Too poor to be Catholic?

by Kishore Jayabalan • April 21, 2005

Reporting on an act of vandalism on the cathedral of Buenos Aires, Reuters asserts that Latin America is a region “whose poor and hungry often cannot afford to follow Roman Catholic doctrine.”

How’s that??? Reuters does not expand on its theology, but we can take a guess at what this all implies. The poor and hungry cannot be expected to follow the Catholic Church’s teachings on abortion and contraception, because we all know that poverty and hunger are alleviated by uninhibited sexual activity. It’s a nice twist on the liberation theology condemned by Cardinal Ratzinger in the 1980s, isn’t it?

We can expect more of the same, along with bogus accusations of Ratzinger’s Nazi past, from the disgruntled foes of Pope Benedict XVI.

Kishore Jayabalan

Kishore Jayabalan is director of Istituto Acton, the Acton Institute's Rome office. Formerly, he worked for the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace as the lead policy analyst on sustainable development and arms control. Kishore Jayabalan earned a B.A. in political science and economics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In college, he was executive editor of The Michigan Review and an economic policy intern for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He worked as an international economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, D.C. and then graduated with an M.A. in political science from the University of Toronto. While in Toronto, Kishore interned in the university's Newman Centre, which led to his appointment to the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations in New York. Two years later, he returned to Rome to work for the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace as the Holy See's lead policy analyst on sustainable development and arms control. As director of Istituto Acton, Kishore organizes the institute's educational and outreach efforts in Rome and throughout Europe.

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