Pope Lectures Capitalists About Poverty

A scolding Pope John Paul II warned Mexican businessmen Wednesday that they have no cause to celebrate the collapse of communism if their own capitalist system generates more wealth for a few and greater poverty for the many.

Welcoming, cheering Roman Catholics lined the papal motorcade route with waving flags for nine miles in this sere, flat city that was the birthplace of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa.

The papal warning came in a stern lecture on economic and social justice directed at all well-to-do Latin Americans, and by extension to the industrial world.

“The excessive hoarding of riches by some deprives the majority of them. Thus, the very wealth that is accumulated generates poverty,” John Paul told the business audience in this state capital of 600,000 in west-central Mexico.

The toughest speech of John Paul’s Mexican visit included his most specific appraisal of the economic consequences of revolutionary change in Eastern Europe.

After the collapse of communism, it would be wrong, the Pope said, to conclude that capitalism “is the only road for our world . . . rejecting critical judgments of the impact (that) liberal capitalism has produced, at least until now, on countries of the so-called Third World.”

In Czechoslovakia last month, John Paul hailed the end of communism’s “tragic Utopia” in Eastern Europe. On Wednesday, though, he stressed that his church’s concern is not with economic systems as such but with applications of them that “violate or endanger human dignity.”

Such is the case in Mexico, John Paul said, where great wealth and opulent lifestyles exist alongside the suffering of “great majorities deprived of the most basic resources.”

The Pope’s fourth day in Mexico carried him through searing heat for a grinding 12 hours in corn-and-cattle Durango state. He preached love and hope to inmates at a model prison and ordained 100 priests at an elaborate outdoor Mass here.

John Paul surprised officials at the carefully groomed, 1,200-inmate Durango Penitentiary, where hundreds of prisoners waited behind a newly fenced compound separating them from the altar.

The Pope asked to be let into the compound. Nervously, prison officials unlocked the gate, and for about 15 minutes the pontiff waded slowly among the prisoners while an inmate band played an off-key rendition of the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.

Strolling as though he had all the time in the world, the Pope moved patiently to the farthest reaches of the fenced compound, shaking hands with prisoners and speaking with them briefly. Many knelt and kissed his ring.

“I think this visit will bring us luck in getting out early,” said Pedro Graciano, 50, a father of 10 who has served 30 months of a 16-year sentence for murder.

“The worst of prisons is a heart closed and hardened, the worst of ills is desperation. I wish you hope,” the Pope told the prisoners.

Today, John Paul will visit Chihuahua and Monterrey.