Has the Pope’s Resignation Been About Vatican’s Controversies?

Pope Benedict XVI took the Catholic world by surprise by announcing his resignation at the end of the month allegedly "because of advanced age." (CNN)

While it may be true that part of his calling it quits may be due to health, where the Vatican confirmed that Benedict has had a pacemaker for years, which may have been an aggravating factor, pressure from the Vatileaks scandals could have been the trigger (Huffington Post).

The Vatileaks scandal, according the the Huffington Post in 2012, exposed alleged corruption that “cost the Holy See millions of euros (dollars) in higher contract prices”

Further the article added that this revelation “laid bare power struggles inside the Vatican over its efforts to show greater financial transparency and comply with international norms to fight money laundering. There was even a leak of a memo claiming that Benedict would die this year.”

I guess in lieu of death, resignation may have been the outcome. I blogged about this scandal last year.

Add to this other controversies that has plagued Pope Benedict’s reign.

From Reuters

The child abuse scandals hounded most of his papacy. He ordered an official inquiry into abuse in Ireland, which led to the resignation of several bishops…

Benedict confronted his own country's past when he visited the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Calling himself "a son of Germany", he prayed and asked why God was silent when 1.5 million victims, most of them Jews, were killed there.

Ratzinger served in the Hitler Youth during World War Two when membership was compulsory. He was never a member of the Nazi party and his family opposed Adolf Hitler's regime.

Of course most of mainstream media has been silent about this.

Yet in support of Occupy Wall Street, the Pope has spoken, if not ranted, against alleged “greed”, which he mistakenly had attributed to laissez faire capitalism. 

Obviously, he had most likely been utterly confused or deliberately misled (by influence peddlers) in associating cronyism or corporatism for free markets. 

And even more bizarre is that the Vatican has even endorsed the ECB’s inflationism! Redistribution from society (or transfer of wealth) to rich bankers and the political class has been by the Vatican as moral??!!

On the other hand, the Pope’s foray into politics by misreading and distorting economics could have been that capitalism served as convenient smokescreen from the internal controversies, wrangling, and power struggles that put pressure on the Pope and the Vatican.

As I previously wrote,

Is it not that the Bible warned that “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone”? (John 8:7)

Does this not apply to the Vatican too?

Whether due to health or political controversies or both, this shows that Pope Benedict is just human, and thus subject to the frailties of humanity as shown whether in health, moral, organizational or even political economic issues.

Vatican’s Scapegoating Capitalism

The easiest way of blaming social evils has been to bash capitalism. 

A good example has been the recent New Year homily by the Catholic Pope Benedict XVI who condemned “unregulated capitalism” for sowing “hotbeds of tension and conflict caused by growing instances of inequality between rich and poor” due to "the prevalence of a selfish and individualistic mindset which also finds expression in an unregulated financial capitalism” (BBC)

In the eyes of the Pope, the world operates on unregulated or unfettered individualism. 

In reality, the world is being suffocated by mounting regulations that has essentially been shifting the balance of social power from the markets to politicians.

Proof?

In 2012, in the US 29,000 laws came into existence in the state laws with more coming.

From CNBC.com

In 2013 in Illinois, motorcyclists will be able to "proceed through a red light if the light fails to change." In Kentucky, releasing feral or wild hogs into the wild will be prohibited. And in Florida, swamp buggies will not legally be considered motor vehicles.

On Jan. 1, as crowds of people toast to a new year, more than 400 news laws across the country will take effect — and possibly improve life for some.

"The laws that state governments deal with are really the laws that impact people on a daily basis," said Jon Kuhl, a spokesmanfor the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks the bills. "Whether amending or updating laws or enacting brand new legislation, it was an active year."

In addition to the new laws of 2013, more than 29,000 laws were passed by state legislatures this year, Kuhl said. Many dealt with healthcare, education, gay rights, child safety and the Internet.

And that’s aside from Federal laws. (MSNBC estimates the above at 40,000 laws including federal)

Another fact is that US tax code has ballooned from 400 to 72,000 words.

As Voxxi notes (chart theirs)

We have more professional tax preparers in the United States than law enforcement officers (765,000) and professional firefighters (310,400) combined.

But we need them. Consider this: in  1913, we had 400 pages of federal tax code in law. Today, its more than 72,000 pages.

Fear of being audited has led to this boost in tax preparers.

In short lobbying, tax avoidance, corruption and other means to influence political institutions to acquire favorable treatment becomes the commonplace operations.

 

And the above is just a segment of the overall political picture.

In other words, the Pope got his perverted idea of social malfeasance backward. Either the Pope has been misinformed or has not been forthright.

The Pope only needs to see how government debt levels in developed countries has been skyrocketing and how central banks have been bailing out the the privileged bankers. This has hardly been a function of individual-market based greed but of greed by those in power and their cohorts.

What the Pope and the Vatican seem to really rebuke hasn't been unregulated capitalism but state capitalism, corporatism or cronyism.

Yet in truth, individuals are not innately evil. It is mainly political power that debauches morality.

As the great John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, popularly known as Lord Acton [Online Library of Liberty] pointed out

I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

I am inclined to think that institutions like the Catholic church have used capitalism as convenient scapegoats when they are underfire, i.e. to deflect on the raging controversies, such as charges of institutional corruption and sexual abuse  which like the Australian Catholic Church admits and apologized.

Is it not that the Bible warned that “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone”? (John 8:7)

Does this not apply to the Vatican too?

Quote of the Day: Blaming Capitalism, Redux

But blaming capitalism for the world’s economic ills is like blaming the guy who invented gunpowder for nuclear holocaust. Sure, you could make an argument that the two are loosely related, but the real blame lies with the system itself– a system which awards perverse power and control to an elite few.

As I’ve often written, future historians will look back on our time with utter incredulity and wonder how we could allow such a system to take over… to allow a tiny handful of men to control the lives and livelihoods of billions of people.

Certainly, injustice in the world is great. There are a lot of people who are suffering, people who have had their lives turned upside down from state-sponsored corporate welfare.

Holding out for the government to fix it, though, is like waiting for a thief to give your stuff back. It’s not going to happen. They’re instrumental in perpetuating the problem.

That’s from the Mr. Simon Black of the sovereignman.com commenting on the fallacies of the Occupy Movement.

My earlier quote of the day on blaming capitalism here.

Let me add that not only governments “perpetuate” the problem, they are THE problem. If “a tiny handful of men to control the lives and livelihoods of billions of people”, then governments represent as instruments of control by the political class in complicity with vested interest groups who profit from political rents or popularly known as “state-sponsored corporate welfare”.

These are the people who disdain the free market, capitalism or economic freedom for the simple reason of aversion to competition, which stems from valid and real concerns of the erosion of their current usufruct privileges, which they enjoy out of government protection and redistribution. Take away government’s aegis, then these parasites will be vanquished.

And their tentacles of venal influence for the public to continue with their servitude extends vastly through the incumbent establishment institutions—media, academia, Wall Street and many others, covering all the aspects of our lives.

So the analogy of “waiting for a thief to give your stuff back” is correct. These politically entrenched groups will fight to preserve their unsustainable privileges until the point of self-destruction. The chickens will come home to roost.

Quote of the Day: Blaming Capitalism

It would be correct to describe this state of affairs in this way: Today many or some groups of business are no longer liberal; they do not advocate a pure market economy and free enterprise, but, on the contrary, are asking for various measures of government interference with business. But it is entirely misleading to say that the meaning of the concept of capitalism has changed and that "mature capitalism"--as the American Institutionalists call it--or "late capitalism"--as the Marxians call it--is characterized by restrictive policies to protect the vested interests of wage earners, farmers, shopkeepers, artisans, and sometimes also of capitalists and entrepreneurs.

The concept of capitalism is as an economic concept immutable; if it means anything, it means the market economy. One deprives oneself of the semantic tools to deal adequately with the problems of contemporary history and economic policies if one acquiesces in a different terminology. This faulty nomenclature becomes understandable only if we realize that the pseudo-economists and the politicians who apply it want to prevent people from knowing what the market economy really is. They want to make people believe that all the repulsive manifestations of restrictive government policies are produced by "capitalism."

The great Ludwig von Mises clarifies and defends what capitalism is all about.

And exactly as Prof von Mises describes, present day detractors equivocate and fudge on the terminology, and importantly, misrepresents on the causation of events. Critics usually point to effects of massive interventionisms, which they impute to as the cause of what for them constitutes as "market failures". They mistakenly imply that incumbent policies have had neutral effects on the markets.

All these signify as vain attempt to mislead people.