Home >> Global Organizations >> Vatican and Churches

     Email   Print 

Will Next Pope Come From The Third World?

John Mangun - 4/10/2005

Pope John Paul II begins his eternal rest and the world ponders who will be his successor. Virtually within hours of his death, commentators in every language raised the question and contemplated the possibility of the papacy held by someone from the Third World. They deliberated that a man of color, a man of poverty, a man from a 'marginalized' country would bring a new perspective to the Roman Catholic Church. In their enthusiasm for change, these pundits ignored the fact that the chair of the Holy Father has been occupied by a black man, by many poor men who remained poor even through their rise in the Church, and that several Popes came from a country which did not enjoy major economic and political status on the world scene.

Often through the days long coverage of this historical event, repeated comments were made that the Church ought to choose a man who did not whole heartedly embrace a free economic system. If not outright hostile to a free market and capitalistic economy, at least he should be very skeptical and cautious.

It is astonishing to think that anyone who holds the papacy, and who understands the human suffering that poverty brings, would embrace any economic system that does not foster the greatest opportunity for individual wealth building. No one who honestly examines economic history for the last five hundred years could come to any conclusion other than that a free and open economic system creates the highest standard of living for the greatest number of people.

Every nation and its citizens that existed under a closed and controlled economic environment, whether communism, socialism, colonialism, National Socialism, or feudalism lived a more destitute life than those under a free market economy. To be sure, government must maintain and enforce certain regulatory power to curtail economic abuses. However, to support any of these "isms" of failed economic theory is to keep people poor. It is historically ironic to mention that the period of greatest power of the Church occurred during feudal times when the mass of humanity in its areas of dominance experienced the most poverty.

For the Church to hold to any economic philosophy that stifles man's God given creativity, determination, and entrepreneurship runs even against the teachings of the foundation of Christianity found in the Gospels of the Bible.

In the teaching commonly known as the parable of the talents, Jesus of Nazareth taught that people have the obligation to make the most of the assets they have been entrusted with handling. The person who uses his skills and ability most wisely is supposed to get greater financial rewards according to Christian philosophy. The parable of the vineyard workers teaches Christians that the boss has the authority to determine salaries of the workers and that those salaries are not always and should not be the same. That idea does not sit well with the economic doctrine of socialism, where everyone in the workplace is treated the same regardless of effort or productivity. In the parable of the hidden treasure, a man finds a great wealth buried in a field and then goes and buys the field without telling anyone about his discovery. He keeps all the wealth for himself, a very capitalistic viewpoint.

For practical purposes, you would think that a Pope would look at those nations that have adopted a strong secular view and virtually ignored the Church, as the economic model not to welcome. Socialist, anti-capitalist France was once the "elder sister of the Church". Now the Catholic Church in France is for old people and other senile fools. The Church is only growing in those nations that are firmly committed to economic individual self-determination. Catholicism is not healthy in those countries where the people expect the state and government to be the engine of wealth creation.

It would be good for the Church and perhaps beneficial for the world if the next spiritual leader of one billion people was a product of the Third World. These countries deserve that recognition not only for their place and importance in the global future but for their faithfulness to the Catholic Church. It was in Manila, not Paris or New York, where John Paul II spoke to four million people at a Mass. We may live in a nation of too much poverty but we are neither helpless nor hopeless, and the Third World has not moved towards the secularism that has drained and depleted the vibrancy from and truly threatens the future of the Church.

Note this also. It is not the economic system of a free market that has kept the Third World from achieving prosperity and general wealth creation. As in the Philippines, most of the third World is poor because of government abuses and the wickedness and immorality of those governments. Perhaps a Third World Pope, who understands for having lived under that kind of government, could provide the leadership necessary to effect changes. Pope John Paul II was an architect of the defeat of Soviet communism because he knew it all too well.