Pope Benedict XVI yesterday weighed into the financial crisis hitting the world, claiming it showed the futility of money.
As stock markets around the world recorded record falls – the Dow Jones down 3.58 per cent yesterday and the FTSE 100 falling 7.85 per cent – the pontiff urged the world to learn lessons of the banking crisis.
"He who builds only on visible and tangible things like success, career and money builds the house of his life on sand," the Pope said in an assembly in the Vatican.
"We are now seeing, in the collapse of major banks, that money vanishes, it is nothing."
The Vatican's own newspaper L'Osservatore Romano has also taken a firm stance on the crisis – criticising the free market capitalism as having "grown too much and badly in the past two decades".
The Vatican is particularly open to the threat of global financial crisis.
Besides its industries of producing mosaics and uniforms, the Holy See earns around $1 billion (£574 million) from its portfolio of stocks, bonds, property and donations.
The Vatican's books were hit in 2003 and 2007 because of fall in the US dollar, although its wealth grew sizably in the 1990s boom.
On Sunday the head of the Catholic church also hit out at modern culture.
"Nations once rich in faith and vocations are losing their own identity under the harmful and destructive influence of a certain modern culture," he said.
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