Tuesday, November 25, 2008
A reflection by the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster
Our common bond: a fragile global financial system - Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor
Within a few weeks what began as a “credit crunch” turned into a financial crisis and has now become a global recession. Religious leaders are not normally economists. However, they cannot ignore the damaging human consequences of the rise and fall of economic indicators. Behind the gloomy headlines are cities, neighbourhoods, families, individuals deeply affected by the economic breakdown; and the hardest hit will be the poor: those already struggling to survive.
Christians have a paramount concern for the poor. This “preferential option for the poor” is a constant theme in Catholic social teaching. The biblical concept of justice implies that the justice of a community is measured by how it treats the powerless. And a “globalised” world, must consider not only the poor and marginalised in the West, but also the eight hundred million people outside it who are living in absolute poverty, together with the half a billion who are chronically hungry. It is right for religious leaders to insist that in formulating our economic and commercial policies we must take full account of their implications for the poor, both at home and in the rest of the world. Any new dispensation of world economy which does not address the extreme marginalisation of rich and poor does not merit consideration.
The Church neither condemns the market economy nor canonises it. Christians recognise that the market, like money itself, is an essential element in the conduct of human affairs. But the laws by which it operates are not blind. They follow from and can be moderated by human actions and decisions. So those who operate the market have an obligation to promote the common good and to safeguard against those most adept at exploiting it. Governments and regulators have a part in this, but all of us not only bankers, business leaders and financiers must consider the moral implications of what we are doing and whether we are contributing, in however small a way, to promoting the common good and not to the perpetration of injustice. There is nothing immoral in wanting to be prosperous. But are economic growth and ever-increasing material prosperity the sole criteria of a healthy or successful society? Although the majority of people in the developed world are better off financially than they were 40 years ago, has this brought social, emotional and spiritual well-being?
Today’s common bond appears to be a shared uneasiness with the present state of society, which clearly is a society not at ease with itself since no-one can escape the consequences of a fragile global financial system that binds us all together.
It seems that the present crisis may be a kairos: an opportunity for stocktaking about what we understand by the common good; about what national or social success means; about what it means to be human. It is an opportunity to recognise that ensuring social justice cannot be left to governments, politicians and the market, but depends on our day to day decisions and on the goals we set.