Mercy and financial science: while Draghi cuts interest rates, Bergoglio remits sins. Fiscal bonds and spiritual obligations, Mario and Francesco are rehabilitating the capitalist world and aiming for growth.
In the beginning there was European Central Bank President Mario Draghi and quantitative easing (QE), the Federal Reserve’s strategies and the strategic reserve of the faithful, which the Church bestows in times of crisis and is known the world over as indulgence. It is the type of chronological coincidence that will delight historians when centuries from now they construct portraits of the times and couch them in metaphor.
In the future, the Jubilee of Mercy will be viewed as a geopolitical initiative both material and spiritual, implemented by today’s society to get through its current impasse. As a new beginning after the many false starts of the millennium, what with the collapses of the Twin Towers and Wall Street, right up to the piecemeal Third World War that officially began to the notes of machinegun fire and heavy metal riffs on ‘Bataclan night’.
Money and absolution, the forgiveness of debt and sin have never been so in step and so present within the collective imagination in a joint effort to lift the stock exchange and psyches, markets and souls, which according to the dictates of economists are linked by a thread that is invisible yet ever so real and crucial.
It is as if God and Mammon, the two true powers that will obscure politics in times to come, have reached a truce in the folds of their ongoing struggle, both exercising the right to release rather than bind. As such, the Jubilee must be considered within a broader context and can legitimately, through a scientific and non-hyperbolic expansion of our vocabulary, be referred to as the Roman Catholic Church’s version of quantitative easing.
A praiseworthy example of this striking, somewhat rash yet not entirely groundless lexical parallel is found in the final document of last October’s synod. The assembly of bishops outlined, on the suggestion of the pope, the mainstays of an ‘ecclesiastic Maastricht Treaty’ that will determine the possible evolutions of the church’s teachings: a ‘Fiscal Compact’ on family ethics that establishes the margin for deviation from the standard – or ‘virtuous’ – model, a definition that applies both in Brussels and Rome when describing the absence of debt or sin.
From a position that primarily targeted more anomalous situations, to bring them out in the open and back into the fold of a norm that was duly broadened and gradually eased, we have instead moved to the signing of an actual stability treaty, thus relieving a preoccupation – some might call it an obsession – that troubles both the European Community bureaucracy and the church hierarchy.
For example, the process that allows remarried divorcees, on a case-by-case basis, to be readmitted to Holy Communion strangely resembles the procedure that has entitled Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’ Greece to remain in communion with the euro and receive the support of the European Stability Mechanism. Just as Athens had to stand before an internal forum to justify its ideological change of heart and accept the assessments of the Troika, so couples in ‘irregular’ situations are required to undertake a “path of accompaniment and discernment”, both discreet and concrete, overseen by their confessor.
While on paper the church’s formal constitution does not waver, restricting flexibility and thus closely mimicking the eurozone, the Jubilee represents a free zone, an override in the implementation of the material constitution that effectively introduces the largest ‘quantitative easing’ of precept and sin in Catholicism’s 2,000-year history. It is a powerful gust of fresh air, a shoulder charge even, compared to the mild draughts and chinks opened up by the synod, replete with theoretical nit-picking and rhetorical dissertations, as Father Antonio Spadaro, editor of Civiltà Cattolica and authorised interpreter of papal dispositions, clearly indicated in one of his articles.
As the European Central Bank (ECB) changes its timeworn practices, abandons its non-inflationary path and invests 60 billion euros a month in QE, protracting the duration of the massive buy-out and extending it to the bonds of territorial institutions, so Pope Francis has decentralised the Holy Year in all cathedrals, opening as many doors, and sending forth a task force of missionaries empowered to relieve even the most toxic assets because “no one can be excluded from the mercy of God”.
Bank branches and sacred portals, doctrinal fonts and cash liquidity, depositum fidei and bank deposits. While Draghi lowers already-negative interest rates and dissuades banks from parking their cash in the ECB in order not to lose more money, Pope Francis cuts to the chase a priori, pushing the Church beyond itself so that it doesn’t disown and lose its identity, tout court.
Careful analysis shows that great democratic revolutions are triggered by tax disputes, by the dialectic that ensues between sovereigns and aristocracies on the convenience, and conviction, to impose or relieve taxes. Absolutions or restrictions are introduced, depending on circumstances, to make life easier for subjects, or the faithful, and expand the range of inclusion – not just ecclesiastically speaking. Which lead to inevitable repercussions on the life and behaviour of the global village.
Over ten years and two conclaves (2005 and 2015), the Vatican theocracy has experimented with two divergent EU programmes, just like a mature alternating democracy. In a highly evocative and weighty analogy, Jorge Bergoglio is to Joseph Ratzinger as suave hardliner Jens Weidmann, the guru of the German Federal Bank and defender of the Nibelung treasure, is to Mario Draghi, who 50 years ago soared from the nest of a Roman Jesuit high school to embark on a career imprinted with a Pindaric predilection for openings, both mental and winged, inherited from the Society of Jesus.
This is nothing new beneath the skies of the Eternal City and earthly cities, amid the toing and froing of a pendulum whose motion determines and unites, much more than we believe, the Chair of St. Peter with many a chair in economic history – for example, Benedictine monks vs. Ignatian reducciones; ora et labora vs. liberation theology; Advent resolutions vs. Keynesian prophecies; Mittel-European ‘centre halves’ vs. South American ‘dribblers’.
In one corner we have a ‘homeopathic’ cure that deliberately, in its respective works and thinking, takes doses of inflation or relativism, though never overdosing and trusting in the long run that it can make the most of society’s vital and often anarchic energy. In the other corner is the ‘antibiotic’ reaction that avoids the tiniest contagion and entrenches itself in the sterile chambers of catechisms and monetarisms, dreading unforeseeable outcomes and safeguarding the integrity of the norm – in coin as much as doctrine.
Such is the geoeconomic context of the Extraordinary Jubilee, with mercy being bandied about like a growth factor that is promptly included in books on the science of economics, where ascetic pilgrims intersect with ascending flow charts.
After all, since he proclaimed “good evening” on the night of his election, Pope Francis has proved himself to be the most authoritative dispenser of the intangible, albeit essential, asset of hope, without which there can be no recovery and no development. In other words, the pope who like none before him stands as a forceful enemy and chastiser of capitalism also appears to be its main circumstantial ally and effective supporter. He props it up and corrects it, in its chronic confusions and cyclical contortions, with a unique (and also particularly Jesuit) capacity for connecting production mechanisms with divine machinations.
This beguiling and bivalent paradox opens up unchartered paths of contemplation, unhinging commonplace ideas about Bergoglio and forcing political analysts to cross the threshold of the Holy Door with him to try and solve the enigma and provide an account of the continuing journey.
In the beginning there was European Central Bank President Mario Draghi and quantitative easing (QE), the Federal Reserve’s strategies and the strategic reserve of the faithful, which the Church bestows in times of crisis and is known the world over as indulgence. It is the type of chronological coincidence that will delight historians when centuries from now they construct portraits of the times and couch them in metaphor.
In the future, the Jubilee of Mercy will be viewed as a geopolitical initiative both material and spiritual, implemented by today’s society to get through its current impasse. As a new beginning after the many false starts of the millennium, what with the collapses of the Twin Towers and Wall Street, right up to the piecemeal Third World War that officially began to the notes of machinegun fire and heavy metal riffs on ‘Bataclan night’.
