To judge from his encyclical Caritas in Veritate, published this week, Pope Benedict XVI agrees with those who say that something has gone wrong with the way the world does business. What makes his document unusually disturbing and thought-provoking is an assumption he does not share. The Pope does not think that making capitalism more moral will be a simple matter of bringing a few malefactors to account, whether this involves summoning a half-dozen bankers to hearings in Westminster or Washington, or chanting slogans against Bernard Madoff in Manhattan’s streets. “Many people today would claim that they owe nothing to anyone, except to themselves,” the Pope writes. “They are concerned only with their rights.” That certainly describes a lot of businessmen – and most of the rest of us.

Caritas in Veritate must have disappointed many people who had really been looking forward to it. Surely the leader of a faith with universal claims would not devote tens of thousands of words to globalisation if he did not mean to excoriate it. Yet Benedict has bigger fish to fry than Wal-Mart, say, or Nike. The encyclical is not anti-global or anti-capitalist. In fact, it accepts that “man is constitutionally oriented towards being more” – richer, yes, but also wiser and more loving. Business and finance have not created new excesses. They have opened new routes for an arrogance already present in the hearts of men.