Who says the Holy See isn’t hip to pop culture? It just takes them a couple of decades to catch up. In a speech to the Italian Senate today, the Vatican’s Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone invoked Oliver Stone’s Wall Street — specifically, Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” speech — as part of his explanation of the current financial crisis.

Tomorrow’s edition of the official Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano features an article explaining the reference. While acknowledging that Wall Street‘s “strictly cinematographic merits (are) less than first rate,” the paper says that Stone’s movie “still says something true and worrying about the international financial world of the recent past.”