Catholic Economics

Today our Church remembers Saint Roque Gonzalez (d. 1628) the gifted and courageous Spanish Jesuit, martyred by tomahawk, who founded the “reductions” of Paraguay. These idyllic communities combined, in a distinctive and creative manner, respect for the Indians, Catholic values, and communal-and-private use of property. They were repressed by Spain in reaction to Vatican resistance to the Spanish empire. The sadness associated with this loss, captured so well by the movie The Mission, can present a temptation, for the Catholic in our current context, to despair of the possibility of ever expressing the values of our faith in the larger political/economic arena. It feels as if the articulation of a Catholic politics will inevitably be overwhelmed by larger, impersonal forces: the global market economy, totalitarian systems, or the more subtle cultures of death that corrupt the familial basis of society and sacrifice the innocent and powerless.

Then, however, one comes upon an inspiration like the lecture “Market Economics and Ethics” (http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=8544) delivered by then-Cardinal Ratzinger in 1985, years before the 1989 collapse of communism and decades before the globalized, capitalistic crisis of 2008. With his typical lucidity and prescience, he critiqued both economic communism and classic liberal (we would call it conservative) free market capitalism. Both view economics as systems of absolute, mechanistic determinism: the one in dialectical materialism and the opposite in the “invisible hand” that magically coordinates a multitude of egoistic (often greedy) decisions into efficiency, abundance, and happiness for all. Neither system allows participation of the ethical, free, decisive person in economics: the one seeing only objectivistic determinations at work and the other marginalizing the ethical to the subjective or private realm. Without entering into any of the concrete, prudential details of political and economic controversy, the Cardinal insisted that economics, like politics, is an action of the human person and always presumes and expresses an ethical viewpoint.

This illumination is most pertinent for our current situation and specifically for the emerging battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party and the conservative movement. The surges of enthusiasm for Huckabee and Palin, as well as the clear rejection of Giuliani, certified that defense of the family and the innocent is the non-negotiable center of the movement. But economic policy is another thing. The “free-market-low-tax-small-government” libertarian wing of the party continues to dominate in economics. The McCain/Palin mavericks catered to this wing and worsened their chances in the face of the economic decline as their only chant became: “lower taxes and stop earmarks.”

That same wing now despises the Bush Administration for not being “truly conservative” in the venerated Reagan tradition. In fact George W. Bush did distance himself from the free market fanaticism associated with Reagan. For example, he tripled the amount of foreign aid over that of Bill Clinton, who is rightly regarded as an internationalist and humanitarian. This accomplishment, especially in regard to AIDs in Africa, as well his other efforts towards a “compassionate conservatism” earned him the animosity of that wing of his own party and did nothing to temper liberal resentment, which grew into an almost compulsive hysteria. The worst thing would be for the anti-Bush wave to install the free market extremists in control of the conservative movement.

An influx of working class and economically liberal Catholics into the Republican Party would both consolidate its commitment to innocent life and move it economically towards a common sense, pragmatic and worker-friendly economics, allowing for free markets influenced by government direction and correction. Such an approach is advocated by moderates like David Brooks and Douthat/Salam ("The Grand New Party.") The lack of such an exodus in the recent election is another reason it was such a disappointment.

The Catholic voice is entirely silenced and domesticated within the Democrat Party and may be overwhelmed by the free-marketers within the Republican Party. This leaves the Catholic voter in roughly the position of the Paraguayan reductions, portrayed by Jeremy Irons and the pugnacious Robert DeNiro, which is to say the position of our martyr-saint Roque Gonzalez, as the tomahawk split his skull.