"An unfettered pursuit of money rules. That is the dung of the devil."

LOOKING AT THE NRC, I saw that one of my favorite religious journalists, Sean Michael Winters also wrote about Pope Francis's address.  The passage I took as the title of this post is worth the price of admission to all of this.

Pope Francis delivered another remarkable address last weekend when he spoke to the fourth World Meeting of Popular Movements. The gatherings of community organizers are like a meeting of theologians, only the theology is done with one's hands rather than with one's words. They seem to invite Francis to show the world that side of him that was previously known only to those he visited in the barrios of Buenos Aires.

The worldwide gatherings have occasioned some of the pope's strongest social teaching as witnessed in 2015 when he spoke at the second such gathering in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. There he said, "And behind all this pain, death and destruction there is the stench of what Basil of Caesarea, one of the church's first theologians, called 'the dung of the devil.' An unfettered pursuit of money rules. That is the dung of the devil."

Those words should be emblazoned over the entryway of every business school at a Catholic university, but they aren't.

This weekend, the pope's comments about the protests after the murder of George Floyd rightly captured the headlines. The pope said that he thought of those protests when he thinks about the good Samaritan.

"It is clear that this type of reaction against social, racial or macho injustice can be manipulated or exploited by political machinations or whatever, but the main thing is that, in that protest against this death, there was the collective Samaritan who is no fool! This movement did not pass by on the other side of the road when it saw the injury to human dignity caused by an abuse of power."

Call me an ultramontanist, but I am always impressed that this 84-year old Argentinian, who has never spent much time in this country, can identify and name an inflection point in U.S. culture that so many U.S. Catholics failed to even grapple with.