2. In the evening, as the Frankfurt paper relates, both men spoke in the Palacio Libertad before leaders of every party and the envoys of foreign nations. The president, speaking mildly against his habit, praised the late Francis, whom he had once called the representative of evil on earth, as the most important Argentine of all. He maintained that liberty, life and private property are the foundations of the Christian faith, and with them defended his conduct of the public finances. The Pontiff replied courteously, but with weight: those who wield authority must act with prudence, acknowledge the limits of the power entrusted to them, and direct their counsels to the welfare of the whole community. The economy must serve man, not man the economy. He praised private enterprise and the growth of wealth; yet its fruits must reach also those without work, the old who live on pensions, and the families who, though they labour, can scarcely reach the end of the month. He named no one. He added that those who dissent must also be acknowledged as fellow citizens.

3. How wide the gulf between them is, Euronews makes plain. The president, it reports, has staked his whole fortune on cutting public spending and bringing the treasury into balance; he has called social justice an aberration and a theft, and mocked as huge stupidity the complaint of families who cannot make it to the end of the month. The Church, for its part, has long reproached his austerity. The day before, in the Uruguayan town of Florida, at least fifty thousand of the faithful had heard the Pontiff.

4. I grant, my lords, what is fair. To spare the treasury is no vice, and our ancestors never approved the largess of those who buy the people with public money. Cicero himself asked: "What else is it to snatch from some what is theirs, and give to others what is not?" If the president restrains the state's debt and those new account books by which so many commonwealths have perished, I do not fault his constancy. But largess is one thing, the annona another. I who once governed the City know that to provide grain for the people is no bribe to purchase a crowd. It is the duty that holds a city together.

5. I remember when maintenance was withdrawn from our priests and the public grain denied to the Virgins of Vesta. A little money was saved to the treasury; a great bond of the commonwealth was broken. What was gain to the fisc was loss to piety. The old who live on pensions and the families who labour are of the same kind: they are not beggars but citizens to whom the commonwealth has pledged its faith. And faith, as the same Cicero says, "is the foundation of justice"; whoever subjects it to the ledgers may perhaps fill the treasury, but he empties the city.

6. Graver still is what the Frankfurt paper records: that the week before, dedicating a Baptist church in Patagonia, the president explained paradise itself in the vocabulary of economics. I, who pleaded before princes for the rites of our fathers, said: "Not by one road alone can one arrive at so great a mystery." I say the same of the common good. He who sets a single doctrine of the market in the place of all theology commits the very error of those who would impose one rite upon a whole city. The market must not become a god; it is a servant, useful indeed, but it requires a master.

7. Yet I praise, for it is rare, forms rightly kept. The president received with flowers, music and honour the pontiff he had once assailed with insults, and praised his dead countryman, whether from the heart or from the needs of the hour. Forms are not the shadows of things but their very substance: he who honours his guest has already paid part of his duty. And the Pontiff's journeys are themselves an oration: he goes to the disabled, to the young of Córdoba, to a prison, to the shrine of Luján, before departing for Peru.

8. The remedy I propose, my lords, is therefore neither new nor harsh. Let the treasury be thrifty; but let what is owed to the old, to those without work, and to families be held sacred, like the grain of the Vestals. Let him who commands acknowledge the limits of the power entrusted to him, and hear his opponents as citizens. Wealth without piety does not enrich a commonwealth; it drains it.