Dear Friends of Istituto Acton,
With the recent nomination of Bishop Blase Cupich as the next Archbishop of Chicago, we are likely entering the latest round of polemics over the purported incompatibility of Catholicism and capitalism, Windy-City style. In honor of Sean Connery, we’ll be sure not to bring a knife to this gun fight.
One reason to think so is Bishop Cupich’s participation at a June 2014 conference at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. The title of that conference, “Erroneous Autonomy: The Catholic Case against Libertarianism”, tells you all you need to know about its conclusions. The videos don’t reveal how many people took part, but it took place around the same time as Acton University, where we had nearly 1,000 people from all over the world trying to bring markets and morality together in a constructive fashion.
Another is the portrayal of Cupich as a new kind of leader – a “Francis bishop” – who eschews the culture wars over abortion, same-sex marriage, and other contentious issues - all having to do with the Church’s teachings on sexuality - and focuses on supposedly non-controversial matters like immigration and youth unemployment because “this economy kills.” (Cue Rodney King in the pulpit.) Many on the religious left are hoping for the demise of nasty ideologues like Paul Ryan and the Acton Institute who have the gall to promote economic liberty as a path to material and perhaps spiritual well-being, and may even commit the mortal sin of voting Republican.
This recurring animus against free markets may come as a surprise to those of us who have, and especially to those who haven’t, enjoyed the benefits of freedom, innovation and wealth creation. Didn’t we put the mythology of “real socialism” to rest with Pope St. John Paul II’s 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus? John Paul certainly didn’t idolize the market economy and warned that it will succeed only to the degree that it respects moral and ethical principles that come from outside the field of economics. The world’s financial and business scandals continually remind us of this truth. At some point, however, we have to regard this hostility to markets as the ideological equivalent as that some libertarians have towards the State.
To be fair, Bishop Cupich’s reading of libertarianism was not nearly as extreme as Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga’s account. I’ve heard the latter give similar talks in person on several occasions and his views never seem to change, no matter what evidence exists to the contrary. His Eminence has no patience for reforming or improving “the idol” of market economies; he want to smash and replace it with nothing but love (try paying your bills with that!), where Cupich asserts that libertarians simply don’t believe in solidarity and apply economics to every aspect of life. Cupich, of course, is American and Rodriguez is from Honduras, so the differences in perceptions and realities between North and South America are definitely major factors in how one appraises capitalism. But I think there’s more to these kinds of remarks than geography or even culture.
It has something to do with accepting the idea that economic thinking inevitably becomes the only way of looking at the world and crowds out everything else; it’s a new form of the materialist determinism expounded by Marx and his followers. While religious critics of capitalism often fashion themselves as simple pastors and allies of the downtrodden, “men very often find themselves in a sad state because they do not give enough thought and consideration to these things,” as Pope Paul VI put it in his encyclical on development (Populorum Progressio, n.85). The problem is the denial to see economics for what it is, or at least what it used to be before the mathematicians took over, i.e. a fundamentally human science.
I don’t expect bishops to have PhDs in economics, but some appreciation of the new opportunities provided by free markets would be very much welcomed by those of us who want to see growing economies lift people out of poverty. Would it be so bad to hear a bishop say that onerous levels of taxes and regulations make poverty more, rather than less, likely? Would it be impossible for a bishop to say that the freedom to buy and sell licit goods and services doesn’t mean we have the freedom to beat our wives or exploit each other sexually? Would it be that hard to convince their flock that they can run successful businesses without endangering their eternal souls?
In order to be truly effective pastors, bishops need to be more than “pastoral” in the simple-minded sense of the word. As a highly-educated segment of the Church and the population in general, they have the responsibility of understanding the intellectual challenges presented by modern society, where authority, tradition and order have much less appeal than concepts such as liberty and equality. The alternative is to allow even more radical notions of autonomy take root, placing the Church at an even greater disadvantage. Unfortunately, these intellectual challenges require thinking more seriously about mundane activities like commerce than most theologians and philosophers would like to do.
I’ve noted before in these letters that the spectacle of the anti-intellectual intellectual or the anti-modern modern originated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His critiques of the negative effects of commercial society on the human soul had tremendous influence on virtually all aspects of 19th-century European life, which also happens to be the setting for the beginning of modern Catholic social teaching. Rousseau ran afoul of the Catholic and Calvinist religious authorities of his day due to his promulgation of “natural religion” and other heresies, not to mention his own disastrous moral failings. Looking at the way our religious authorities now speak of equality and compassion, one wonders if he has gotten his revenge.
Thanks be to God, the survival of the Church does not depend on its intellectual sophistication, so I have no doubt the Church will survive this latest bout of misinformed economics and overheated rhetoric among its leaders. As an Acton colleague of mine puts it, personal sanctity is the most important thing and some of our bishops will probably be assigned to the “bad economics” part of heaven. That would be ok if so many others didn’t have to suffer the consequences of bad economics (poverty, stagnation, wasted resources, increased frustration and envy, and yes, even youth unemployment) in the meantime.
Let’s assume that religious leaders are acting out of sincere concern for the poor. So why do bishops hold views that manifestly hurt those they are trying to help? Perhaps, as the French poet Charles Péguy once remarked, “It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of looking insufficiently progressive.”
Kishore Jayabalan
Director
