Vatican issues document on global financial reform

(October 24, 2011) Seeking to provide moral and ethical guidelines to help the world that is grappling with financial and economic turmoil, the Vatican on Monday issued a document urging a reform of the global financial system. The document, entitled “Towards Reforming The International Financial And Monetary Systems In The Context Of Global Public Authority” was released at a press conference by Cardinal Peter Turkson, the president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. In the preface to the document, the Ghanian cardinal noted that the economic and financial crisis which the world is going through, calls everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural and moral values at the basis of social coexistence. The cardinal referred to the 1967 social encyclical ‘Populorum Progressio’, or “The Development of Peoples” where Pope Paul VI pronounces the types of relationship between the Church and the world, based on the sacredness of human dignity and the search for common good. The Vatican official said that it is around these two pivotal points that the entire document of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace is woven. According to the council, “the common good of mankind and the future itself are at stake” now with over a billion people living with little more than one dollar a day. Inequalities have hugely increased across the world, thus fuelling tension and massive migratory flows. Among the key proposals made by the Vatican’s Justice and Peace council are establishing an international public authority, “taxing financial transactions at fair tax rates” and recapitalising the banks, not least “with public funds” to support real economy. Given the current global financial and economic crisis that “has revealed selfish behaviours, collective greediness and a large-scale hoarding of goods,” the Pontifical Council proposed “the establishment of an international public authority serving the common good” as it is “the only horizon that is compatible with the new reality of our time.”