“Many of you have been stripped by this savage world that does not give employment, that does not help, that does not care if there are children in the world who are dying of hunger, does not care if so many families have nothing to eat.”
Pope Francis
“Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills."
"Naive trust in those wielding economic power"
"The Golden Calf"
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_calf
The intractable difficulty with "unjust economic structures" is that there is no personal responsibility in them.
Rather, "unjust economic structures" are Capitalism's trump card, keeping people in perpetual oppression by depersonalizing them by depersonalizing them automatically by systems having no personal component.
Capitalist sin is essentially depersonalized, programmatic, systematic and automatic.
As Woodrow Wilson observed: "The truth is we are all caught in an economic system which is heartless."
Capitalist Sin "just happens"... because it was designed to "just happen"... a gift of self-exculpation supplied by early generations of modern capitalists who thus absolved all subsequent generations of any moral (or political) responsibility.
Structural Sin authorizes "the Pilate in each of us" to wash our hands, to turn our back on the crucifixion of the poor, and then sleep well at the end of long feasting.
Currently, Christian Theology -- based on the medieval template of each individual's personal relationship with God -- includes no heuristic, no epistemological method for grasping the pervasive nature of overarching and subtending structural sin for which "I am not responsible."
The automatic structures of sin enable each of us to proclaim -- quite plausibly and with clear conscience -- that "it is out of my hands."
In Spanish, a common legal rendition of "corporation" is "sociedad anonima" - an "anonymous society." Since "no one" dwells within the anonymous"corporate shell," there is no one to blame, no one to hold responsible; indeed no personal conscience that might be panged into "changing."
The structures are what they are - over there, far away, beyond the reach of human responsibility.
Immutable.
Perhaps the Supreme Court's recent definition of "corporations as persons" lays the foundation for a new jurisprudence that holds formerly "impersonal" corporate structures personally responsible.
Where there are "persons," moral and legal responsibility can be assigned to those persons.
Where there is only clockwork mechanism and anonymous corporate fictions -- set in motion by systematic decisions made in the distant past -- there is no more moral responsibility than my car "experiences" when I leave it running at curbside to help my wife load groceries.
It would be such sweet irony if Citizens United blew up in Capitalism's face.
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
“Many of you have been stripped by this savage world that does not give employment, that does not help, that does not care if there are children in the world who are dying of hunger, does not care if so many families have nothing to eat.”
- ***To understand religion across its full spectrum of virtue and vice, it is helpful to remember that Pharisees thrive in every generation.
"Yeshua Excoriates Fellow Pharisees"
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