The Pope is the 1%

It has recently come to my attention that the Pope has ostensibly lent his sneering condescension to the message of a movement that could only be worse off for having him- his latest encyclical on other peoples' economic misconduct, released on Monday, follows up on the 2009 Caritas in Veritae with some harsh words for other bloated economic enterprises:

[Ratzinger] decried "corruption and illegality" among economic and political elites in both rich and poor countries. He told financiers they must rediscover the ethical foundation of their activity and stop abusing savers. He wants a radical rethinking of economics so that it is guided not simply by profits but by "an ethics which is people-centered."

Benedict notes that economic "inequalities are on the increase" across the globe. He does not accept the trickle-down theory, which says that all boats will rise with the economic tide. Benedict condemns the "scandal of glaring inequalities" and sees a role for government in the redistribution of wealth.

I have mixed feelings about Occupy Wall Street. Economic inequality and state favoritism towards the rich is indisputably out of control in the United States, but when I swung by Occupy Boston a couple of weekends ago, I was alarmed and annoyed by the number of white people with dreadlocks waving around Reddit-meme signs and generally not knowing what was really going on. The sincere core of the movement is where my loyalty lies, and I must heartily disagree with Father Reese when he writes that the "people in [Occupy Wall Street] could do a lot worse than to study what the pope has said about the economy." Quite the contrary- there is no worse role model for economic justice than the Pope. The Pope and his Church run a massively profitable enterprise that preys upon the poor and that has historically time and again proven its utter inability to interact with the poor in a meaningful way outside of supporting their enemies and worsening their conditions.

Above I say that the Pope attacks "other" peoples' economic misconduct" and "other" bloated economic enterprises because foremost in my mind in terms of profoundly unethical economic hoarding and exploitation is the Pope's institution. The Pope is here decrying "glaring inequalities" from his city-sized golden palace that has no independent financial oversight, has always been allied with economically exploitative regimes, that is itself an economically exploitative regime, and that does little for the poor other than encouraging them to breed and become Catholic.

Lets start with the Pope himself. His office is sustained by a global tax on Catholics known as "Peter's Pence," which is the fund specifically designated for sustaining the vast operating expenses of Vatican City and the Pope himself, including his numerous palatial vacation homes across Europe, his private jets, even the maintenance for his gold-embossed clothing and private doctors. At last count, Peter's Pence was at nine figures. This tax is levied on all Catholics with no exception to their obligations depending on the wealth of those Catholics- and unlike states, which merely wield temporal power over their subjects, the Pope has the backing of an eternity in the furnace with which to squeeze money from his devotees.

The historical record on Catholic outreach to the poor speaks for itself. Mother Theresa, whose entire life and career amount to an elaborate con job in my eyes, raised as much as fifty million dollars under the ruse of collecting money for the poor in her life, and spent most of it building convents and Catholic schools in India and spending just enough on her "home for the dying" to give everyone in it unwashed cots, a single communal toilet, and rosary beads. Catholic adoption services around the United States and elsewhere follow this general pattern of prioritizing Church needs over the poor by utterly abandoning their commitments to impoverished children in orphanages when the horrifying specter of adopting those children out to gay couples rears its head.

This is a centuries-old technique. Catholic schools in the East did indeed provide a fair amount of sustenance for the poor- so long as they became tithing converts, joining schools that were built and protected by imperialist Catholic governments in Europe to expedite the destruction of the Church's victim cultures. Catholic banners flew over the plundering genocidal maniacs who mingled gold and blood together in South America for centuries before declaring themselves the rightful governments in those places.

Our own century saw the Church radically violate its own internal theological and hermeneutic techniques in a mad scramble to suppress what was seen as the Marxist influence on Liberation Theology, which is the only uniquely grassroots theology of any widespread acceptance that I'm aware of in human history. Built by poor laypeople in South America and their soon-to-be-declared heretical priests, this kind of theology begged the Church to fulfill its own putative fealty to the man who said "give everything you have to the poor." Against this theology the Church leveled every mind it had without regard to the Church's own normal processes for evaluating and incorporating new Catholic theologies.

They scarcely had to, however, since the military force used against the poor by Church-backed dictatorships from South America to Spain to Africa was more than enough to stamp out any attempts to take seriously Jesus's love for the poor. From Noriega to Franco to the Rwandan Genocide, anything that protected both dominant economic interests and Church interests (which historically have proven to be identical) was on the Church's good-guys list.

While attacking others for their "economic misconduct," the Pope shields all of his finances and his Church's from legitimate secular authorities, doling out the occasional large sum to buy the forgiveness of those children tortured by the insatiable lusts of the boy-crazed Catholic priesthood but otherwise doing little for the poor. Their approach to poverty is to perpetuate poverty: where the undisputed facts of history show that the key to undermining poverty is to give women control over their own reproduction, the Church crusades against condoms and abortion with a zeal matched only by its loathing of homosexuality and far dwarfing its pitifully sectarian attempts at legitimate charity.

The struggle against the bottomless greed of America's wealthiest has nothing to learn from the hypocritical heir of two thousand years of cruel, cynical exploitation. The doting elder child of a lengthy legacy of greed and hoarding is nothing more than a reminder that the rich like to look poor. Your friends in college with rich parents were embarrassed to say so because their lives don't seem as authentic. The white people with dreadlocks occupying Wall Street are embarrassed to tell you about their trust funds because it makes them seem less sincere in the movement. The Pope is just another one of these spoiled brats trying to distance himself from the temporarily unpopular upper class, whose allegiance he will cling to for money and in whose wallets lay the future of his Church and its political affiliations.

At least the rich college students cluttering up Occupy Wall Street have their hearts in the right place. At least they're trying. What's the Pope's tact? Take shots at other rich people from a golden palace, attack other people who misuse and misappropriate their funds, attack others for their greed and their exploitative policies, while himself ministering over cartoonishly oversized amounts of wealth, misusing and misappropriating said vast wealth, while hounding his own followers for their money, exploiting their fears for donations and buying the loyalty of the dictators who themselves exploit, oppress, and murder the poor.

The Church spent the 20th century purging itself of leftism, and now they're ashamed to admit it. Own up, Pope- you are the 1%, and the people are not buying your bullshit.