Pope Francis has called for more regulation of financial markets and rejected suggestions that his criticisms of unbridled capitalism smack of Marxism.
“Markets and financial speculation cannot enjoy absolute autonomy,” he said in an interview published in La Stampa newspaper yesterday, calling for greater ethics in the economy and a better distribution of the earth’s resources.
“We cannot wait any longer to resolve the structural causes of poverty in order to cure our society of an illness that can only lead to new crises,” he said.
Conservative Catholics, particularly in the United States, have criticised some of his past pronouncements on the economy, with several openly calling him a Marxist. But the Argentine Pope said he was just stating Church teachings.
“If I repeat some sermons by the first fathers of the Church in the second or third centuries about how the poor must be treated, some would accuse me of preaching a Marxist homily,” he said. “The New Testament does not condemn wealth but the idolatry of wealth.”
He has condemned huge salaries and bonuses, calling them symptoms of an economy based on greed and also said speculation in food commodities was undermining the global fight against poverty and hunger.
The New Testament does not condemn wealth but the idolatry of wealth
The interview is from a chapter of an Italian book called Pope Francis: This Economy Kills, to be published this week.
Meanwhile, as Pope Francis baptised 33 infants in the Sistine Chapel yesterday, he told the mothers to feel free to breastfeed them if they cried or were hungry.
“You mothers give your children milk and even now, if they cry because they are hungry, breastfeed them, don’t worry,” he said, departing from his prepared text.
The written text of his homily had the phrase “give them milk,” but he changed it to use the Italian term “allattateli”, which means “breastfeed them,” and added that they should not hesitate.
As the 20 girls and 13 boys in the room famous for Michelangelo’s frescoes cried, Pope Francis asked his listeners to remember poor mothers around the world, “too many, unfortunately, who cant give food to their children”.
Even before he read the homily, at least one mother was seen breastfeeding, perhaps recalling that the Pope had used similar words to make mothers feel at ease before.
Baptism is the sacrament at which infants or converts are initiated into the Christian faith. Pope Francis poured water on the foreheads of the infants as part of the ritual.
The Sistine Chapel, which Michelangelo painted in the 16th century, is the room where cardinals elect popes in secret conclaves.
Pope Francis was elected the first non-European pope in 1,300 there on March 13, 2013.