor countries because of the economic crisis. He urged wealthier countries to increase development aid to help eliminate world hunger, saying peace and security depended on it.

The German-born Benedict, 82, stated: "There is urgent need [for] a true world political authority" to manage the global economy.

The economy needs ethics in order to function correctly – not any ethics, but an ethics which is people centred," Benedict wrote in the 144-page document


Benedict said that the drive to outsource work to the cheapest bidder had endangered the rights of workers, and he demanded that workers be allowed to organise in unions to protect their rights and guarantee steady, decent employment.

The Bishops of Ireland welcomed the publication of Caritas In Veritate (Love in Truth).

The Irish bishops said the Pope had revisited the teachings on "integral human development" expounded by Pope Paul VI in his landmark 1967 encyclical, Populorum Progressio.

The document was in the works for two years, and released the day before leaders of the G-8 industrialised nations meet to co-ordinate efforts to emerge from the financial crisis.