Leo W. Gerard: Sacrilege: Wall Street Worship

Great to hear our progressive leaders touting the Pope, huh? Even if the Pope's statement about restoring politics' primacy (?!?) sounds like something outta Chantal Mouffe.

This false idolatry produced a nation gripped by massive unemployment, a nation in which destructive income inequality has risen beyond robber baron levels, a nation where greed has been perverted from sin to good, a nation where politicians genuflect to money changers, not majority citizens.

Salvation for the majority is not more failed trickle-down economics or more deregulation so that Wall Street can resume committing unfettered wagering. Redemption is political and economic systems devoted to serving the common good, not the affluent few.

These concepts -- that governments should protect majorities and that the international financial collapse is an opportunity to transform the system into one supporting a more fraternal and just human family -- are contained in a report released last week by the Pope's Council for Justice and Peace. It says:

The economic and financial crisis which the world is going through calls everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural and moral values at the basis of social coexistence.

Those values mandate economic and political systems that transcend "personal utility for the good of the community," the report says, then adds:

The primacy of the spiritual and of ethics needs to be restored and, with them, the primacy of politics, which is responsible for the common good - over the economy and finance.