vatican calls for ‘central world bank’ to be set up

from belief blog: Against the backdrop of the European debt crisis and the birth of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Vatican on Monday called for a new “global public authority” to help reform the world’s finance and economic systems. New ideologies are “reducing the common good to economic, financial and technical questions, (placing) the future of democratic institutions themselves at risk,” said Roman Catholic Bishop Mario Toso at a Monday press conference. The document, called “Towards reforming the international financial and monetary systems in the context of a global public authority” quotes former Pope John Paul II in bemoaning the “idolatry of the market.” The document calls for a new global economic authority that could impose penalties on member states as “way of ensuring that they possess efficient markets,” Toso said. Some progressives embraced the Vatican’s call, arguing that it sounded many of the same themes as the Occupy Wall Street movement.