For centuries, the Catholic Church has declared war on inequalities. In Latin America, that battle is especially intense. In Costa Rica, the bishops and a number of priests almost derailed the referendum on the Free Trade Agreement with the United States. Their most often used argument was that the agreements benefited the rich, to the detriment of the poor. If the agreements were signed, the clerics claimed, the gap between the fortunate and the dispossessed would increase. That statement was not true, but a good many people believed it. “Dispossessed” is a word some clergymen love. It has a lot of pull. It conveys the curious notion that someone has taken away from the poor something that they had, or should have.

The person who has done the most to establish a rigorous measurement of inequality is an Italian mathematician and statistician named Corrado Gini, who died in 1965. In 1921, Gini published a brief article -- barely three pages long -- about the inequality of income among nations and established a methodology to assay the differences. He divided the whole of society into five parts and calculated which fragment of income corresponded to each fifth part. With that information, he created an index where 0 was absolute equality (all persons had the same income) and 1 was absolute inequality (a single person hoarded all incomes.)

Like many of his contemporaries, Gini, then under the influence of Mussolini, was a corporativist who tended to perceive and classify society in strata. He thought that a scientific basis existed for fascism and wrote a book to demonstrate that point. However, his Gini Coefficient became an objective proof of whether a society was fair or unfair. And, to some degree, some of that was true. His index demonstrated that Scandinavian societies, which were thoroughly dominated by the middle social sectors, were situated between 0.2 and 0.3 and were the least unequal in the world, whereas almost all the Latin American and African societies lay between 0.5 and 0.7. They were the most unfair.

Why do Latin Americans, after 100 revolutions, maintain those levels of inequality? The Church believes the phenomenon is the product of the unfair distribution of wealth, but that's not true. Inequality in income is the consequence of the differences in education, origin (urban or rural), family structure, and the weakness of the productive fabric where people earn a salary. In societies that raise bananas, coffee or sugar, without adding value to the production, the workers are terribly poor.

Quite simply, the less unequal societies are those where the workers earn high wages because they produce valuable goods or services. A worker at Volvo can earn $30 per hour because he builds cars that have a high market price. He earns much because he produces much, not because the Swedes are more just. In turn, there's no way a Haitian peasant can earn a decent wage for cutting cane with a machete.

How is a less-unequal society built? Obviously, the same way a developed society is built. On a domestic level, with education, administrative honesty, adequate public policies, meritocracy, social peace, hard work, observance of the law, a good judicial system capable of settling conflicts, respect for property, and the encouragement of national savings. On an international level, by availing itself of the possibilities of globalization, by attracting foreign investment and technological transfer, by maintaining an intense international commerce and by multiplying its contacts with the First World.

What hasn't the slightest chance of reducing inequalities is the prescription the Church usually proposes: to place the accent on aid and redistribute the generated wealth among the needy. That's not the way to do it. No country has ever leaped into modernity and development by following that road. It's amazing that, after 2,000 years of existence, an institution as wise and well-intentioned has not yet learned the lesson. The worst thing is not that the Church makes an intellectual error; it is that, by doing so, it inflicts terrible harm to those it aims to protect. In Costa Rica, it almost did.