Para um papado liberal

A opinião de Lord William Rees-Mogg, no Times de hoje:

The next pope will be a socialist; no doubt a democratic socialist, but a socialist all the same. Almost every cardinal and bishop in the Roman Catholic Church, and probably every bishop in the Anglican Church, is a socialist. They are socialists in the same sense as Tony Blair, or Gerhard Schröder, or Jacques Chirac, or Bill Clinton. They are all socialists because they have never studied the liberal argument. That is a pity; liberalism may not be enough, but it is the basis of our culture.(...)
My first thought, therefore, was that I might send a copy of The Wealth of Nations as an inaugural present to the next pope, whoever he might be. (...)Adam Smith’s view was that every man should be free to pursue his own interest in his own way, without encouragements or restraints, “upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice”.(...)
How did this principle of selection by free competition [Darwin's] change our economic world? One substantial reason is to be found in a pair of postwar papers, which neither the next pope nor the Prince is likely to have read, by the Austrian philosopher Frederick Hayek; they are The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945) and Competition as a Discovery Procedure (1968).(...)
They are remarkably prescient. Hayek’s argument is that information is diffused, and can be used efficiently only if economic systems respond to the knowledge available to individual bodies. Hayek’s view was validated by the subsequent victory of the personal against the giant computer and by the free interactions of the internet. These are liberating discoveries.(...)
Free economic competition is not a zero-sum game. Free competition creates complex mutual benefits, by what Adam Smith called “the hidden hand”. Liberalism has changed the world because it works and socialism does not. The history of liberal theory explains why that is so.