Is "God" on our side?

Speaking during morning Mass at the Casa Santa Marta the Pope criticised the "theology of prosperity" according to which "God shows you that you are just if he give you great riches," calling it mistaken. The pontiff told the audience "you cannot serve both God and riches."

Pope Francis spoke out against rich bosses that exploit their workers calling them 'blood suckers'.  He said that exploiting the working people to enrich a person is "like sucking blood." The exploitation of labour is a mortal sin, he said. He pointed to those who are given only seasonal work, "with no opportunity for a pension, without health insurance." Employers who do this "are true leeches and they live by spilling the blood of the people whom they make slaves of labour."

Vatican Radio also reported that Pope Francis told a story of a young girl who told him about working 11 hours a day for €650 a month (around £500). Her employer hold her take it or leave it, because there were more people that wanted the job. These rich people, the pope said, "grow fat on their riches."

He finished by saying that people think "that slaves no longer exist: they exist. "It's true, people no longer go to Africa to capture them in order to sell them in America, no. "But it is in our cities. And there are these traffickers, these people who treat the working people without justice."

Despite the similarity of appeals, socialists spurn the irrationality of religion. 

Neither God nor Master 

Banish gods from the skies and capitalists from the earth