The Pope of Global Village

He's here! He's here!

Francis I is the new U.S. Catholic Bishops. Like them in 1986, he cares...and that should be enough, shouldn't it?

1. We are believers called to follow our Lord Jesus Christ and proclaim his Gospel in the midst of a complex and powerful economy. This reality poses both opportunities and responsibilities for Catholics in the United States. Our faith calls us to measure this economy not only by what it produces, but also by how it touches human life and whether it protect s or undermines the dignity of the human person. Economic decisions have human consequences and moral content; they help or hurt people, strengthen or weaken family life, advance or diminish the quality of justice in our land.

Of course, 'justice' means that people get what they deserve. But the bishops are talking about social justice. That adjective transforms the noun into something like the opposite of its usual meaning. Maybe Francis would benefit from meeting Thomas Sowell more than Fidel and Raul Castro;

Both the authors of the Bishops' Pastoral Letter in the 1980s, and Pope Francis today, blithely throw around the phrase "the poor," and blame poverty on what other people are doing or not doing to or for "the poor."

Any serious look at the history of human beings over the millennia shows that the species began in poverty. It is not poverty, but prosperity, that needs explaining. Poverty is automatic, but prosperity requires many things -- none of which is equally distributed around the world or even within a given society.

The question the Pope should be asking himself is, Which arrangements of human affairs result in less poverty? Sowell has an answer;

A scholar specializing in the study of Latin America said that the official poverty level in the United States is the upper middle class in Mexico [and even higher in Cuba]. The much criticized market economy of the United States has done far more for the poor than the ideology of the left.

Pope Francis' own native Argentina was once among the leading economies of the world, before it was ruined by the kind of ideological notions he is now promoting around the world.

By their works....