PhillyDeals: Pope offers ideas about the economic crisis

Pope Benedict has reviewed the world economy in crisis and drawn up a 79-point list of problems and recommendations, laid out cost-benefit-analysis style and footnoted from his predecessors' pronouncements, and from the Bible.

Catholic social teaching, citing Isaiah and James, Aquinas and Leo XIII, fueled the rise of the labor-union movement and of the Christian Democratic parties that ran Western Europe and competed in Latin America and parts of Asia after World War II.

The church has less social influence now. But Benedict sees a strategic opportunity in today's crisis to get people thinking about big questions. Some highlights:

Who asked him? "The Church does not have technical solutions to offer and does not claim to interfere in any way in the politics of States. She does, however, have a mission of truth. . . ."

Profit "is useful if it serves as a means towards an end that provides a sense both of how to produce it and how to make good use of it. Once profit becomes the exclusive goal . . . it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty."

Economic growth "continues to be a positive factor that has lifted billions of people out of misery."

But: "This same economic growth has been and continues to be weighed down by malfunctions and dramatic problems, highlighted even further by the current crisis," such as "the damaging effects on the real economy of badly managed and largely speculative financial dealing," which he blames for unemployment, mass immigration, and pollution.

The culture of poverty: "In some poor countries, cultural models and social norms of behavior persist which hinder the process of development."

Trade: "The principal form of assistance needed by developing countries is that of allowing and encouraging the gradual penetration of their products into international markets."

Open sourcing: "On the part of rich countries, there is excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property, especially in the field of health care."

Blind science: "Technological development can give rise to the idea that technology is self-sufficient when too much attention is given to the 'how' questions, and not enough to the many 'why' questions underlying human activity."

Synthetic life: "Human knowledge is insufficient and the conclusions of science cannot indicate by themselves the path towards integral human development. . . . Moral evaluation and scientific research must go hand in hand."

Blaming the traders, not the trades: "Instruments that are good in themselves can thereby be transformed into harmful ones. But it is man's darkened reason that produces these consequences, not the instrument per se. . . . Every economic decision has a moral consequence."

He likes credit unions, nonprofits, and consumer cooperatives: "Space also needs to be created within the market for economic activity carried out by subjects who freely choose to act according to principles other than those of pure profit."

He doesn't like spot markets: "What should be avoided is a speculative use of financial resources that yields to the temptation of seeking only short-term profit, without regard for the long-term sustainability of the enterprise, its benefit to the real economy."

He mentions he's still against abortion, gay marriage, atheism. And he's skeptical about birth control, noting that some rich countries are in trouble because they've stopped making young people, while some poorer, populous countries are getting rich fast.

His bottom line: "The decisive issue is the overall moral tenor of society." Which vanishes in a world where technology and money are the only limits.

I ran this by a couple of Philadelphians who've written books about morals and money.

Economy.com senior economist John E. Stapleford found Benedict's language naive. "People should, as the pope states, work for the benefit of all. But they won't. . . . They will be driven primarily by self-interest expressing itself as greed."

University of Pennsylvania law professor David Skeel gave Benedict a little more credit, comparing his views to Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: Both argue "the underlying structure" of society should be designed to "hold our sinfulness in check."

They didn't talk about the Pope's letter where I went to Mass last Sunday. But Father Jud Weiksnar, the Franciscan pastor of St. Anthony's in Camden's Cramer Hill neighborhood, says his parishioners got Benedict's arguments right away.

"I preached about it," and handed out summaries, "and the people knew what the pope was talking about," he told me. "The problems other parts of the country are now facing, Camden has been facing for decades.

"The pope said, 'Why are people poor? It's not because people lack material things. It's because we lack brotherhood or sisterhood.' That really resonated here."