The Vatican is receiving a barrage of criticism after reporting that it joined the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, among other large transnational corporations, to push for “inclusive capitalism”.
The criticism focuses on pointing out that talking about an inclusive capitalism is simply a face-lift from capitalism as usual, characterized by deification of money and disregard for life, communities and nature.
The public manifesto of the Brazilian Articulation for the Economy of Francis and Clare, on the launch of the “Council for Inclusive Capitalism with the Vatican”, is one of the most concerned about this alliance:
The contradiction and the strangeness lie on the fact that corporations of exponential profits, big global players of capitalist accumulation, reproduction, concentration and centralization, meet themselves with the Vatican allegedly intending to reduce inequality and exclusion, while pulling the flag for the “salvation of capitalism.”
For us, it is curious to realize that, in order to combat and overcome socio economic and environmental injustices, this Council proposes the flag for the salvation of a system that, paradoxically, be capitalist and, at the same time, “inclusive”.
The Economy of Francis was received by the whole world as a result of all that has been appointed by the Magisterium of Pope Francis himself on these issues. He himself has already denounced that “this current economy kills” (EG, n. 53), because “the profits of many grow exponentially, while those of the majority are located farther and farther from well-being” (EG, n. 56). In fact, the capitalist system is, in its essence, accumulative and concentrating; therefore, even if its agents “do not want to”, it generates inequality and exclusion, in addition to destroying nature.
