VATICAN CITY — A lack of financial ethics has wreaked “havoc” on the global economy, Pope Benedict XVI writes in a new encyclical released Tuesday (July 7), and calls for a “true world political authority” to ensure international cooperation, peace and environmental protection.

The encyclical on globalization, Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth), is Benedict’s third and the first to focus on Catholic social teaching. Encyclicals are among the most authoritative papal documents and largely serve to map out the priorities and concerns of the current pope.

Formally addressed to Catholics and “all people of good will,” the 144-page document emphasizes the moral causes for the vast economic disparities between rich nations and the underdeveloped world.

“The causes of underdevelopment are not primarily of the material order,” Benedict writes, but “in the lack of brotherhood among individuals and peoples.”

Global competition has spurred governments in poorer countries to weaken labor unions and reduce social spending in order to keep wage costs low, the pope writes, while foreign aid spending has often fallen prey to corruption in both donor and recipient countries.

In an apparent reference to the high prices of patented pharmaceuticals, Benedict criticizes the “excessive zeal for protecting knowledge on the part of rich countries, through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property, especially in the field of health care.”

The pope also deplores sex tourism in the Third World, lamenting that “this activity takes place with the support of local governments, with silence from those in the tourists’ countries of origin, and with the complicity of many of the tour operators.”

The encyclical is largely a survey of failed solutions to problems of inequality. Benedict condemns attempts to alleviate poverty through “strategies of mandatory birth control,” calling it a “mistake” to “consider population increase as the primary cause of underdevelopment.”

In unusually strong language aimed at international development agencies, the pope notes that “at times … the poor serve to perpetuate expensive bureaucracies,” and urges international organizations to practice “complete transparency” with regard to funding.

He also warns that aid “can sometimes lock people into a state of dependence” if its beneficiaries have no say in how the aid is distributed.

Nevertheless, Benedict judges that the “unrelenting growth of global interdependence” requires reforming and strengthening the United Nations and other international institutions.

“To manage the global economy … to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration; for all this, there is an urgent need of a true world political authority,” Benedict writes.

Without mentioning the United Nations by name, the pope adds that “such an authority would need to be universally recognized and to be vested with the effective power to ensure security for all, regard for justice, and respect for rights.”

The encyclical’s publication came one day before leaders of the world’s richest nations were to meet at a G8 summit in the city of L’Aquila, 70 miles northeast of Rome, and three days before Benedict’s first meeting with President Obama. That context, though largely coincidental, has inevitably highlighted the political implications of the pope’s words.

“Amid the dense prose there are indications that he is to the left of almost every politician in America,” said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Woodstock Theological Center. “What politician would casually refer to `redistribution of wealth’ or talk of international governing bodies to regulate the economy?”

But other observers downplayed partisan characterizations of Benedict’s approach.

“It’s a mistake to ask, does it validate my position or not, either right or left,” said Carl Anderson, supreme knight of the Knights of Columbus. “The point is, how do I change as a result of reading it?”

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The encyclical emphasizes the link between personal and social ethics, attributing pollution and depletion of natural resources to “hedonism and consumerism,” for example, and bemoaning a disrespect for life that is expressed through abortion and euthanasia.

Benedict argues that morality is necessary not only for social equity but for material prosperity, as demonstrated by the current economic crisis.

Abandonment of financial ethics “has wreaked … havoc on the real economy,” he writes, and the crisis has shown that “without internal forms of solidarity and mutual trust, the market cannot completely fulfill its proper economic function.”

“Once profit becomes the exclusive goal,” Benedict writes, “it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.”