From his pre-conclave speech to his recent apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium it is clear that Pope Francis is a man on a mission. He has a vision of the Church going out to the margins, to the most vulnerable, to the poorest of the poor.
The Church is called to come out of herself and to go to the peripheries, not only in the geographical sense but also to go to the existential peripheries: those of the mysteries of sin, of pain, of injustice, of ignorance and of religious indifference, of thought, of all misery.
This vision is now joined to a stinging critique of our globalised economy which promotes a 'new tyranny' of unfettered capitalism and an attack on the 'idolatry of money'. While such language has not been uncommon, buried in the riches of Catholic social teaching, this pope has made it up front and centre stage of his message.
This prominence is not going unnoticed. Conservative commentators are starting to speak out against Pope Francis. The shock-jock broadcaster Rush Limbaugh, in a show entitled 'It's Sad How Wrong Pope Francis Is (Unless It's a Deliberate Mistranslation By Leftists)' has labelled the pope's recent exhortation pure Marxism:
This is just pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the pope. Unfettered capitalism? That doesn't exist anywhere. Unfettered capitalism is a liberal socialist phrase to describe the United States.
More recently an editor of Fox News website, Adam Shaw, who doubled as a movie reviewer for the Catholic News Service (CNS), was sacked from CNS after vociferous criticism of Francis, identifying him as the 'Catholic Obama'.
While American Catholic neoconservatives, such as Michael Novak and George Weigel, felt more comfortable with John Paul II's role in the collapse of communism and his acceptance of a positive role for the free market, and with Benedict's shift away from social justice issues to return to an earlier piety, Francis' renewed emphasis on the place of social justice in the life of the Church, and his criticisms of the free market are causing concern. However Francis' vision is driven by his experience of poverty in the barrios of Buenos Aries and the failure of the 'free market' to lift the poor out of their poverty in Argentina.
This disquiet from the neoconservatives will be even greater given the role of the Vatican in the recent World Trade Organisation [WTO] trade negotiations in Bali. Archbishop Silvano M. Tomasi, Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations, made an intervention which one seasoned observer described as unprecedented in the specificity of its claims. Highlighting the gap between rich and poor, the intervention noted:
This imbalance is the result of ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and of financial speculation. Consequently, there is an outright rejection of the right of States, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules. An even worse development is that such policies are sometimes locked in through trade rules negotiated at the WTO or in bilateral or regional FTAs [free trade agreements].
Reflecting the Pope's growing concern for the natural environment, the intervention highlighted the fragility of the environment in the face of the rapacious drive for profits:
The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenceless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.
The intervention was particularly critical of attempts to subvert an international, multilateral agreement on trade through a strategy of regional or bilateral trade agreement.
Certainly, the enlargement of regional trade agreements is a step towards further trade liberalisation but we have to bear in mind that these agreements inevitably threaten the desirability to reach an agreement on a truly multilateral basis. In fact, by entering a regional trade agreement a country reduces the incentives to extend its efforts on trade liberalization at a multilateral level. Most importantly, we know that only the multilateral system is a clear, equitable system that provides effective guarantees for small and poor countries that tend to be penalized in a Regional Trade Agreement where it is asymmetric.
Markets need to be not just 'free' but fair in their impact upon the poor. This is a significant criticism of the American policy pushing for a Pacific free-trade region and the current Australian approach of establishing bilateral agreements such as that currently being negotiated with South Korea.
Of course many of these concerns have their basis in the long history of Catholic social teaching, but Francis is giving them a new emphasis and impetus in the global arena. For Francis social justice is not just an optional extra to Catholic identity, but is a core dimension of the task of evangelisation.
The National Catholic Reporter is carrying a piece quoting an official at the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Fr Michael Czerny, confirming that Pope Francis is planning an encyclical on the environment. 'That's an area perhaps where there's been less church teaching than there has on poverty and development.' This will not be well received by the neoconservatives. They may soon find that we have a pope who is not only 'Marxist' but also a deep shade of green.
Neil Ormerod is Professor of Theology at Australian Catholic University.