Andrew Stuttaford
NR
With the papal visit nearly upon us, The Federalist is running a timely piece by First Things’ Maureen Mullarkey about the man that Speaker Boehner has invited to address the Congress:
The article is very well worth reading in full, not least for her description of a somewhat sinister rally in Buenos Aires in March attended by a disreputable crew that included Archbishop Sorondo of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, one of the Pope’s point men on climate change.
Mullarkey also discusses an article by Uki Goñi that appeared in the New York Times last month (I talked about it here), noting Francis’ instruction to an audience in Paraguay “not to yield to an economic model which is idolatrous, which needs to sacrifice human lives on the altar of money and profit.”
As Mullarkey explains:
The words are meant to inflame, not inform. They are an incitement to rage in search of an object. To what end demagogic rhetoric from the Successor of Peter? She is not the first, nor should she be the last to notice the violence that lurks within Francis’ rhetoric.
The heart of Mullarkey’s piece, however is this (my emphasis added):
Francis is attracted to state dominion and the economic populism that serves as rehearsal for it. His inclination points down a crooked historical road, past Juan Perón and the Argentine Church, to the disfiguring alliance between Mussolini and Pius XI. Perón was an attentive student of Italian fascism and the role of the state in structuring an economy. He studied Mussolini’s opportunistic courting of the Catholic Church, which lent legitimacy to Il Duce in exchange for institutional privileges.
Perón particularly admired Mussolini’s oratorical hold on the populace. Both Juan and Eva understood the enchantments of populism. A charismatic pair, they ruled more by dint of personality—personalismo—than democratic procedure. Ushers of an “option for the poor,” they glorified the lower classes and denigrated the wealthy. (This, while they amassed a huge personal fortune from the Eva Perón Welfare Foundation.)
When Francis speaks of “the people” as a revolutionary vanguard that “overflows the logical procedures of formal democracy,” he is lapsing toward that ecstatic Peronist vision of a Third Way—justicialismo. That the disposition and design of it ended in economic collapse and misery is nothing against the splendor of the mystique.
In his youth, Francis absorbed the myth but not its lessons. Chief among them is how much Argentina’s fiscal catastrophe owed to an extravagant welfare system that favored enforced wealth redistribution over development. Among the many factors of Argentina’s historic economic crisis, one cries for attention: Perón’s increasing reliance on redistributing income, not only between industries and occupations but between skilled and unskilled workers.
Narrowing wage differences between productive and non-productive segments of the economy proved lethal to the economic growth needed to achieve a durable prosperity. Beneficial to workers in the short term, Perón’s neglect of productivity—the engine of income creation—undermined possibilities for the long term. Eventually, popular expectations outran the money supply. The rest is ruin.
What Perón attempted in Argentina, Francis would effect globally with the aid of the United Nations and whatever “world authority” with enforcement powers can be conjured into existence. Climate change is the vehicle for what Vatican sweetheart Naomi Klein crowed was essentially an assault on democratic free enterprise and entrepreneurial culture. (“It’s not about carbon—it’s about capitalism.”)Read more at:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner
