Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster and President of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, has touched off a row over remarks he made recently concerning the demise of capitalism.

Here’s the context from the Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper:

[the Cardinal] made the astonishing claim at a lavish fund-raising dinner at Claridges which secured pledges of hundreds of thousands of pounds for the catholic church. The Cardinal, dressed in his full clerical regalia, said in a speech at the black tie dinner that he had worried whether the dinner should go ahead because of the troubled economic times. But he went on to say that in 1989, with the collapse of the Berlin wall, that munism had died.” In 2008, he said, “capitalism had died.”

The response from the munity was swift.

Catholic business people surveyed by The Daily Telegraph insisted that there were plenty of good capitalists, who used the process of making money to benefit all of society. The problems came when capitalism was used by a few to enrich themselves to the detriment of everyone else. Sir Tom Farmer, the Scottish billionaire former owner of car parts firm Kwik-Fit, said: “I seriously hope that capitalism is not dead, but I hope that the abuse of capitalism is dead. I hope that is what the Cardinal meant. At the end of the day it is a system that creates wealth – but it has its failings.”

Rev. Robert A. Sirico, president of the Acton Institute, was interviewed on Ave Maria Radio today by host Al Kresta and asked about the Cardinal’s remarks.

“There is some great irony here of His Excellency speaking at a lavish fundraising event at which one presumes he is about to ask for money for the renovation of the Cathedral, etcetera,” he told Kresta. “Either the Cardinal is possessed of a great insight that no one in that room and few other people are possessd of, or he is speaking economic lunacy.”

Listen to the interview here.

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