Pope Francis is one of the world’s most inspiring figures. There are passages in his new encyclical on the environment that beautifully place human beings within the seamless garment of life. And yet over all the encyclical is surprisingly disappointing....Omigod! The Catholic Church has gone Bolshevik!
Hardest to accept ... is the moral premise implied throughout the encyclical: that the only legitimate human relationships are based on compassion, harmony and love, and that arrangements based on self-interest and competition are inherently destructive....
Moral realists, including Catholic ones, should be able to worship and emulate a God of perfect love and still appreciate systems, like democracy and capitalism, that harness self-interest. But Francis doesn’t seem to have practical strategies for a fallen world. He neglects the obvious truth that the qualities that do harm can often, when carefully directed, do enormous good. Within marriage, lust can lead to childbearing. Within a regulated market, greed can lead to entrepreneurship and economic innovation. Within a constitution, the desire for fame can lead to political greatness.
You would never know from the encyclical that we are living through the greatest reduction in poverty in human history. A raw and rugged capitalism in Asia has led, ironically, to a great expansion of the middle class and great gains in human dignity....
Well, no, actually it hasn't. This story would suggest that the church is still cozying up to power, the way it generally has in recent memory:
James B. Lee Jr., a towering figure on Wall Street, was remembered at his funeral Mass on Monday as a father, a friend and an investment banker possessed of boundless energy, sprawling interests and a crackling wit, qualities that made him one of the most successful and beloved figures in his industry.Lee, known as Jimmy, wasn't the worst of the banksters, although Matt Taibbi wrote this about him:
The service, in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Midtown Manhattan, was just blocks from where Mr. Lee worked as vice chairman of JPMorgan Chase. There, he shaped corporate America, and the nation’s biggest bank, through a career that established him as perhaps the pre-eminent deal maker of his generation.
... Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan presided over the funeral Mass....
Mr. Lee pioneered the syndicated loan market -- in which multiple banks cooperate to lend money to a single client to finance a major transaction. This innovation allowed Mr. Lee to become the go-to financier for corporate chieftains looking to strike transformative multibillion-dollar deals as well as for private equity heads seeking leverage for their big debt-laden buyouts of public companies....
“This is where we New Yorkers come, Catholics and all faiths, in moments of loss and difficulty and heartache,” Cardinal Dolan said. “So you are all very much at home here this morning.”
As one of the world's leading Leveraged Buyout (LBO) pioneers, Lee is a human bridge symbolically connecting two different and equally loathsome eras in Wall Street iniquity -- the Gordon Gekko/LBO Eighties and Nineties, and the price-rigging, bubble-making, steal-everything-not-nailed-down era covering the Wall Street of today. From the public's perspective, Lee basically represents the banker who foreclosed on your house and the guy who liquidated your factory in a deal financed by junk bonds, all in one.In 2013, Lee was asked to do a Twitter Q&A on behalf of JPMorgan Chase. The Q&A had to be canceled when it resulted in tweets such as the following:
Reading David Brooks, you'd think Lee would get a similar response in a Catholic church under the new commie pope. But not to worry -- he got a cardinal to do his funeral Mass, and the ushers were strictly from the A list:
So relax, David. They're not stashing pitchforks and tumbrels in the sacristy. Capitalism is still in no real danger from Catholics.
