The Vatican has adopted a new investment strategy. It aims at applause, but is deeply hypocritical.
The Vatican has adopted a new investment strategy. The Catholic Church usually keeps a low profile when it comes to money matters, but the popes in Rome have always been aware, at least in this millennium, that their material wealth and Christian teachings do not always go well together.
Pope Francis has at least provided a little more insight during his tenure. But for the Vatican to even issue a press release on changes in investment strategy, as it did last week, is highly unusual. There is a reason for this: the communication aims to present the ailing church in a better light.
As of Sept. 1, there will be no more financial transactions that are „speculative in nature,“ Francis let it be known. Instead, they should be of a „productive nature“. The church leaders did not go into great detail, but shares in manufacturers of contraceptives, for example, should not find their way into the depot – and oil shares are not excluded, but rather no longer desired.
This may make sense from the church’s point of view, but with their new distinction, the pope and his followers have fundamentally misunderstood or possibly deliberately misinterpreted something: Shares are always both speculative and productive in nature. They are speculative because their purchase expresses the hope of a better future, i.e. rising prices. This idea is also contained in the Latin origin of the term speculation (roughly: „peering into the distance“), which no one should know better than the Latin experts in the Vatican.
At the same time, however, shares are also productive in nature, because by purchasing them, shareholders become co-owners of companies that produce things and thus, in the best case, increase the prosperity of society. To pretend that one can be had without the other can only be paraphrased – if you will pardon me, Your Holiness – in one word: It is profoundly hypocritical.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
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