One of the prospective candidates for the papacy is Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras. If he is elected the new pope, he will be the very first to have been christened with an Irish name. So how did the name Oscar migrate to Honduras? But that is not the purpose of this column, which is to consider the cardinal's remarks that "neo-liberal capitalism carries injustice and inequality in its genetic code". Of course, he means this as a form of condemnation, and his trenchant criticisms of that economic system were applauded by workers of Caritas, the Catholic charity.
Now if it were the primary purpose of "neo-liberal capitalism" to produce inequality and injustice, the cardinal would be right in his condemnation. The deliberate manufacture by the state of injustice and inequality as actual goals would be a very great evil indeed - just as would any comparable, state-imposed project to manufacture justice and equality throughout society. Millenarians have been endeavouring to do that for centuries, and every state-ordained attempt to create a truly equal and just society has ended with the guillotine, the gulag or the garrotte.
One of the architects of the millenarian fantasy of "equality" was Rousseau, he of the preposterous assertion that man is born free, but everywhere is in chains. Man is not born free, merely equal; equal in incontinence, helplessness, nakedness, dependency, and the certainty of imminent death without help from adults. And all attempts to re-create the equality of infancy have inevitably involved the eradication of the achievements of life, of individuality, of self-esteem and of personal achievement.
The concept is not complex, but seems very difficult for people to grasp, and even more to acknowledge and hail. Yet the celebration of inequality and injustice is a primary feature of popular culture everywhere, even as those two qualities are simultaneously reviled in our political culture. What are gossip columns and celebrity-worship about but the worship of inequality? Does the Sunday Times produce its annual list of the richest people of Britain and Ireland because people will boycott that edition of that newspaper, or because they will buy it? (Depressing to see that yet again I wasn't on it. I wonder why).
Of course, for some people to be vastly richer than others will seem an injustice to the bien-pensant - and in a stagnant, rentier or latifundia economy, so it would be. But inequality of income within an open, accountable democracy is really a hallmark of a vigorous economy. Of course, those who think societies should be organised on principles of egalitarian virtue rather than political economy will dispute that, as they once did in the late Pope's homeland, and all its neighbours; and what splendid successes they turned out to be! And of course, in this world of equals, the loyal Communist party member was always the coal-mine boss, and never the canary.
A quarter of a century ago, the political consensus in Ireland was that an economy based on high taxation and generous welfare state outlays created a more inclusive, cohesive society. The outcome was not so much income as outgoing: we spent most of the 1980s exporting our labour into economies where the much loathed principles of "neo-liberal capitalism" were practised, and Britain and the US accordingly prospered using the workforce we had educated. In our case, "social cohesion" and "inclusion" meant other countries socially and cohesively including the talent we had created into their economies.
We learnt our lesson, and we are now the model neo-liberal capitalist country in Europe - which is why at least 80,000 east Europeans and perhaps as many Chinese have come to find work here, and why we have growth rates that exceed just about anywhere else in the EU. But the curious thing about this central and irrefutable truth about the economy - that it is unjust, and it is unequal - is just how unpalatable it is even to declare it.
Is it unjust that Dermot Desmond or J.P. McManus or Tony O'Reilly or Tony Ryan are mildly richer than I am? Well, if you believe in equality, as Cardinal Rodriguez does, it clearly is. But since we don't live in a world of equality - and the very Hierarchy of the Catholic Church suggests we don't - then the way that free-market, neo-liberal economies work will ensure that some people will earn more than others. So be it.
But you cannot - as some politically motivated statisticians do - look at a booming economy and declare that the bottom 10 per cent must be living in poverty simply because they are in the bottom 10 per cent. Do you know how many people in Oscar's Honduras, or for that matter anywhere else in South America - where they still talk the pitiful third-way nonsense of liberation theology - would sail on balsa-wood rafts through shark-infested seas for the privilege of joining our bottom 10 per cent?
No doubt the name of Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga, scourge of neo-liberal capitalism, is on the lips of our many full-time, anti-capitalist third-worlders. He will be seen to represent some magical way to create a just society, in which everyone is living in a state-enforced economic harmony. Well, here's an inescapable truth: while we share this planet with China and the Chinese, and India and the Indians, the pope's words - Oscar's or otherwise - will not be heard by most of the world's peoples. And it is they, and not he, who will decide the rules on which our economies are run.