Tea Party Pope?

I report, you decide. This is an excerpt from a recent Fortune article about Pope Francis.

The pope’s strategy for addressing both spending and pension issues is to gradually shrink the Vatican workforce through attrition and raise more money to maintain the benefits. In February of 2014 he imposed a hiring freeze and also stopped formerly generous overtime payments. The plan is to move existing employees from overstaffed congregations to growth areas, such as financial management, without replacing those who depart.

You have to read through a lot of yadda-yadda to get to this which, to me, is the meat. Workforce reduction is the only way to meaningfully reform a budget. If you think in terms of centuries like the Catholic Church does, attrition is the best way to do it. Cutting overtime is a great idea to since it saves money right away AND can make people quit who need their cushy lifestyle. They should grub for it in the "non-Church" sector.

This is what I wish would happen in our government at all levels. Due to automation, we should need less employees than we used to in places like the IRS and the welfare/unemployment offices. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Takeaway quote from the Pope on money:

Pope Francis has a complex but pragmatic view of money. “Money is useful to carry out many things, for works to support humanity,” he has said. “But when your heart is attached to it, it destroys you.”

Classic virtue of detachment, put simply. Not sure what is "complex" about that.

John Allen's article on the Pope Francis revolution and my "oh, noes"

This is a good piece in NCR by John Allen which Michael Liccione posted on his facebook page. I can't help posting some oh, noes moments.

In just four months, Francis has revived the international prestige of the papacy and its moral capital. The Italian edition of Vanity Fair recently declared him its "Man of the Year," including snippets of praise from unlikely quarters such as Elton John, who termed the pontiff "a miracle of humility in the era of vanity."

Elton John? Oh, noes!!

"He's very charming, but he's also very controlling, as all powerful people are," said Omar Bello, an Argentine Catholic journalist and author of a new book on the pope.

Very controlling? Oh, noes!!

His commission to study the economic and administrative structures, for instance, is made up of eight people, only one of whom is a priest -- Msgr. Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda, a Spaniard who serves as secretary of the Vatican's Prefecture for Economic Affairs, and who's a member of the Opus Dei-affiliated Priestly Society of Holy Cross. The other seven are laypeople drawn from the worlds of economics, law and business management.

Opus Dei?! Oh, noes!!

Third, Francis is giving rise to a new culture of accountability, moving toward a more Anglo-Saxon understanding that "accountability" means somebody can actually get fired.

Anglo-Saxon? You mean those white people who fire you? Oh, noes!!

With regard to Francis talking about poverty more than he does about abortion I'm really not to worried about that. Does Pope Francis inspire me to give more of my money to poor people by talking about it? Not really. Does he inspire me to be kinder and more patient to those around me by his patient actions toward his subordinates and the pompous asses in the media? Yes, he does greatly. But if some stingy liberals are inspired to be more generous to poor because of Pope Francis then good for them.