Salvation in the East
The West is in a deep crisis and the East is its salvation. Lest my dear readers start growling about generalisations, let me refine and specify. Two of the great institutions of the West - the Catholic Church and Wall Street, the epitomes of the spiritual and the materialistic - have fallen to depths that they will not recover from without serious scars and changes to their institutions. The faithful and the greedy may still be hoping for business as usual, but that will not happen this time. The Catholic faith is in convulsion or in decline in every major Western country; and the latest rounds of sex and child abuse allegations against predatory priests are as much the symptom as the cause.
In his supposedly unprecedented apology to Ireland over widespread sex and child abuse, Pope Benedict actually attributed the church's malaise not so much to the abuse but to Western secularisation and loss of faith. That is a career theme of his as a theologian and Rome's equivalent of the party whip before he became Pope. That apology, if you read it carefully, is not much of an apology at all.
Meanwhile, Wall Street and the City of London are fighting rearguard actions against regulation and reform that are bound to change the way they have conducted business and make them probably much less profitable. You know something is amiss when even a spokeswoman for Las Vegas takes offence at comparisons between the machinations of Wall Street and casino operations. I am not making this up. Democratic congresswoman Shelley Berkley, whose district covers the gambling strip in Nevada, actually said: 'It's very offensive ... What happened on Wall Street would never have happened in a Las Vegas casino ... it's the most well-regulated industry on the planet.'
But fear not, the Pope and the captains of western finance understand that their future lies in the world of emerging markets. Here, in this part of the world, there are flocks waiting to be shepherded and legions of wide-eyed investors desperate to part with their money - savers with nowhere to park their life savings and people with a spiritual hole in their hearts. I was slow to realise this, but it dawned on me after reading about Goldman Sachs. In the same week that Goldman chief Lloyd Blankfein was grilled on Capitol Hill as the poster bad boy of Wall Street, his investment firm made a 200-fold profit from the initial US$5 million it invested in a mainland company that harvests pig intestines. Shenzhen Hepalink Pharmaceutical, which made its initial public offering last week, has propelled an obscure couple - the majority shareholders - to the top of the list of China's richest people. China is truly the future.
Meanwhile, the Holy Spirit now also hovers over the world of emerging markets. The Catholic faith is spreading rapidly across Asia, Africa and Latin America, while the numbers of its faithful are dwindling and lapsing equally quickly in North America and Western Europe. Less than a third of the estimated 1.2 billion Catholics now live in the developed West. The Philippines has about as many Catholics as Germany and France combined.
Vietnam and the mainland are among the most fertile grounds for Catholic recruitment. Decades of godless Maoism and Ho Chi Minh-style puritanism - followed by rampant state-sanctioned corrupt capitalism - has left many Chinese and Vietnamese longing for godly messages. And Rome is ever ready to exploit a spiritual wasteland. Little wonder the Vatican is so hung up about its prerogative to choose bishops in those countries, a power play that the communist parties of both nations are strenuously resisting.
In case you think that democracy poseur Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun has retired, he is currently focusing his attention on the affairs of the mainland church. His loyalty lies not with Hong Kong, the mainland or its people, but with Rome. That's why he is resisting any attempt to open up local Catholic schools. With the Vatican, it's all about control and blind obedience - obedience which is increasingly eroded in the secularised West.
So, everyone, go East. Follow the spirit. Follow the money.
Alex Lo is a senior writer at the Post
