Peter Turkson is not a name that's readily recognised on Wall Street, the City of London, Hong Kong's Central financial district, or Tokyo's Marunouchi district. Neither would he be instantly recognised if he walked into Silicon Valley, Germany's Ruhr industrial heartland, Toyota City, or a sweatshop in Guangdong.
If I add that he would stand out in any of the above locations because Turkson is a Ghanaian and a Catholic priest, there may seem to be even less reason for the world's top financiers or industrialists to know - or care - about him. But in the last few months Cardinal Turkson has promoted not one but two timely documents which pose essential questions about the troubling way that modern capitalism is developing.
In October, Turkson took aim at global financial markets and condemned 'the idolatry of the market'. He backed a tax on international financial transactions, and called for the establishment of a 'global public authority' and a 'central world bank'. The demands were in a document issued by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, of which Turkson is president.
Its title laid out its concerns: 'Towards reforming the international financial and monetary systems in the context of a global public authority'. Its message is clear: 'The economic and financial crises which the world is going through calls everyone, individuals and people, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural and moral values at the basis of social coexistence.'
It claimed that the financial crisis 'has revealed behaviours like selfishness, collective greed and the hoarding of goods on a grand scale'. It condemned 'neo-liberal thinking', advocating technical solutions to economic problems and called for an 'ethic of solidarity' between rich and poor nations.
Otherwise, 'if no solutions are found to the various forms of injustice, the negative effects that will follow on the social, political and economic level will be destined to create a climate of growing hostility and even violence, and ultimately undermine the very foundations of democratic institutions, even the ones considered most solid'.
