After ‘Freakonomics’, is it now time for ‘Priestonomics’? 

For all the fashionable talk of ‘ethical’ shopping or business, it is striking how narrow is the range of concerns that are usually raised, rarely venturing beyond some fashionable environmental cause or ‘fair trade’ scheme. More rigorous moral and economic analysis is typically missing. 

Claiming the allegiance of a sixth part of humanity (and, following his recent conversion, Tony Blair) the Catholic Church has been pronouncing on questions of economics, political economy and business ethics for industrial societies, beginning with the papal statement or encyclical, Rerum Novarum, (‘New Things’), published by Pope Leo XIII in 1891. From the beginning, the first priority for this body of Catholic Social Teaching has been a rejection of socialism, as a materialistic doctrine, denying humanity’s deeper nature and fostering violent class conflict, a view that proved prescient decades before the advent of the communist dictatorships. 

Now, a fascinating new book, edited by Professor Philip Booth, Catholic Social Teaching and the Market Economy brings together contributions from laymen and clergy highlighting how Catholic thinking offers moral support for many central planks of free-market thinking – the importance of the institution of private property, of enterprise as a social benefactor, lower taxes and limiting the size and placing limits on the role of state bureaucracies in caring for the poor in favour of civil society. While defending the role of private property, business and the market economy, Leo and subsequent Popes have consistently sought to direct them, as a means rather than end, to supporting family and community life and to developing human potential for service through work. 

The authors’ treatment of the encyclicals is usually respectful, but does not hold back on attacking some of the more vacuous statements that clergy and on occasions, even Popes have drifted into. The 1967 en-cyclical Populorum Progresso (‘On the Development of Peoples’), a compendium of the delusions of the time, including dependency theory, was aptly described by the Wall Street Journal as "warmed-over Marxism". Much comment by the Church or laity on social issues today barely rises above a similar banality, reflexively calling for more social welfare, reduced consumption and increased foreign aid. In his 1991 Centissimo Anno, John Paul II reiterated the lessons of the dangers of communism he had learned in the hard school of the Polish workers’ struggle against a government nominally ruling in their name. However, he returned the focus to the pathologies of both the free and the underdeveloped world. Consumerism as an empty accumulation of goods was criticised. Smothering social welfare he condemned too for being little better than communism in treating people as means to the ends of the state rather than an end in themselves. 

Sceptical Catholics, or people of any or no Christian faith should find this an extremely valuable book, in reconciling their humanity with their professional knowledge as social scientists and businesspeople with their humanity. The one possible weakness of the book might be in its Anglo-American focus, so that, owing to the minority status of Catholics in the US and Britain, little emphasis is placed on measuring up the authors’ view of Catholic economics against the continental tradition with its corporatist, Christian Democratic vision of Europe shared in particularly by Jacques Delors and inspired by Catholic philosophy. Nevertheless, I can only hope that we shall soon see the book’s arguments being taken up and repeated in sermons.