«The teaching of Francis is not prejudiced against the market. Instead, he is radically opposed to monopolies and oligopolies. Entrepreneurs play a central role in the creation of healthy wealth and its just distribution. Naturally, the teaching of Francis is opposed to the financialization of the economy. It’s not good to make money to make money. It is not okay to make money with money. It is not acceptable. The de-responsibility of the economic and political ruling classes in their choices with respect to workers and their families never works. But one aspect needs to be clarified: from a cultural and spiritual point of view it is the entire history of the Church that poses fundamental questions on the relationship between the economy and society, the industrial system and the financial system, the scarcity of economic resources and need to preserve ecological resources, the destiny of man to the extent of infinity and the transient modulation of the dynamics between capital and organization, technology and work. Francis, naturally with his originality, is consistent with the history of the Church, which since the nineteenth century has questioned the forms of capitalism. There is a marked continuity between him and those who preceded him: Benedict XVI and, even before that, John Paul II. Each with the charisma of him. Each with his own personality ».
Emilce Cuda, from Argentina, is a moral theologian. Since 4 September last year you have been secretary of the Vatican’s Pontifical Commission for Latin America. She this week she was appointed a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. You studied philosophy at Uba, the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She is the first woman to have obtained a PhD in moral theology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina Santa María in Buenos Aires, when the grand chancellor it was precisely Bergoglio. He studied and worked at Northwestern University in Chicago with Ernesto Laclau, the philosopher and political theorist who is one of the leading scholars of populism, whose cultural and religious matrices Emilce has investigated.
Intellectual daughter of Argentina
We are at the Camoscio d’Abruzzo trattoria, a very simple place near Termini Station, on the other side of the city from via della Conciliazione, where the Pontifical Commission for Latin America is based. Cuda is an intellectual. She is the daughter of Argentina. The country – his and Bergoglio’s – has a paradoxical and dramatic story of overthrowing of great environmental wealth, an abundance of raw materials and significant industrializations which, in the end, were transformed – against every form of rationality in history – into economic deconstruction and social misalignments, poverty of families and loss of hearts.
For example, one cannot understand Pope Francis’ insistence on the Amazon – treated both from a theological and a moral point of view – if one does not grasp its dual nature: a piece of creation and of God’s plan, but also the symbol of the experience of a continent – South America – in which natural deposits have often been subjected to intensive exploitation, for the benefit of a few (sometimes foreigners), without any positive repercussions for local populations and indeed, often, with them direct damage: «The Amazon has a significant metaphorical and spiritual strength. Therefore it is essential in the thinking of Pope Francis. But the pattern, in South America and other forgotten places in the world, always repeats itself in the same way. Now in Argentina there is the lithium problem. Who will benefit from it? Won’t it happen what has already happened with gas and oil? Often material questions and spiritual questions are two sides of the same coin », says Emilce with great passion.
Middle class and European figure
Emilce is not an expression of elite South American, which is Americanized in education, behavior and lifestyle. Her father Antonio was a second generation Argentine, whose family had emigrated to South America from Milan. Her mother, Maria Rosa, was also of humble Italian, Venetian origins: «My father worked at the post office, my mother was a milliner. Both were employed. They were part of that middle class that exists above all in Argentina, while in the rest of South America there is an extreme bipolarization of society divided between the very rich and the very poor ».