File under "Surprising. Curious. 'How About That?' To Be Continued."

From Sandro Magister of Chiesa, this report:

Precisely when the G20 summit in Cannes was coming to its weak and uncertain conclusion, on that same Friday, November 4 at the Vatican, a smaller summit convened in the secretariat of state was doing damage control on the latest of many moments of confusion in the Roman curia.

In the hot seat was the document on the global financial crisis released ten days earlier by the pontifical council for justice and peace. A document that had disturbed many, inside and outside of the Vatican.

The secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, complained that he had not known about it until the last moment. And precisely for this reason he had called that meeting in the secretariat of state.

The conclusion of the summit was that this binding order would be transmitted to all of the offices of the curia: from that point on, nothing in writing would be released unless it had been inspected and authorized by the secretariat of state.

Magister later notes:

But more than these terrible grades, what has been even more irritating for many authoritative readers of the document of the pontifical council for justice and peace is the fact that it is in glaring contradiction with Benedict XVI's encyclical "Caritas in Veritate."

In the encyclical, pope Joseph Ratzinger does not in any way call for a "public authority with universal competency" over politics and the economy, that sort of great Leviathan (no telling who gets the throne, or how) so dear to the document of October 24.

In "Caritas in Veritate" the pope speaks more properly of the "governance" (meaning regulation, "moderamen" in Latin) of globalization, through subsidiary and polyarchic institutions. Nothing at all like a monocratic world government.

When one then delves into the analyses and specific proposals, it is also stunning how strong the divergence is between what is written in the document of the pontifical council for justice and peace and what has been maintained for some time in the financial commentaries published in "L'Osservatore Romano" by Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, president of the Institute for the Works of Religion, the Vatican bank, also chosen for his post by Cardinal Bertone.

For example, not even one line in the document attributes the global economic and financial crisis to the collapse in the birth rate and to the resulting higher and higher costs of population aging.

Read the entire piece, which includes Tedeschi's essay. Also see:

• Brumley & Olson Talk Faith, Politics, and Books | Mark Brumley & Carl E. Olson
• "Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of Global Public Authority" | Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (Vatican News)
• On Going the Way of World Government | Mark Brumley at Catholic World Report
• The Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace steps to the plate, swings, and ...? | Insight Scoop