The documentary, Pope Francis: A Man of His Word (2018) chiefly lays out the pope’s critique of economic Man. The film begins with references to climate change too loosely linked to the global population figure of 8 million humans, 1 billion of whom are unnecessarily living in poverty. The viewer is left to fill in the gaps, such as that because as biological organisms we must consume and use energy, the hyperextended overpopulation of the species is the root cause of climate- and ecosystem-changing CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans. Arguably, the salvific Son of God or the means into the Kingdom of God enjoy pride of place in the gospels, but compassion for the poor as well as outcasts and the sick is indeed a message that Jesus stresses in the faith narratives. Rather than being a sign of sin, poverty, especially if voluntary, can permit the sort of humility that is much superior to the pride of the Pharisees. In the documentary, Jorge Bergoglio, who took the name Francis in becoming pope of the Roman Catholic Church in 2013, is a practical man who points to the sickness or temptation of greed that keeps humanity from riding itself of poverty, unnecessarily. Moreover, the hegemony of the market, with its culture of consumerism and commoditization, comes at the cost of the common good, which to Francis has a spiritual basis. Abstractly speaking, harmony, which inherently respects its own limitations, should have priority over greed and markets. Both of these can go to excess without enough built-in constraints as occurred before and during the financial crisis of 2008, with poverty plaguing humanity even more rather than less as a result.
Such poverty as exists in the
world (in 2017) is a scandal, the pope says, because we could solve the
problem. “We have such riches, so many resources for giving food to everybody,”
yet so many children are hungry. If we become a little bit poorer—having not so
many things—we can help the poor. The pope even wants “a poor church for the
poor.” Unfortunately, men can be found even in the Church who have yielded
to—rather than resisted—the temptation to have more things. More things owned
by fewer people means that more people get less.
Organizational theorists speak of
dysfunctional organizations; the pope refers to the Curia, the government of
the Church, as dysfunctional. Sins are malfunctioning diseases that weaken our
service to God. In men of God, the result is tremendous hypocrisy. According to
the pope, a sick organization can suffer from people who think they are
immortal in the sense that they deem themselves immune from temptation. Other
spiritual diseases include rivalry and vaingloriousness (boastfulness), closed
circles (cliques), and lugubrious (sad looking) faces. Existential
schizophrenia[1]
and spiritual Alzheimer’s disease[2]
are two others. Last but certainly not the least, given Francis’ preoccupation,
is hoarding. A person seeks to fill an existential void in one’s heart by
accumulating material goods not out of need, but, rather, to feel secure. Twice
the pope states, “As long as there’s a church that places its hope on wealth,
Jesus is not there.” This alone doesn’t exclude a church from having wealth,
though Francis clearly wants a poor church for the poor. To be sure, a church
that is itself poor has limited funds to lift the poor out of poverty, let
alone help them momentarily, but in the spending of vast wealth a large church
can made a dent in the problem and the remaining lower cash-flow can make use
of fund-raising.
We need only look at Wall Street
bankers to see that wealth can be accumulated much beyond even the most
risk-averse need for security, financial and otherwise. Pope Francis does not
discuss Wall Street in the documentary. No doubt he would have expressed
disgust at the many traders for whom maximizing a yearly bonus is a game even
during a financial downturn such as that of 2008-2009 even though many
sub-prime mortgage producers and mortgage-based bond traders were culpable both
ethically and in terms of competence. Making unnecessary hoarding into a game
when ending poverty lies within our species’ grasp and poor people are
suffering surely involves an immature, selfish dysfunction. What is for one
person a game is for another hunger and even homelessness. No brotherly love
exists in such a deprived culture of consumption.
In such a culture, money can
apply value anything that can be commoditized. Goods, services, jobs, and even
people are valued monetarily. A Hollywood movie star (i.e., a popular actor),
for example can make millions of dollars on just one film, while dollars can be
scarce for organizations that attempt to reduce poverty. This is a reflection
of how much movies and reducing poverty are valued in a society. As Pope
Francis makes clear in the documentary, enough wealth exists that poverty could
be eliminated, but people with a surplus of money want to go to the movies more
than they want to pitch in together to end poverty.
St. Francis rejected the
distended hoarding disease that springs from the sin of greed. He likened money
to animal dung and lauded poverty, especially of the voluntary sort.[3]
So he viewed money itself, rather than just the culture that forms from it, as
problematic. In the context of ordinary Christians first being able to
accumulate coin from trade during the Commercial Revolution in the High Middle
Age, St. Francis eschewed his inheritance to undergo voluntary poverty in
solidarity with the poor, the sick, and the outcasts like Jesus.
The saint felt a calling to
restore God’s house on Earth, for which a complete transformation of attitude
would be needed. Such a transformation, while not impossible with human nature,
would surely go against its grain and thus could not be based in it. Like
Kant’s notion of perpetual peace protected by a world federation, the
transformation is possible but not probable.[4]
Being very difficult to accomplish in human nature, we can conclude that the
transformation is sourced either in the higher faculties of human nature or a
source that is wholly other to our artifacts and nature. Both St. Francis and
the pope who took that name would say that the transformation is so foreign to
our nature (and thus ways) that the source must be divine, transcending
Creation, hence wholly other.
To St. Francis, the
transformation of attitude, which I submit applies not only to greed, but also
pride, can result in “a new brotherhood
of man dedicated to the common good.” The documentary uses that rather secular
language—the common good. In political theory, the common or public good stands
for what is in the public welfare—the good of the whole (e.g., a city). The
aggregation of private uses can fall short of that which is in a community’s
interest. Hence, in Wealth of Nations,
Adam Smith advocates a role for government in regulating markets. Relatedly,
public goods like air and water are for common use because either they cannot
be privatized (e.g., contained in packages) or the cost of exclusion is too
high. Air and water, respectively, apply. This is why Polanyi argues in his book,
The Great Transformation, that social
norms should hold sway over markets, rather than vice versa, and thus
governments should not be controlled by the financial sector. Even though
markets can efficiently allocate goods and services, even a financial system,
if left to itself especially in times of great volatility, can go beyond
equilibrium and collapse without the overarching public good being enforced by
a government, such as in the United States in 2008.
In St. Francis’ usage, the term common good is not just secular, for the
transformation needed has a divine rather than an earthly source. The
transformation runs against the human nature to economize even for a person’s
own self-preservation. Godric of Finchale, a trader during the Commercial Revolution
more than a century before St. Francis, gave his accumulated wealth to the poor
in order to live as a hermit close to Nature. Godric put even his own life at
risk because he, like St. Francis, believed that having any wealth would castrate his salvation. That is, salvation does
not allow for making an income and accumulating wealth. The underlying
assumption is that wealth is tightly coupled with the stain of underlying
greed. Elsewhere, I call this stance the anti-wealth paradigm.[5]
That paradigm was dominant in
Christian thought for centuries; the pro-wealth paradigm, in which greed is not
necessarily behind profit-seeking and wealth, only began to take hold during
the Commercial Revolution in the High Middle Age. Interestingly, just as
capitalism arrived on the world stage two centuries before Adam Smith wrote his
Wealth of Nations during the
eighteenth century, so too did the pro-wealth paradigm come to dominate among
theologians two centuries before Max Weber wrote his Protestant Work Ethic. Ricardo’s world capitalism began during the
sixteenth century, and the pro-wealth paradigm had begun in the Italian
Renaissance during the fifteenth century. Renaissance theologians emphasized
the Christian virtues of liberality and munificence as “good uses” of wealth,
and thus as justifying the fortunes of even the usurer Cosimo De Medici.[6]
He made a deal with Pope Eugene IV: In return for financing the renovations of
a Florentine monastery (at which Cosimo got a cell for prayer), the
international banker could keep his fortune of usurious interest and secure his salvation. St. Francis
must have been spinning in his grave.
As shown in the documentary, Pope
Francis is also an adherent of the anti-wealth paradigm. “Jesus in the Gospels
says no one can serve two masters. We either serve God or we serve money,” the
pope says. He is assuming that serving money means that greed and money are
present. In other words, greed and wealth are linked. Unlike Godric and St.
Francis, however, Pope Francis was at the time the head of a very wealthy
organization, the Roman Catholic Church. Although he says in the documentary
that he wants a poor church serving the poor, he, like the pro-wealth paradigm
adherents, had to confront, by which I mean legitimate, the extant wealth of
his Church. He emphasizes good uses, namely to the poor, in the documentary. In
contrast, St. Francis “attacked the subtle temptation of pious Christians to
pile up wealth under the pretext of using it to beautify churches or serve God.”[7]
Had he been alive in Cosimo De Medici’s day, St. Francis might have preached
that Pope Eugene should pick up one of De Medici’s usurious coins by the teeth
and deposit the coin on top of a pile of animal dung. Moreover, by contrasting
St. Francis and Pope Eugene IV, we can see that the zenith of the anti-wealth
paradigm had been replaced by that of the pro-wealth paradigm by fifteenth
century—two centuries before Weber’s Protestant
Work Ethic.[8]
As if channeling St. Thomas
Aquinas, Pope Francis says in the film that the big temptation for mankind is
greed. Even though Francis mentions St. Francis’ notion of an attitudinal
transformation, the pope could have said more concerning how the dysfunctional
attitude of pride fits in. This would be a nod to Augustine, who had written of
pride as the chief sin. In the twenty-first century, the term sin can seem vague and even antiquated;
hence the pope uses the terms, temptation and disease. Perhaps these, while
workable in reaching a secular world, do not go far enough.
Beyond the temptation of greed
issuing out in diseases, St. Francis’ transformation of attitude could be
contemplated beyond the immaturity, selfishness, and lack of compassion for
others. When Wall Street traders turned maximizing their bonuses into some kind
of a game, something more than greed was at work, even during the mortgage-bond
fiasco that led to the financial crisis of 2008. Not only did it not matter
that subprime mortgage borrowers were going homeless; traders actually blamed
the scheme on those borrowers (for being stupid) instead of themselves. During
a flood, arrogance has no place above water, let alone on stilts.
A dysfunctional socio-economy can
be viewed as an encrusted artifact of the attitude borne of the temptation of
greed and its diseases. In the film, the pope bemoans an economy of exclusion
and inequality, where money rules, as having resulted in a plundered planet; we
have abused rather than cultivated it, and climate change may be our reckoning.
Work is sacred, the pope says, because creating something is a version of doing
the Creator’s work. “The way to escape consumerism, this corruption, this
competitiveness, this being enslaved to money, is the concreteness of
day-to-day work”—a “tangible reality.” Similarly, Heidegger wrote that in
concrete work, such as nailing with a hammer, a person comes to realize oneself
as an entity that exists (dasein).
God sent our species to cultivate, through work, not only the land, but also
science, art, technology, and culture. “But when someone feels that he owns
this culture and feels all-powerful,” the pope says, “the temptation arises to
go further, and destroy the culture.” This feeling of “all-powerful,” as if self-appointed
as a god, is otherwise known as pride. Here we see the pope link it to the
temptation of greed. Perhaps the common denominator is a refusal to recognize
limits upon oneself. As Gordon Gekko says in the film, Wall Street,
the wealth that he desires as a trader is unlimited. How much is enough? "It’s not a question of enough.”
Exploiting the planet’s resources, including
coal for energy, plays into more for its
own sake. Increasing the CO2 concentration in the oceans and atmosphere
does so as well. Even being fruitful and multiplying without limit—as if the
divine command holds even after sufficient multiplying has enabled our species
to cultivate the Earth—plays into more.
Indeed, as the overpopulation is behind the CO2 increases because biological
organisms, including of our species, must use up energy, our species may go
extinct because of the refusal to rationally curb the more even to the extent that it is instinctual and woven into the
fabric of our economic, social, and political systems. In the film, neither the
narrator nor the pope go this far in connecting the major themes. Essentially,
the pope argues that if people live as Jesus in the gospels, then exclusion,
poverty, and the cult of more, including its destruction of the planet at least
in terms of human habitation, and thus the overall good of humanity, could be
expunged. Instead, a harmony could exist in line with the principles of
ecosystems. It is a “law of nature,” the pope says for lack of a better
expression that “all things should be in harmony.” Plato’s notion of justice,
by the way, is when a musical-mathematical harmony exists within a
reason-directed psyche (mind) and polis (city and even country).
1. Efforts to stabilize one’s existence, in this case by having more wealth.
2. Remembering God no longer. In this void, a person can engage in self-idolatry,
which can include worshipping one’s own wealth as an extension of oneself.
3. Skip
Worden, God’s Gold.
4. Immanuel
Kant, Perpetual Peace.
5. Skip Worden, God’s Gold.
7. Dan Runyon, “St.
Francis of Assisi on the Joy of Poverty and the Value of Dung,” Church History 14 (1987).
8. Skip Worden, God’s Gold.
