Dear friends of Istituto Acton. With the June 18 release of Laudato Si’, my Acton colleagues and I have been incredibly busy responding to Pope Francis’s encyclical and we wanted to share some of our first thoughts with you, especially our Italian readers. (For full coverage, please visit our Laudato Si’ Resource Guide.)
The release happened to occur during our annual seminar Acton University in Grand Rapids with about 1,000 people from all over the world in attendance, so we had the benefit of being together in one place across the Atlantic. The state of Michigan may be geographically far from Rome, but we still speak with great love and respect for the See of Peter.
In this special edition newsletter, Fr. Robert Sirico and Dr. Samuel Gregg offer their immediate but considered reactions in order to highlight the important of free markets in caring for our common home, while Catherine Snow provides some useful background information on the encyclical’s advisors.
Many people may not assume that the buying and selling of goods and services is something that should occur within a family, and in a certain sense, they are correct. But in another sense, how else are we supposed to allocate the vast resources God has given us?
The more I reflect on this dilemma, the more I have come to realize that economics is like the plumbing of our common home. It is absolutely necessary for its maintenance and thriving, even if we prefer not to think about it too much. We prefer to focus on the architecture, the garden and of course the people inside, but without effective plumbing, the home breaks down in ways beyond the physical.
I’ll have more to say about the functions of the family and property in the commercial society in my regular letter from Rome next week. For now, let’s roll up our sleeves and take a closer look inside the oft-neglected inner workings of our common home.
Kishore Jayabalan
Director
