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Pope Francis has put out a tweet against inequality which has conservative economic commentators fuming.
On April 28, Pope Francis posted to his Twitter feed: “Iniquitas radix malorum.”
In English this translates to “Inequality is the root of social evil”.
The papal tweet came only days after French economist Thomas Picketty’s bestseller “Capital in the Twenty-First Century?” sold out on Amazon.
Picketty posits that an unregulated free market creates an ever-widening wealth gap.
The papal tweet had nearly 10,000 retweets shortly after it was posted.
Writing for the Religion News Service, David Gibson noted that the papal tweet had drawn criticism from the libertarian, Catholic-run Acton Institute.
“Seriously, though, what was up with that tweet by @Pontifex? Has he traded the writings of Peter and Paul for Piketty?” tweeted the Acton Institute’s Joe Carter.
“Hate and apathy are the roots of social evil,” he added as a counterpoint.
“So, if we achieve maximum redistribution of resources, we will have eliminated ‘social evil’ , whatever that is?” wrote Rod Dreher at the American Conservative.
“Yes, and that’s why the Soviet Union was the Garden of Eden,” Dreher added.
Gibson noted that Catholic Culture editor Phil Lawler called the Pope’s tweet “a fairly radical statement” and as “a piece of economic analysis a very simplistic one”.
Lawler added that Francis probably doesn’t know what’s going onto his Twitter feed anyway, and the Pope does not speak English.
“So we can be sure those aren’t his exact words,” Lawler said, echoing previous conservative efforts to downplay or explain away some of Francis’ more provocative statements.
Yet Vatican officials have said that in fact Francis personally approves all of his tweets, and did so in this case as well, Gibson wrote.
Moreover, they noted that the tweet is taken directly from Francis’ exhortation from last year, Evangelii Gaudium (see paragraph 202).
In his exhortation, Pope Francis attacking the “idolatry of money” and calling on politicians to guarantee all citizens “dignified work, education and healthcare”.
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