Talk about great PR.
The pope took time to weigh in on the world’s financial system, sounding off on various investment instruments and even making veiled references to a fiduciary standard of care in communication to the Catholic faithful on Thursday.
The pontiff’s view was released by the Holy See Press Office with the exceedingly long title, “Oeconomicae et pecuniariae quaestiones. Considerations for an ethical discernment regarding some aspects of the present economic-financial system of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.”
Referencing the 2008 financial crisis, the missive began broadly by noting it could have provided a chance to develop “a new economy, more attentive to ethical principles, and a new regulation of financial activities that would neutralize predatory and speculative tendencies and acknowledge the value of the actual economy.”
Yet humans being human, we failed.
“Although there have been many positive efforts at various levels which should be recognized and appreciated, there does not seem to be any inclination to rethink the obsolete criteria that continue to govern the world.”
On the contrary, it adds, the response seems at times “like a return to the heights of myopic egoism, limited by an inadequate framework that, excluding the common good, also excludes from its horizons the concern to create and spread wealth, and to eliminate the inequality so pronounced today.”
In a nod to the need for a fiduciary rule, Francis argued that while the commercialization of certain financial instruments “is in itself licit, in [an] asymmetrical situation it would be possible to take advantage of a lack of knowledge or of the contractual weakness of either counterpart. In itself, this amounts to a violation of due relational propriety, which is already a grave violation from an ethical point of view.”
What is morally unacceptable, he concluded, “is not simply to profit, but rather to avail oneself of an inequality for one’s own advantage, in order to create enormous profits that are damaging to others; or to exploit one’s dominant position in order to profit by unjustly disadvantaging others, or to make oneself rich through harming and disrupting the collective common good.”