New: Catholic-Themed Stock Indexes

Pope Leo xiv is starting to make good on his promise to revolutionize international finances. On February 10, the Vatican bank (known as the Institute for the Works of Religion) announced the launch of two equity benchmarks that pick investments based on Catholic principles.

• The Morningstar ior U.S. Catholic Principles index and the Morningstar ior Eurozone Catholic Principles index are “designed to serve as a reference for Catholic investments worldwide.”

In a meeting with the College of Cardinals in May, the new pope explained that Leo xiii was the primary inspiration for his papacy, “mainly because Pope Leo xiii in his historic encyclical, Rerum Novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great Industrial Revolution.”

He also noted that in “our own day, the church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor.”

Each index includes 50 medium-cap ($2 billion to $10 billion) companies and large-cap ($10 billion plus) companies that align themselves with the Institute for the Works of Religion.

• This approach prioritizes Catholic moral norms above maximizing profit by encouraging companies to preserve the environment, combat addictions, protect the sanctity of human life, and adhere to the social doctrine of the church. It also gives the Vatican and its bank, troubled by scandal, new financial leverage.

Bible prophecy describes a great church that continues from early New Testament times to the return of Jesus Christ. It significantly influences “the kings of the earth” and “the merchants of the earth.” It exerts extraordinary power over a union of 10 nations (or groups of nations) described in symbolic terms as a “beast” (Revelation 17:12). In fact, this church has such great influence over the “beast” power, that “no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast” (Revelation 13:17).

Herbert W. Armstrong explained in his booklet Who or What Is the Prophetic Beast? that these nations are 10 European nations tenuously bound together by the ideological glue of Roman Catholicism. A day is coming soon when no one will be able to engage in business except those who submit to the social doctrine of the Vatican, including enforced work on the seventh-day Sabbath and enforced rest on Sunday.