Benedict XVI and Jonathan Sacks will be having a private meeting in the Vatican. Quite interesting to see how the head of Christianity and the head of Jewish Communities in the Commonwealth share such a similar vision. Is it a signal of the resurgence of religions in the public sphere?

Benedict XVI truly believes on the importance of the role of religions in the public sphere. Since the beginning of his pontificate, interreligious meetings had always been scheduled in his international trips agenda. The proposal made by the Pope is the one of a sort of alliance among religions, to get religious thought back in the public sphere. «Meetings of this sort – Benedict XVI remarked the day after the 27th of October meeting in Assisi –  are necessarily exceptional and infrequent, yet they are a vivid expression of the fact that every day, throughout our world, people of different religious traditions live and work together in harmony. It is surely significant for the cause of peace that so many men and women, inspired by their deepest convictions, are committed to working for the good of the human family. In this way, I am sure that yesterday’s meeting has given us a sense of how genuine is our desire to contribute to the good of all our fellow human beings and how much we have to share with one another».

Is religious spirit the answer to the modern times? «We are where we are – Rabbi Sacks said – and the only way to look is forward. The question for many of us must surely be: what is the best investment over the next few years? It isn’t the stock market. That may crash. It isn’t housing. Its value may fall. It isn’t works of art. Who knows what taste will be, ten or twenty years from now? The best investment right now is in spiritual goods: in love, trust, friendship and forgiveness, in prayer and celebration and the life of the soul. Now is the time to invest in the deepest sources of happiness: in marriage, family and home, and the bonds of love between husband and wife, parent and child. Now is the time to invest in community and the supportive networks of people with whom we share our prayers, memories and ideals. Community is where our joys are doubled and our sadness halved by being shared with others».

If we’d go on crossing quotations, we should follow many others common views between Benedict XVI and Rabbi Sacks. They are both concerned for the «false Gods» (in Papal words) or the «too much faith in the wrong things» (in Rabbi’s words); they both are very attentive to the future of the Faith (and Rabbi Sacks wrote a book on the topic); they both see that one can only invest in the true values, since this is the only antidote to religious indifference.

The question of religious indifference had been widely discussed also during the Second Vatican Council. The pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, reviewing from a phenomenological point of view the various forms of atheism, a word which «is used to signify things that differ considerably from one another», also contains this note: «There are also those who never enquire about God; religion never seems to trouble or interest them at all, nor do they see why they should bother about it» (n. 19). The phenomenon of religious indifference can be recognized in these words. It is perhaps—many people are inclined to think so today—the most widespread and, from some standpoints, the most serious form of unbelief.

Also with regard to religious indifference as to atheism and agnosticism there are authors such as Scheler, Rahner, Tillich, Grühn, who question its existence. To their mind the psychical structure of man is such that it is never possible for it to break off with the Absolute. «Every man –  Werner Grühn writes – believes in God, and it does not matter whether he admits it or not. Radical (or “scientific”) atheism is rather an artificial product of armchair speculation, a theoretical invention of some heads that are not always among the best».

Still in the Gaudium et spes we read that «man is continually being aroused by the Spirit of God and he will never be utterly indifferent to religion — a fact proved by the experiences of ages past and plentiful evidence at the present day. For man will ever be anxious to know, if only in a vague way, what is the meaning of his life, his activity, and his death. The very presence of the Church recalls these problems to his mind. The most perfect answer to these questionings is to be found in God alone, who created man in his own image and redeemed him from sin» (n. 41).

From the century of Enlightenment onwards, religious indifference has been invoked as a sign of the intellectual maturity of modern man or as the condition to realize his perfect liberation. It was claimed that man had become, or that at least he was on the right way to become, completely self-reliant and self-sufficient, capable of solving all problems and of satisfying all desires, without having recourse to God. Consequently he could, and should, set him aside and behave as if he did not exist: etsi Deus non daretur.

Was truly this the path to follow? Benedict XVI, on the other side, always invited to live etsi Deus daretur, as God exists. It is a issue that not only deals with ethics, but even with moral action in life. Would living as God exists change the dramatic economical situation? Benedict XVI believes so, and he wrote it in the encyclical Caritas in Veritate, where he dedicates a paragraph to the gift. «The economy and the market – the Pope warned in his address before delegations of the Confederation of Italian Cooperatives and the Italian Federation of Cooperative Banks – must never be separated from solidarity». «Social capital –Rabbi Sacks said some time ago during a conference  – is alive and well, and exists in churches and synagogues. Religion works, whether you believe in it or not». And then he stressed that community, not theology, seems to be the determinant. Commenting on America’s obsession with «God». the Rabbi mused that in America, «everyone has to talk about God – in England it‘s different … we don’t do God». No surprise that – during his 2008 trip to United States – Benedict XVI praised the “positive laity” of America.

Religions, faith, identity, conversation, social capital: these are the pillars on which the resurgence of religions stand to build a new civilization. Rabbi Sacks and Benedict XVI based their leadership on these pillars. They both want to do God in society. When the rabbi will be talking with the Pope, they will have a lot of things in common to speak about.

Carlo Maria Viganò did not want to go to Washington. He would have preferred going to take the Vatican governorship, or at least – but he seems to have refused this appointment, as well – to become the number one of the Prefecture for Economic Affairs. The governor of Vatican State is now card. Giovanni Lajolo, that has already passed the age limit. His predecessor was the cardinal Edmund Szoka, and Viganò also runned for Szoka’s succession. His sponsors were the cardinal Angelo Sodano, former Secretary of State, and to cardinal Attilio Nicora, now president of the Vatican Authority for the Financial Information. Both if he had become governor of the Vatican State or Prefect for Economical affairs, Viganò would have strengthen the link with his two sponsors. Particularly, as a Prefect he could lend a hand to his friend Nicora in controlling the Vatican finances, and to Sodano as well, that has still great interest in the I.O.R. (the Institute for Religious Works), the Vatican “bank”. But he strongly wanted the governorship – it was his first option,  and many in the Curia believe that this was an ispired manoeuvring. There had been an exchange of letters between Viganò and the State Secretariat, and the correspondence was leaked to the press. What it was still not leaked is that a group of cardinals and prelate wrote a personal letter to the Pope to ask to let Viganò remain in Rome.

The Pope had been really bothered from these pressures, and he decided to send Viganò to Washington. And Sambi had been chosen as Prefect for the Economical Affair.

Until now, the Prefect has been the card. Velasio de Paolis, that now his managing the complicated case of the Legionaries of Christ. The role of the Prefect is even more important in the light of the commitment for Vatican financial transparence brought on by Benedict XVI. The Authority for Financial information controls all the financial operations of the Vatican State. On the other hand, the Prefecture of the Economic Affair is also charged of  functions of control and vigilance. So, the new prefect should be  – Vatican sources explain – an «authoritative prelate, preferably not tied to the former Vatican management». This is one of the reasons why Viganò had been soon excluded from the first rose of names. After Sambi’s death, there is now a restrict rose of names running for the succession of Velasio de Paolis: Claudio Maria Celli, until now president of the Pontifical Council of the Social Communication, and mons. Giuseppe Sciacca, auditor in the Rota Tribunal. This latter also runs for Viganò’s succession as number two of the Vatican governorship.

But there are other pieces of the Curial puzzle to place. First, the new governor of the Vatican City State. Card. Lajolo will retire, and his successor will almost surely be mons. Giuseppe Bertello. Bertello is the nuncio in Italy, and he has been long time waiting for a promotion. The new Papal nuncio for Italy will be Lorenzo Baldisseri, until now appointed as nuncio in Brazil.

There are other news regarding the nunciature in Italy: the Spanish monsignor Luis Miguel Munoz Cardaba is leaving is charge in Italy, heading to Australia, and will be replaced by the Italian Luca Lorusso. The delegation of the Holy See in Italy will be again the only one staffed exclusively by «autocthonos» Churchmen, and this is peculiar, since – in fact – Italian questions are discussed in the Second Section of the Secretariat of State, and not in a special section, as many believe.

Soon there will be a new arrival in the Second Section of the Secretariat of State: Monsignor Andrea Ferrante, who before entering into Vatican diplomacy, with his last post in Uganda, had been the personal secretary, in the curia, of then titular archbishop Crescenzio Sepe – who then became the cardinal prefect of “Propaganda Fide” and is now archbishop of Naples – at the time responsible for organizing the Great Jubilee of 2000.

Looking forward a new consistory (Benedict XVI will be probably appointing about ten new cardinals in the next November), all the Vatican clans – the old and the new ones – are trying to have their men in important positions. More than looking forward, it would be better looking backward. Domenico Calcagno had been recently nominated president of the Apsa, the so-called “Central Bank” of the Vatican. Calcagno substituted cardinal Attilio Nicora. The decision was made on the basis of the objective incompatibility between the role played by Cardinal as president of the APSA, and the one contextually covered as President of the Authority for Financial Information.  The authority is meant to  monitor the implementation of international anti-money laundering legislation in the offices of the Holy See. Nicora in fact is a controller and one of the major controlled. When appointed as Chairman of the Authority, it was determined that each time the Authority dealt with problems related to the Apsa,  Cardinal Nicora would abstain.

The succession of Calcagno, a native of Genoa, was not a surprise.  The new president of APSA, designed to obtain the cardinal’s hat at the next consistory, is personally known to the Secretary of State for many years, since when Bertone was Archbishop of Vercelli, and Calcagno worked in the administrative offices of the Italian Bishops’ Conference. Appointed Bishop of Savona-Noli in 2002, he was called to the Vatican four years ago.  Also significant is the arrival at APSA of an and Ambrosian like Monsignor Mistò, which rumors in recent months indicated as a possible new prelate of the IOR.

Actually, Mistò is designed to be the new president of the Apsa in a few years. While monsignor Massimo Boarotto, president of the Extraordinary Section of the Apsa, will keep is marginal role in the Curia. Boarotto enjoys a universal esteem, and it is probably because of it – his career annoyed someone who had other plans – that many rumors talked about a possible closing of the Extraordinary Section of the Apsa, in the context of the “transparency operation of Vatican Finances”. The closing is not up to come, but the rumors on the closing represented a fair signal against the growing of Boarotto within the Sacred Palaces.

Looking forward, there are other two appointments to come: the successor of card. Fortunato Baldelli as Major Pentitentiary of the Apostolic Penitentiary, and the new patriarch of Venice. The strongest candidate to be the new Major Penitentiary is mons. Francesco Coccopalmerio, now president of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts. The new Patriarch of Venice – after Angelo Scola’s appointment as archbishop of Milan – could be mons. Pietro Parolin, nuncio in Venezuela and formerly appointed for years as number 4 of the Secretariat of State.

The international scenario is not encouraging. The United States avoided the default thanks to the debt ceiling agreement, but the credit of the United States had been first downgraded by the Chinese rating agency  Dagong  and then downgraded by Standard&Poors. In the meantime, the Holy See is working intensely to outline a reform of the world monetary system.  In the encyclical Caritas in veritate there were several points remarking it. One above all, the so-called world political authority paragraph. There is the need of a true world political authority – the Pope wrote – «in order to arrive at a political, juridical and economic order which can increase and give direction to international cooperation for the development of all peoples in solidarity. To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration».

A new monetary system could not prescind from a global authority, an authority – an official to the Holy See explains – that «needs to have universal competences and needs to be public». The next G20 – scheduled in Cannes for November, 3-4 – will be on financial markets and world economy. It will be the occasion, for the Holy See, to present his proposal to reform the international monetary system. A first sketch of the reform – now under the examination of Holy See consultants and officials – had been proposed by Michel Camdessus, former president of International Monetary Fund. Camdessus is a consultant of the Holy See, but it will also be a member of the French delegation at G20. France is also the hosting country of the summit. For this reason, there is the opportunity that the proposals of the Holy See will  be at least taken in serious consideration.

Facing the global crisis, many countries began thinking about a reform of the monetary system. Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France, talked about enlarging the G7 to better manage currency markets, expand the International Monetary Fund’s oversight capacity in the field, and to the IMF’s currency basket, Special Drawing Right (SDR),the currencies of emerging economies, like the Chinese yuan. «France supports modifying the IMF’s status to expand its oversight capacity», Sarkozy he noted. This can counter what the president of France views as a «proliferation of unilateral measures during crises resulting in a new financial protectionism in which all economies suffer».

The Holy See will make different proposal. The Vatican diplomacy expressed several times doubts about G20 and the international congresses of that kind, considered something more than a club of friends, with no executive power. Holy See asked for a World Government, since it knows that there is the need of an authority over the State sovereignty and with the goal of the common good. The proposal will be different even from the Camdessus first sketch. Camdessus position is more similar to French one. France – and many other countries, as well – think to a world currency in order to have a concrete currency to refer to. Since the dollar is not convertible in gold, it has no real reference in the economy. The solution the G20 is up to give can be just the one of a financial adjustments decided among the few that will met in Cannes. This – according to Holy See position – is not sufficient. In 2009, the Holy See asked the Doha round to be enlarged to the opinions of the excluded countries. This is still the Holy See position. The reform of the monetary system pass through the reform of the United Nations and the reform of International Monetary Fund. The true fight is between the world leaders that still think that the world order could be managed in restricted meeting and the ones that aim at a true multilateral policy. Camdessus first sketch was going toward the first position. Holy See is going in another direction, and its polar star is the common good of peoples.

It was the common good the goal of the delegation that gathered at Mount Washington Hotel, in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944. Preparing to rebuild the international economic system as World War II was still raging, 730 delegates from all 44 Allied deliberated to abandon the Gold Standard – the monetary system based on the convertibility of all the currencies in gold – and to embrace a more appropriate system for capitalism. In fact, the new international monetary system was a return to a system similar to the pre-war gold standard, only using US dollars as the world’s new reserve currency until the world’s gold supply could be reallocated via international trade.

Two projects of a new monetary system had been discussed in Bretton Woods. The first project was by the English economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes outlined the institution of a Central World Bank, in order to intervene on the markets to regulate the relationships between debtors and creditors. The bank was supposed to have its own currency, that Keynes called Bancor. The second project was by Harry Dexter White, under-secretary of the Us  Ministry of the Treasure, and outlined a simple leveling-off fund of tax exchanges. The result was a compromise: the economic policies of the State would be coordinated by the International Monetary Fund and from the World Bank; the dollar become the only currency convertible in gold, so having a central role in the economical system.

But Europe – and in particular Germany – lived an incredible economical growth. Always more creditors asked to convert their dollars in gold. In 1971, the Us president Richard Nixon unilaterally suspended the convertibility of Us dollars in gold. It was the end of Bretton Woods. It was the beginning of a variable economy world. The yellow gold was up to be substitute by the black gold, the oil – during the Seventies the oil crisis became a central topic of financial issues.

Here and then, the idea of a world currency letted out from the think-rooms of the Council on Foreign Relations, of Trilateral commission – a group founded by David Rockfeller in 1973, whose member are, or has been, Henry Kissinger, Zygmunt Brzezinsky, George Bush sr., Dick Cheney -, and of Bildeberg Group. In 1988, The Economist – an English magazine read with much attention even in the Vatican Secretariat of State – launched the idea of a world currency named Phoenix. The International Monetary Fund created in 1969 the “embryo” of a new kind of currency, the Special Drawing Rights (SDR). SDRs are not credits the State have with the International Monetary Fund. The State, on the other hand, can sell SDRs, so sustaining their own currency. The world currency auspicated by president Sarkozy would be, in some way, and evolution of SDRs. Something similar to the “bubble that will save us” outlined a couple years ago by Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, president of the I.O.R. (Institute for Religious Works, the “bank” of the Vatican), in an article on the Holy See’s daily Osservatore Romano. Something similar to what the Trilateral Commission outlined in 1989 in a report titled: “International Financial Integration: the Policy Challenges”.

The Holy See looks beyond, conscious that nowadays international finance is made up of fictitious capital. The Holy See aims to re-anchor the international monetary system to the real economy. In fact – officials of the Roman Curia underline – it was not globalization to let multinational groups and private interests take the control of global economy. It was the States to abdicate part of their sovereignty in the name of profit, and now they are stuck in the system.

In the mean time, China downgraded the United States financial rating, and this caused the fall of Western stock exchanges. Until now, China has always been marginalized by the Western economic world. But now its economy has so flourished to let the China “fire” all European and American bonds without consequences in their internal balance. China is now claiming for more weight in the international issues. Somebody is wondering – it is just an attractive hypothesis – if it was the Chinese offence for having been marginalized in the international scenario at the origin of the exacerbation of the Chinese diplomatic relationship with the Holy See.

The Holy See have a great International prestige. Neverthless the See Change campaign, the Holy See is Un Permanent Observer with reinforced powers. Every time the permanent observer speaks during the general assembly, even the sleepiest among the delegates pay much attention to the Holy See Statements. Holy See is now one of the few – if not the only one – asking for a really multilateral international policy. And it was one of the first to preview the fall of the false gods.