Pope Assails Labor-Capital Income Gap

Pope John Paul II on Tuesday challenged what he called the disproportionate rewards going to capitalist managers, as opposed to those going to workers.

The Pope issued the challenge during a Mass in Venezuela’s most progressive industrial town before he crossed the South American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific to begin the second leg of his current pilgrimage in Ecuador.

Preaching to a throng of several hundred thousand, including many factory workers, at the newly developed Venezuelan mining and manufacturing center of Ciudad Guayana, the pontiff assailed “the great differences in social position and wage privileges” between capital and labor.

He also urged caution in progress so that a worker does not become “the slave of the machine of technology.”

“Technology can become--and has become--alienating and manipulative to the point where we must morally reject the presence of a certain ideology of technology because it has imposed the primacy of matter over spirit, of things over the human person,” he said.

Chicken, Fried Bananas

The Pope later lunched on chicken and fried bananas with workers of the ultramodern Orinoco steel mill in an industrial center built virtually from scratch since 1961.

Among other gifts from the people of the sweltering Orinoco River delta town, the Pope received a 22-carat gold key to the city estimated to be worth $20,000. The region is a center of gold and diamond mining, as well as modern industry.

Upon his arrival in Ecuador, the pontiff was greeted by a huge crowd lining a short motorcade route from the airport. In an address to Ecuadorean bishops in Quito, he again referred to liberation theology, but he used far more benign terms than when he excoriated the religious movement for what he called its distortion by Marxism.

Apparently approving of the Ecuadorean bishops’ handling of the subject, he simply offered a reminder that his oft-repeated slogan concerning a “preferential option for the poor” means the poor in spirit, no matter what their material wealth.