Pope Benedict predicted economy crash back in '85?
Every time something big happens, rumors inevitably appear that someone predicted it. The usual suspect in such cases is Nostradamus, but this time the prophet was none other than the Pope Benedict XVI.
On Nov 19 Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti, speaking at Milan's Cattolica University said that Pope Benedict XVI was the first to predict the crisis in the global financial system.
In 1985 when he was known "simply" as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (he was elected pope in April 2005), pope Benedict was taking part in a Rome event discussing the Church and the economy.
He presented a paper entitled "Market Economy and Ethics" in which he says that a decline in ethics "...can actually cause the laws of the market to collapse."
"Money vanishes, it is nothing" said the pope (shown in the picture above in gold embroided clothes and a staff costing like a second-hand car) in his speech on October 7th and concluded that "the only solid reality is the word of God."
On that same day the official newspaper of Vatican "l'Osservatore Romano" also criticized the free-market (or as some clergy likes to call it "wild capitalism") for having "grown too much and badly in the past two decades."
As with any prediction, some will claim it was a supernatural / divine inspiration, some will call it a lucky guess, while the third will say it was a prediction based on observation and logical conclusions. In this particular case, I think we can safely conclude that the odds are in favor of this last explanation. In all likelyhood it was a prediction based on the observation of the events and tendencies.
Overall - 1 out of 10 stars for this prediction because clergy is always complaining about materialism so it was just another speech in the line with that, and (as any better observer must have noticed) because there was no time frame specified in the prediction.
