Every economic decision has a moral consequence....

The Trouble with Catholic Social Teaching

Posted By Dale Ahlquist On April 19, 2011 7:31 PM 

... There are people who think Catholic Social Teaching has something to do with homosexual rights or abortion rights or contraception rights. It doesn’t. Those things are not rights. They are wrongs. And the Church holds the line against them without compromise. Other people avoid Catholic Social Teaching because of what it really does mean. It means justice for the poor.

The Church has always emphasized the corporal works of mercy: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, comforting the afflicted. But justice is distinct from mercy in that it means achieving something more permanent than relieving immediate suffering. It means, as Chesterton says, raising both the political and the economic status of the poor. ...

Chesterton ... says we once had the medieval concept of the Just Price. Then the simplistic “laws” of supply and demand. Now things are more complicated: we have a market where suppliers “demand a demand.... 

Anything that exploits the weaker side of man is, quite simply, evil. It is one of the reasons why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

The old economic models no longer work. In order to have a just society we need to act with principles other than economic profit. This is a theme repeated by Chesterton throughout his writings. It is also a theme repeated in the ... the encyclicals on Catholic Social Teaching. The latest installment is Caritas in Veritate (“Love in Truth”) from Pope Benedict XVI.

Mammon, the one real alternative to God, has always had a robust following, but never more so than in the modern world, where, as the new encyclical points out, the amount of overall wealth has increased but so has the disparity between the rich and the poor.

The Pope says, “Every economic decision has a moral consequence.” He echoes ... the social philosophy of Distributism, which was espoused by Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Fr. Vincent McNabb, and others. ... Benedict does not confine his treatment of social issues to mere economics. He touches upon technology, ecology, and education−the whole human person. ...

In a skeptical and materialistic age, the social encyclicals seem to garner the widest attention because everyone is interested in seeing how the Church will adjust to the trends of the modern world. However, it is arguable that there has never been a real surprise in any papal encyclical. The Pope simply affirms the truths the Church has always affirmed. The encyclicals are needed only because the world changes, not because the truth changes. The world needs to be refreshed by the truth. For instance, in 1968, the only surprise of Humane Vitae was that the Church was not going to give into the world. Lust is still wrong. Now, in 2009, the only surprise of Caritas in Veritate was that the Church was not going to give into the world. Greed is still wrong.

In both these encyclicals, the family is defended as the basic unit of society. We cannot have sexual arrangements that destroy the family. We cannot have economic arrangements that destroy the family. ...