ROME, Italy (CNN) -- Pope Benedict XVI, on the eve of a global economic summit, lashed out at modern capitalism for being shortsighted and short on ethics.

• Pope Benedict XVI says world needs new economic understanding
• Pontiff's remarks come on eve of G-8 summit in Italy
• Global economic crisis likely to be high on summit agenda

"Today's international economic scene, marked by grave deviations and failures, requires a profoundly new way of understanding business enterprise," the pontiff said in his third encyclical letter, "Charity in Truth," which was released Tuesday.

The papal letter was released as the heads of leading industrialized nations started gathering in central Italy for the Group of Eight economic summit, which begins Wednesday.

U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to speak about the economic outlook. The leaders of the other G-8 nations -- Japan, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Canada and Russia -- also are scheduled to speak.

It's beginning to sound like February, as political rhetoric and journalistic support suggest momentum for more spending.

By Jeff Poor
Business & Media Institute
7/8/2009 12:02:32 PM

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” That’s a saying once bungled by President George W. Bush, to the loud delight of the liberal media. But that same media should keep it in mind as Washington mulls a second round of stimulus spending.

A July 7 Bloomberg story by Shamim Adam reported that Laura Tyson, an economic advisor to the Obama administration, had put forward the notion that the $787 billion approved in February was “a bit too small,” and that government should consider a second stimulus package “focusing on infrastructure projects.”

Although Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., maintains there is “no showing that a second stimulus is needed,” other members, including House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer in a July 7 Politico article, say it shouldn’t be taken off the table.
 

As trial balloons are being floated for a second stimulus, some familiar faces that pushed the first package are making the rounds once again.

Wednesday, July 08, 2009
By Monica Gabriel and Marie Magleby

Washington (CNSNews.com) - House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday that the health-care reform bill now pending in Congress would garner very few votes if lawmakers actually had to read the entire bill before voting on it.

“If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,” Hoyer told CNSNews.com at his regular weekly news conference.

Selected Pages

Link to Full English version of:  CARITAS IN VERITATE(1).pdf 

Anthology of the third encyclical of this pontificate, signed on June 29, 2009, and made public on July 7

by Benedict XVI

1. CHARITY IN TRUTH, to which Jesus Christ bore witness by his earthly life and especially by his death and resurrection, is the principal driving force behind the authentic development of every person and of all humanity. [...]

3. [...] Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. [...] In the truth, charity reflects the personal yet public dimension of faith in the God of the Bible, who is both Agápe and Lógos: Charity and Truth, Love and Word. [...]

4. [...] A Christianity of charity without truth would be more or less interchangeable with a pool of good sentiments, helpful for social cohesion, but of little relevance. In other words, there would no longer be any real place for God in the world. Without truth, charity is confined to a narrow field devoid of relations. It is excluded from the plans and processes of promoting human development of universal range, in dialogue between knowledge and praxis. [...]

Selected sections from original article

Pope Benedict XVI's upcoming meeting with President Obama may be focused squarely on the worldwide financial crisis and on the pope's vision for a "true world political authority" to manage the global economy with God-centered ethics.

Benedict's new social encyclical, a major teaching titled Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth), released Tuesday in Rome, calls for creation of a new worldwide economic authority, for redistribution of the world's wealth, protections of workers, respect for the environment, and a refusal to accept an "anti-birth" mentality that promotes birth control or abortion...

"Despite utterly important differences on issues like abortion," there are "areas of resonance" between Obama's policy agenda and Benedict's call for "regrounding our economic, cultural, and political lives on an integral Christian humanism that is 'open to the Absolute,' " says Stephen Schneck, director of the Life Cycle Institute at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.

Schneck says he expects the encyclical, "a breathtaking glimpse of the possibility of civilization with a human face," to set the agenda for the Benedict-Obama meeting...

Key Republicans in both the House and the Senate are accusing the White House of giving “incomplete and misleading” information to investigators probing the president’s abrupt firing of AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin.  In return, the White House is hinting that documents concerning its actions in the Walpin affair may be protected by executive privilege.

 By: Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
06/16/09 12:13 AM EDT

Can Republicans in Congress get to the bottom of President Obama's sudden -- and suspicious -- decision to fire AmeriCorps inspector general Gerald Walpin? The answer is no -- unless some. Democrats show interest in what could possibly be the first scandal, or at least mini-scandal, of the Obama administration.

In dismissing Walpin, the president seemed to trample on the law -- a law he himself had co-sponsored as a senator -- that protects inspectors general from political influence and retribution. In addition, it appears that at least part of the reason Walpin was fired was for the tenacity he showed in investigating misuse of AmeriCorps money by a friend and supporter of the president, Kevin Johnson, the mayor of Sacramento, California. Walpin got the goods -- evidence of Johnson's serious misuse of federal dollars -- and the inspector general ended up getting fired for his troubles.

» 06/05/2009 14:22
ISLAM – EGYPT – USA

by Samir Khalil Samir, AsiaNews

An analysis of the US President’s speech by an expert on Islam and the Arab world. In general there is a lot of honesty and justified mea culpa. But there is also too much rhetoric on Islam’s contributions; historical falsehoods on the Cordoba Caliphate and the birth of Israel; ambiguity on Israeli settlements in the occupied territories; religious freedom is more than tolerance; forgetfulness on the everyday rights of women. The Pope said more in the Middle East.