Catholic World Report: The Church and Capitalism

CWR conducts a wide-ranging interview with Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, president of the Institute for Works of Religion, known colloquially as the Vatican Bank.

Excerpt:

I have tried to study how the Western world ended up in this economic crisis from its inception, and have come to the conclusion that the causes are to be found in the decline of economic development, coupled with the increase in the cost of old-age pensions. The drop in the world’s gross domestic product was the result of the dramatic drop in the birth rate of the Western world.

The West, meaning Europe, the US, and Japan, has always been the driving force of the economy of the entire world, so there was bound to be an adverse effect on the world’s economy when the rate of population growth collapsed, going from 4-4.5 percent, which was the average rate up to the mid-1970s, to zero growth. This has entailed not just a reduced rate of development, but an increase in the fixed costs of society. When the replacement rate no longer kept up with the increasing burden of the aging population, the West found itself having to cope with unexpected costs. 

In the 1960s we were told that if we didn’t have children we would become rich. Now we see that the exact opposite has happened: we have become poorer. In those years neo-Malthusian theories were rampant, and people were persuaded that if the population continued to grow unchecked, by the year 2000 hundreds of millions of people in Asia would starve to death. Today we see that nations that were supposed to starve to death have become richer than we are and are the ones that support our economy, thanks to the growth of their populations.

But even then, in 1968, Pope Paul VI wrote in Humane Vitae that economic development could not avoid taking into consideration the value of man and therefore of life.

Photo of Ettore Gotti Tedeschi by CNS