VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Harsh criticisms meted out by Pope Francis on free-market capitalism have sparked backlash from some fiscal conservatives and have led some people to call him “anti-capitalist” or even Marxist.

Ahead of his apostolic visit to the United States in September, some are bracing themselves for more criticisms from the pope, this time directed specifically at the U.S. culture and economy.

Joseph Kaboski, a professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame and president of CREDO, an international organization of Catholic economists, said, “As an individual, the pope probably views redistribution programs as a more effective way of tackling poverty than economic growth,” though “most mainstream economists would disagree.”

In addition, he said, the pope would probably “like more government involvement in the economy than many Americans would be comfortable with.”

However, Kaboski said he views the pope “as neither pro- nor anti-capitalist, but instead a measured critic.”

Kaboski said he is “confident Pope Francis finds much to commend” in U.S. economic life, such as private property, the entrepreneurial spirit, human creativity, technological advances, the way it creates jobs, income and products, and the way charities, government and the private sector pitch in to provide services to those in need.

At the same time, the pope “would also criticize the vast disparities in income and wealth … point to the poor in the inner cities, and argue that they are not fully participating in society,” Kaboski said. In addition, the pope would “point to the fact that the global economic crisis started in the U.S. financial sector and wound up shaking economies of many poor nations,” he said.

Kaboski said he is “very excited” about the pope “emphasizing the needs of the poor, but then if he talks about the roots of the financial crisis, it’s hard for me to fully go along with his confidence because academic economists are still debating the root causes of the Great Depression.”

“There are some statements (he makes) that can leave people scratching their heads,” he conceded.

However, it is important to keep in mind that the pope is “never teaching economics,” added Kaboski, who is also a consultant for the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development. Rather, the pope is “catechizing on how our Christian view ought to impact our view of a good economy and society.”

Christians are called to evaluate economic activity through the lens of their relationship with God and others, which must be central to their lives, he added.

In homilies and at various audiences throughout his two-year pontificate, Pope Francis has sought to raise awareness and inspire action that would narrow the imbalances between the world’s rich and poor. He has criticized the current global economy, which is says is based on a “throwaway culture” that encourages consumption and waste, and marginalizes or even discards people seen as economically unproductive.

His main criticisms of “unregulated capitalism” are spelled out in his apostolic exhortation, “The Joy of the Gospel,” which calls people to turn from the idolatry of money and indifference to the needs of the poor. The economy must be based on the primacy of the person, honor human dignity and care for the poor, especially by including them in the economy, he said.

Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment, “Laudato Si’, on Care for Our Common Home,” took up the same themes and extended his reflection to the devastating impact of the throwaway culture on the environment and on the poor who live closest to nature and rely most heavily on the land for their livelihood.

“This is related to what the pope has been talking about long before the environment: lifestyle,” said Greg Burke, senior communications adviser to the Vatican’s Secretariat of State. “This encyclical is as much about wealth and poverty as it is about the environment.”

The call to action in “Laudato Si'” is “not just taking out your trash,” Burke told Catholic News Service, “but how much trash … you produce because of rampant consumerism.”

Carolyn Woo, president of Catholic Relief Services and a former business professor, told CNS that the encyclical also includes a call to action for the business sector.

“Pope Francis actually invites business to be a part of the solution,” she said. “But it cannot be business as usual.” Rather, businesses need to shift out of “the same short-term thinking or the same obsession with short-term profits and disregard for people,” she said.

Practically, it means businesses would need to adopt the values of “solidarity and sustainability, oriented toward the common good and the true development of all peoples” and engage in more environmental impact assessments of their activities, she said at the Vatican’s official launch of the encyclical June 18.

Ralph McCloud, director of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, said cooperatives and other community-based businesses already operate according to the values of sustainability, solidarity and subsidiarity. He said they also are well-positioned to implement green initiatives and “look for green opportunities” that answer the needs of their local communities.

Pope Francis has praised cooperatives as a viable model that fights exclusion and puts people before profit.

“To speak of an economy that we can all share in is not very popular,” said McCloud. But CCHD shares the pope’s concern about how “a broken economy breaks families, communities and the human spirit,” he said. Furthermore, he said, the pope’s comments have been “an inspiration for low-income Americans.”

CCHD, an organization of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, educates for community-based development and funds community start-ups and cooperatives. Since its founding, CCHD has supported 99 cooperatives, including Golden Steps in Brooklyn, New York, which provides assistance to the elderly, and Opportunity Threads, a textile manufacturing co-op in Morganton, North Carolina.

Co-ops are increasingly understood as “a viable option in a capitalist economy,” he said. In addition to benefiting the families of co-op members, McCloud said co-ops in the U.S. promote the type of personal and community development the pope has called for, including greater participation in education and in the political process.

Kaboski pointed out that recent popes have often used the term “unbridled capitalism” to refer to an economy that is “indifferent to the poor and ideologically rejects any need to circumscribe the economy within a legal, political and cultural framework.”

“A market without rules and morals doesn’t remain free,” he continued. “What (the popes) are really arguing for is an economy that is truly free in the Catholic sense of the word free: an economy that more fully enables people to attain their own perfection.”

In line with the Catholic understanding of freedom, which involves discernment, Kaboski said, the economy requires “reflection and guidance” in order to “best fulfill its proper function, serving all the members of society.”

“The pope is not an economist and his job is not to (propose) concrete economic policies,” he said. “But he is called to be a prophetic voice in the world, praising the work of God and the collaboration of mankind where he sees it” and calling for repentance “where he sees serious social problems.”

— By Laura Ieraci, Catholic News Service.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Catholics and Buddhists from five U.S. cities have issued a joint statement expressing their commitment to work together to help lift their communities out of poverty and remedy other social ills in their neighborhoods.

This new, practical approach to interreligious dialogue marks a shift from the more traditional discussions aimed at mutual knowledge and understanding to a greater emphasis on planned collaboration for social projects.

“I see it as a reflection of a maturing of the relationship, where the dialogue shifts from verbal understanding to cooperation in community service,” said Ronald Kobata of the Buddhist Church of San Francisco.

Kobata was in Rome in late June for the first national meeting of U.S. Buddhist and Catholic leaders.

The June 22-27 dialogue included 23 Buddhists and 23 Catholics, mostly clerics involved in interreligious dialogue or social action, from San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C. The theme was “Suffering, Liberation and Fraternity.” The local archdioceses supported the dialogue. They met in Castel Gandolfo, just outside of Rome.

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The meeting was sponsored by the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs. The dialogue was held in Italy upon the invitation of the council, whose members thought the context would help to establish “a firm footing” for the dialogue, said Anthony Cirelli, associate director of the USCCB secretariat.

Cirelli said this meeting was significant because previous Catholic-Buddhist dialogues were regional and focused more on “theological exchange.”

But for Kobata, interreligious collaboration in the area of social justice is not new. He said his faith community has been involved already in “providing dinners at homeless shelters” in cooperation with the San Francisco Interfaith Council.

“Moving from talking about what we’d like to do, to doing what we can to promote the well-being of our communities, we can see that compassion is not the monopoly of any faith tradition,” said Kobata. “As the saying goes, ‘People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care.'”

Cirelli said Buddhists and Catholics share “much common ground” in their concern to address the “relational suffering” people endure by promoting “sound relationships.”

“Both the Buddhist and the Catholic traditions place much emphasis on extending mercy and compassion to the other,” he said.

Buddhists, for whom mercy is “a supreme priority,” said Cirelli, have taken note that mercy is being given priority by Pope Francis as well, namely in his preaching and teachings and in his proclamation of the upcoming Year of Mercy.

“This naturally translates into a common thread for more intentional collaboration and engagement between Catholics and Buddhists,” he said.

Pope Francis met with members of the U.S. Buddhist-Catholic dialogue at the Vatican June 24.

In his message, he said their efforts “are seeds of peace and fraternity” in “this historic time, so wounded by war and hatred.”

Though the pope’s discourse was short, he took time to greet each participant and exchange a few words with them.

Cirelli said participants felt encouraged by their meeting with the pope.

“I learned right away from the Buddhist leaders that the attention the Holy Father showed them by calling for this audience meant that he was serious about dialogue,” said Cirelli.

Kobata confirmed the importance of the papal audience.

“My impressions are that Pope Francis’ leadership, sincerity and dedication to promoting interfaith cooperation have inspired the participants in this dialogue to bring our communities together in cooperative efforts to promote peace, alleviate suffering, and live responsibly with our natural environment,” Kobata said.

Cirelli said dialogue participants agreed on the importance of recognizing the “brokenness of human relationships” and of “intentional dialogue for bringing healing.” They also agreed that interreligious dialogue can be more effective when academic dialogue at a national level is complemented by grass-roots social action at the local level.

Participants issued a joint statement at the meeting’s conclusion, identifying areas for collaboration and social action projects, such as climate change, youth outreach, prison ministry, restorative justice, affordable housing, and resources for migrants and the homeless.

— By Laura Ieraci, Catholic News Service.

WASHINGTON (CNS) — In another in a series of bitterly divided end-of-term cases, the Supreme Court June 29 upheld the execution protocol used by Oklahoma and several other states.

In a 5-4 ruling, Justice Samuel Alito upheld lower courts that said the use of the drug midazolam in lethal injection does not violate Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

The majority opinion noted that it has been previously established multiple times that capital punishment is constitutional and only delved into whether the claims by Oklahoma death-row inmates that the effects of the drugs used in lethal injection are unnecessarily painful. Among the reasons Alito cited in upholding lower courts were that “the prisoners failed to identify a known and available alternative method of execution that entails a lesser risk of pain.”

According to the “Catechism of the Catholic Church,” the Church does not exclude the use of capital punishment, assuming the offender’s identity and resposiblity are certain, but only “when this is the only practicable way to defend the lives of human beings effectively against the aggressor” (2267).

However, quoting St. John Paul II’s “Evangelium Vitae,” “If, instead, bloodless means are sufficient to defend against the aggressor and to protect the safety of persons, public authority should limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person. Today, in fact, given the means at the State’s disposal to effectively repress crime by rendering inoffensive the one who has committed it, without depriving him definitively of the possibility of redeeming himself, cases of absolute necessity for suppression of the offender ‘today … are very rare, if not practically non-existent.’”

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas each filed concurring opinions with the majority. Alito’s majority ruling also was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Two of the four justices who disagreed with Alito each wrote a dissenting opinion, including one in which Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg called for briefings on whether the death penalty itself ought to be ruled unconstitutional. “I believe it highly likely that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment,” Breyer wrote. “At the very least, the court should call for full briefing on the basic question.”

In his majority ruling, Alito devoted a great deal of discussion to the evidence presented about whether midazolam fails to act sufficiently as a sedative to prevent inmates being executed from suffering an undue amount of pain. The cases arose after several cases like that of Clayton Lockett. At his April 2014 execution, he writhed in pain for 40 minutes before dying of apparent heart failure.

Alito recounted the circumstances leading to the use of midazolam, which has become an alternative for other drugs, whose manufacturers refuse to supply them for use in executions. He also went into graphic detail about the murders committed by the death-row inmates who sued.

In his concurrence and pointed disagreement with Breyer, Thomas also described brutal crimes that landed people on death row. It was the third criminal justice case in the last weeks of the term in which Thomas has made a point of writing about severe sentences being necessary because of the pain inflicted on crime victims and their families.

— By Patricia Zapor