In the preface, Turkson states: “We hope that world leaders and all people of good will find this reflection helpful. It is an exercise of responsibility not only towards the current, but above all towards future generations.”

Among the principal points made in the statement are:

1) In recent decades, increasingly unregulated monetary and financial markets generated wealth through the use of credit, leading to “an inflationary spiral that inevitably encountered a limit in the risk that credit institutions could accept” and contributed to the current financial meltdown. Furthermore, the  wealth produced by this has led to an increasing gap in income within and among nations and to grave consequences to the “real economy,” including unemployment.

2) While appreciating the good that technology has brought us, the council warns against viewing “all the problems that need tackling as exclusively technical in nature.” Today’s “technological ideology” is reducing people to things or numbers, abandoning ethics and human responsibility and recognizing only what is material.

3) The heart of the reflection builds on proposals made by Pope John XXIII and Pope Benedict XVI that the world needs “an authority over globalization.” Benedict calls it “a world political authority.” Contrary to what Corcoran sees as the Church’s “mad rush into global statism and authoritarianism,” almost half of this section is devoted to insisting this must be a gradual process, requiring a balance between the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity. It won’t be successful or effective unless it is the result of a consensus arising out of the collaboration of people and governments at all levels of global society.

4) Lastly, the document addresses the need for reform of the global financial and monetary system. It recognizes that the Bretton Woods institutions, including the International Monetary Fund, are no longer able to stabilize the world monetary system. Due to globalization and deregulation, in recent years the financial system has been outrunning the real economy of production and services instead of servicing it.

While the statement recognizes the progress being made by the G20 in calling countries to a new era of responsibility, it also recommends “a process of reflection and reforms” leading to a “commitment to create some form of global monetary management.” The council imagines a “central world bank” that “regulates the flow and system of monetary exchanges, as do the national central banks.” Ultimately, it recognizes the need for “an authority with universal jurisdiction… as a first stage in a longer effort by the global community to steer its institutions towards achieving the common good.”

In this process, the primacy of the spiritual and of ethics needs to be restored, as does the primacy of the political, which is responsible for the common good, over the economy and finance. This calls for upright lives and a freeing up of social imagination not afraid of new ideas.

To that end, the council suggests:

a) Establish an international tax on financial transactions, proportionate to the “complexity of operations.” This would facilitate the regulation of the flows of capital and foster social justice and solidarity, as well as provide the means to build up a global fund to “support the economies of the countries hit by crisis as well as the recovery of their monetary and financial systems”;

b) Recapitalize banks with public funds, making the support “conditional on … behaviours aimed at developing the ‘real economy’ ”;

c) Define clearly the separate domains of ordinary credit and investment banking.

For those thinking these are wild new ideas, they have in fact been discussed and promoted in think tanks and NGOs for years. What is new is that it makes more concrete suggestions for implementation than such statements usually do. The primary interest of the statement is less about the mechanics of a public authority than about the quality of the process by which we can arrive at it. The readers are urged to live out of the spirit of Pentecost rather than the spirit of Babel.

To attain the goal of a responsible global authority demands social engagement, coupled with the spiritual vision and ethics that can guide political decision-makers in shaping the required people-centred financial and economic institutions and technology to create a just human society with a sustainable ecology.

The press was caught by surprise when Turkson said that he supports the Wall Street Occupiers. With a careful reading of the document, that would not have been the case. 

(Fr. Ryan is special advisor to the Jesuit Forum for Social Faith and Justice.)