The Vatican Information Service reports that Pope Benedict XVI has released a new Encyclical, “Caritas in veritate” (Charity in Truth), which addresses “integral human development in charity and truth.” At the Georgetown/On Faith blog, Thomas J. Reese, S.J. responds:
Pope Benedict’s long awaited encyclical calls for a radical rethinking of economics so that it is guided not simply by profits but by “an ethics which is people-centered.”
“Profit is useful if it serves as a means towards an end,” he writes in Caritas in veritate (Charity in Truth), but “once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.”
He decries that “Corruption and illegality are unfortunately evident in the conduct of the economic and political class in rich countries…as well as in poor ones.” He also says that “Financiers must rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity, so as not to abuse the sophisticated instruments which can serve to betray the interests of savers.”
Read the full piece at Georgetown/On Faith. And check out George Weigel‘s analysis of the encyclical at National Review online, in which he claims it “resembles a duck-billed platypus.” A summary of the encyclical is available here.