Chris Arnade  theguardian.com, Thursday 12 December 2013 06.15 AEST

Edward Snowden was not chosen as Time magazine‘s Person of the Year, and for this many in the media are outraged.

Instead Time chose Pope Francis, a man who in the last year has been transforming the Catholic church by focusing on the searing inequalities brought about by poverty. In one of his many poignant quotes recently, he asks:

How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?

His stunning 224-page “Apostolic Exhortation” is a treatise on the corrosive effects of capitalism and a call for empathy. It is a must read, whether you are Catholic or not:

Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.

I keep going back to the line “those wielding economic power”. They are the ones who have come to dominate our society, a society that over the last 40 years has slowly ceded to the ideology of free markets.

When I worked on Wall Street in the 90s, I traveled for business to Pope Francis‘s home country of Argentina. I was one of many foreigners there to tell them how they needed to reform their country, open it up to the free markets. They did embrace the free markets. That worked well until it didn’t, ending in a massive crash in 2001. Poverty rates climbed during that period.

We bankers would travel in taxis, past the slums that ringed the city center of Buenos Aires. No banker went in there. It was said to be too dangerous. Instead we moved around numbers on a spreadsheet, numbers that represented people. Pope Francis did go into the slums. Regularly. He saw what we didn’t. As he wrote in his Apostolic Exhortation: “Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded.”

The victory of the free markets has made empathy a bad word. It certainly is on Wall Street. You can’t make money if you start asking how it is made, who is being hurt, and who is being left behind.

So rather than look at those left behind, those wielding economic power have slipped further into their world of technology and luxury. Surrounding themselves by technological walls to complement the physical walls.

Snowden has reminded us that those technological walls have cracks. That nobody is completely free. It is a big revelation, but it’s something those living in poverty have viscerally known from birth. They know that many in this world are never even given a chance of freedom.

Pope Francis asks that all of us, especially those wielding economic power, start looking at the destructive effects of our current idolatry of money and rationality. Get out of the technology cocoon and see what – who – has been left behind:

I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.

Snowden is combating the creeping influence of state power into technology. The Pope is combating the complete takeover of society by free markets, the resulting death of empathy, and ultimately the soullessness of our current culture.

I have spent past three years with many people living in the poorest parts of the Bronx neighborhood in New York City. One night, soon after the Snowden story broke, I was in a crack house taking pictures of addicts by candlelight. I asked one of them if I could post her picture online. “Not if it’s Facebook. The government owns that and are spying on you.”

Her friend replied, “Of course they are, you idiot. They are also throwing me against the wall whenever they want. They are breaking down my house whenever they want. They are throwing all of our kids and men in jail whenever they want. And people are upset they looking at a Facebook page?”

Poverty has a way of searing into you, from birth, recognition of the injustices of our society.

Time magazine got it right. Maybe it really was the better business decision, a way to sell more magazines. If so, that says a lot. Pope Francis has made stories of injustice profitable.

That alone should make him the person of the year.