“They said it couldn’t be done.  And not just that.  They said, `What do priests know about economics?’  And I said to myself, `That I will hear no more.’  So I learned about economics.”

Cardinal Óscar Ándres Rodiguez Maradiaga spoke (and spoke) at Georgetown the other day, and his words, tumbling out during Mass, at lunch, in interviews, and in a public conversation and Q&A with my colleague John Carr, amounted to something like an “extemporanous enyclical” akin to the one his close friend Pope Francis dropped on the world with The Interview a couple of years ago.

Cardinal Rodriguez is a vital member of Pope Francis’ eight-cardinal advisory council, the first such council in the history of the papacy.   He knows Washington through two decades spent trying to persuade the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to forgive or reduce the loan obligations of Latin American countries.  The Washington Post in 2005 characterized him as a “crusader for debt relief”:

He has said millions of poor people are suffering as their governments struggle to pay back loans that were often squandered by corrupt leaders.  "It is necessary to let Latin America breathe a little more and aspire to grow economically,“ he once said. "And with such a great weight it cannot.”
Rodriguez Maradiaga has often condemned free-market economic policies promoted by the United States. “Neoliberal capitalism carries injustices and inequity in its genetic code. Latin America is poor, and its people are poor because they have been exploited by the rich,” he said.

“They said it couldn’t be done, shouldn’t be done, but we did it,” he told the audience in Gaston Hall, referring to debt forgiveness; and he went on to say that Pope Francis’ call for a swift and forceful response to climate change is a similar undertaking: ambitious, difficult, controversial, but right and necessary.    

Cardinal Rodriguez (as the Post piece set out) “speaks eight languages and holds degrees in philosophy, theology, clinical psychology and psychotherapy.”  He’s also a licensed pilot, and that experience informed once of his most striking remarks in Gaston:

“We have better orientation systems than ever, but people are disoriented.  The German Wings pilot – such a sad story!  Here is one who knows orientation the best – and he is the most disoriented.”

To hear him speak was to understand why he and Pope Francis are simpatico.