Christianity Today just published my take on Pope Benedict XVI’s latest encyclical, Caritas in Veritate. Here is an excerpt.
Although mainstream media outlets have already spun this encyclical as one that focuses on the global economic crisis—and it most certainly does address that—that is clearly not the pope’s point of departure. For those who have eyes to see, the animating principle of this encyclical is virtually on every page of it: theological anthropology is the only proper starting pointing from which we can come to know the common good….
The categories that dominate our public discourse in the United States—left, right, liberal, conservative, etc.—play no role in illuminating the Church’s social doctrines or the message of Caritas in Veritate. This is why it is a fool’s errand to attempt to artificially divide Catholic social teachings into its left and right wings….Benedict does argue in this encyclical that free markets and the ownership of property are the best way people can produce the wealth that is necessary for a just regime. But free markets will not result in integral human development if they are bereft of sound ethical constraints and not directed toward the common good. This is why in Catholic social teaching the state has an obligation to protect, nurture, and help sustain the natural development and proper ends of certain governmental and private institutions. These include the family, civic and political associations (such as labor unions), organizations of social welfare (administered privately and/or by the state), and schools. According to Benedict, such institutions make morally sound markets possible because they provide the social infrastructure for the achieving of integral human development. So the Sermon on the Mount cannot be separated from “Honor thy Father and Mother,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and “Thou shalt not steal.” Thus, the “justice” in social justice refers to a rightly ordered community, not to the ideologies of a Ludwig Von Mises or a Karl Marx. In Christian theology, you can gain the whole world and lose your own soul (Luke 9:25). To paraphrase St. Paul, that’s a stumbling block to the Austrians and foolishness to the Marxists.
You can read the whole thing here.
July 10th, 2009 | 3:09 pm
Very good
July 11th, 2009 | 9:49 am
If Ludwig von Mises is the big scholastic bogey man the philosopher will make him out to be (other than a secular Jew who had no religious sense a la Guardini, not a sin per se, more a handicap deserving of pity) then why does Benedict appeal to the system of metaphysics Mises introduced to the economic profession, economic logic (see 32) vs mathematical determinism aka logical positivism of the pederastic Keynes suddenly so fashionable in the dirigiste croney capitalism favored among the First Things crowd?
“Mathematics Versus Economic Logic by Ludwig von Mises [This article's original title is "Logical Catallactics Versus Mathematical Catallactics." excerpted from chapter 16 of Human Action.]
“A very imperfect and superficial metaphor is not a substitute for the services rendered by logical economics. The problems of prices and costs have been treated also with mathematical methods. There have even been economists who held that the only appropriate method of dealing with economic problems is the mathematical method and who derided the logical economists as “literary” economists.”
http://www.mises.org/story/3540
It would seem to me that the literary description of existence, thought and action is inherently open to the Trinitarian conception of integral human development that Benedict lucidly appeals to. Please correct me where I am wrong, but I cannot let this calumny against one of the most cogent economic thinkers in the 20th Century to go unchallenged. Indeed, he would seem to be an ally of ours in acknowledging the superior inheritance of the Christian West in comparison to his imperial neighbors, the Ottomans:
“The religion of Islam has not changed since the days of the Arab conquests. Their literature, their philosophies continue to repeat the old ideas and do not penetrate beyond the circle of theology. One looks in vain among them for men and movements such as Western Christianity has produced in each century. They maintain their identity only by rejecting everything foreign and ‘different,’ by traditionalism and conservatism. Only their hatred of everything foreign rouses them to great deeds from time to time. All new sects, even the new doctrines which arise with them, are nothing more than echoes of this fight against the foreign, the new, the infidel.”
cited from Mises on Islam by Laurence M. Vance
http://www.lewrockwell.com/vance/vance23.html
July 11th, 2009 | 11:05 pm
“The categories that dominate our public discourse in the United States—left, right, liberal, conservative, etc.—play no role in illuminating the Church’s social doctrines or the message of Caritas in Veritate. This is why it is a fool’s errand to attempt to artificially divide Catholic social teachings into its left and right wings, as if the Church’s rejection of economic libertarianism and the proclamation of the principles of subsidiary and solidarity are inconsistent with support for male-female marriage and the sanctity of human life.” Bravo.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact