Financial Times
Pope Francis is giving his blessing to a coalition of large investors, companies, unions and foundations that are pledging to make capitalism less socially and environmentally damaging.
The Vatican will on Tuesday lend its name to the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, whose members must commit to measurable action to create a more equitable and trusted economic system, including adherence to the UN’s sustainable development goals.
The alliance marks an embrace of big business and finance by a head of the Roman Catholic Church who has warned of the idolatry of making profit one’s only purpose and called unfettered free markets the “dung of the devil”.
In a statement, Pope Francis said that a fair, trustworthy economic system that could address humanity’s biggest challenges was “urgently needed”. The group’s leaders had taken up the challenge of making capitalism “a more inclusive instrument for integral human wellbeing”, he said.
The council’s founding members, who will hold annual meetings with the Pope, include the managers of $10.5tn of assets, companies with a combined market capitalisation of more than $2tn and groups representing more than 200m workers around the world.
They include the leaders of companies including Bank of America, BP, EY, Johnson & Johnson, Salesforce and Visa. The investment groups Calpers, State Street and TIAA are also members, alongside the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, OECD secretary-general Angel Gurría and Mark Carney, the UN special envoy for climate finance.
“Neither the Vatican nor the CEOs that I know need another meeting. We need action and we need to reform capital markets,” Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the council’s founder, told the Financial Times. The Pope’s support was significant, she said, because “it’s a positive embrace of doing the right thing for capitalism, but it’s also a challenge”.
She said she had been confident that she could enlist leaders in business and finance to advance a more inclusive form of capitalism, but approached the Vatican because “we needed moral guidance”.
Pope Francis is backing a new movement to redefine capitalism as a force for goodThe Vatican will on Tuesday lend its name to the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, whose members must commit to measurable action to create a more equitable and trusted economic system, including adherence to the UN’s sustainable development goals.
The alliance marks an embrace of big business and finance by a head of the Roman Catholic Church who has warned of the idolatry of making profit one’s only purpose and called unfettered free markets the “dung of the devil”.
In a statement, Pope Francis said that a fair, trustworthy economic system that could address humanity’s biggest challenges was “urgently needed”. The group’s leaders had taken up the challenge of making capitalism “a more inclusive instrument for integral human wellbeing”, he said.
The council’s founding members, who will hold annual meetings with the Pope, include the managers of $10.5tn of assets, companies with a combined market capitalisation of more than $2tn and groups representing more than 200m workers around the world.
They include the leaders of companies including Bank of America, BP, EY, Johnson & Johnson, Salesforce and Visa. The investment groups Calpers, State Street and TIAA are also members, alongside the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, OECD secretary-general Angel Gurría and Mark Carney, the UN special envoy for climate finance.
“Neither the Vatican nor the CEOs that I know need another meeting. We need action and we need to reform capital markets,” Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the council’s founder, told the Financial Times. The Pope’s support was significant, she said, because “it’s a positive embrace of doing the right thing for capitalism, but it’s also a challenge”.
She said she had been confident that she could enlist leaders in business and finance to advance a more inclusive form of capitalism, but approached the Vatican because “we needed moral guidance”.
Capitalism has been condemned for many of the world’s evils, from massive income inequality to climate change. But self-interest wasn’t the core idea of the economic system first codified by Adam Smith in the 18th century. Avarice became coupled with capitalism in the 1980s, fueled largely by Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman’s theory that the singular goal of businesses is to maximize profits for shareholders. In short, it was the argument that “greed is good.”
Now a new global alliance, with Pope Francis as its moral leader, is pushing to rescue the heart of capitalism and reorient it as a force for social good...
Now a new global alliance, with Pope Francis as its moral leader, is pushing to rescue the heart of capitalism and reorient it as a force for social good...
Forester adds that though the leader of the Catholic Church serves as it main advisor, the coalition is firmly non-sectarian. “This is of course informed by the [Christian] gospel, but it speaks about what Aristotle was speaking about 300 years before Christ about humanity’s need to be responsible for each other,” says Forester, also known socially as “Lady Lynn,” by virtue of her marriage to a British knight. Her net worth was more than $600 million in 2016, according to Business Insider.
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