Listening to the Sunday homily at one of my favourite Parisian churches, Notre-Dame d’Auteil recently, I was struck by the comments of the celebrant, a former banker.

Solidarity through joint financial activities can be boosted through cooperative banking

He said the Church document Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of Global Public Authority, published by the Holy See’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace in October 2011, differed radically from the Marxian concept of Das Kapital.

Individual dignity seems to be subservient to societal ‘good’, with the Christian position where the person transcends, in his essence, the community, even as he subjugates the call of his ‘ego’ to the overriding needs of society.

Both tenets underline the ephemeral quality of money and the greed it generates. Marx seemed to herald the day when capitalism would die at its own hands; Christianity holding forth the supremacy of an ethos responding to Him who would be with us till the end of time.

Laudably inviting four economists to evaluate the Vatican document, Discern and the Fondazione Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice held a roundtable at the Palazzo de Piro in Mdina some weeks back to offer the proceedings in an instructive, provocative booklet.

The booklet has been titled Towards Reforming the International Financial Monetary Systems, A Comment on the Document Published by the Pontifical Council For Justice And Peace. It is instructive because the lecturers have given a masterly tour d’horizon of the fundamental problems arising from the global financial crisis.

It is provocative in some of the solutions suggested, the primary, perhaps the Holy See’s embrace of a global public authority to oversee and control the world finances.

More than one orator, notably Michael Bonello, formerly the excellent Governor of the Central Bank of Malta, argued that the Church’s position was at best utopian, a criticism which Fr Joe Inguanez, the Discern director, addresses in his preface.

John Cassar White retorts that the Church should not be “proposing blueprints for economic reform”.

Rather, and this is a point made by all four participants, it should emphasise the moral value of work in the overall socio-economic context, which calls for a “re-thinking (of) globalisation: the need for changed values”, as Joe Vella Bonnici themed his contribution. For wealth as such has no intrinsic value: “it is an enabler” as Lawrence Zammit puts it.

Solidarity and subsidiarity are the key words in this problematique. While ideally we could envisage, in a perfect world, a global political authority with global power even over economies, we are unlikely to witness anything of the kind given human nature’s propensity to amass individually.

Where Marx went wrong was in his cry “Workers of the world, unite” – he assumed that all around the world workers had the same interests. Similarly, we cannot assume that people all around the world will pursue exactly the same economic models.

But, as both the Vatican text and the roundtable commentary justly point out, we as Christians should strive after an evolution of the contemporary world where economic and financial decisions, in both public and private sectors, are taken in a setting of human dignity and the common good, as Joe Zahra insists in the introduction to this little gem of serious thinking.

Solidarity through joint financial activities can be boosted through cooperative banking, a project which is now being supported in a number of countries and which has elicited a marked interest from the IMF, the World Bank and the European Union.

Moreover, such cooperation could strengthen parameters and criteria conducive to ethically ‘correct’ investments, an area in which the Vatican itself could, through its own financial network, lead the way offering, en route, a code of transparent financial behaviour.

While it is not a technical booklet, this slim volume brings a wealth of serious and researched thought on a problem the solution of which still seems to evade the counsels of the nations.

Would that political and economic leaders worldwide recognise their responsibilities and duties towards present and future generations in a cosmic belief, of ethical practice and moral strategy, radiating beyond our spatial and temporal cosmic constraints!

Towards Reforming the International Financial Monetary Systems, A Comment on the Document Published by the Pontifical Council For Justice And Peace, was released by Discern and the Fondazione Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice late last year.

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