via Drudge...
A recent Breitbart article's headline purports: "Pope's New Book Criticizes Capitalism."
It then gives the following excerpt from the book to justify its claim:
"Confronted with the abuse of economic power, with the cruelty of capitalism that degrades man into merchandise, we have begun to see more clearly the dangers of wealth and we understand in a new way what Jesus intended in warning us about wealth."
Here were have the classic case of punctuation yielding meaning. Did the pope intend "that degrades man into merchandise" to be a restrictive or a non-restrictive modifier? That is, the phrase "capitalism that degrades man into merchandise" (the version without a comma after "capitalism") means that the pope is talking about a particular kind of capitalism, not capitalism altogether. There might be forms of capitalism that do not degrade man, but that is not what he is talking about at present. If the text read "the cruelty of capitalism, that degrades man into merchandise, we have..." (with a comma after "capitalism") then the pope would seem to be saying that capitalism by its very nature degrades man.
A more accurate headline would have read "Pope's New Book Condemns Some Forms of Capitalism."
I would also say that the article might be slightly misleading in the way it juxtaposes the pope's discussion of Marxism with his views of capitalism. I'll take a wild stab and say that when Benedict discusses Marxism in the book, he's probably dealing with it more as a more general philosophy and worldview than as an economic theory.
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