There's going to be a third meeting at Catholic University on "the relationship of Catholicism to libertarianism." As with the others, there are no libertarians (or, indeed, anyone remotely right of center) on the docket. Instead:
There will be three major talks. The first, by Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego, will examine three faces of erroneous autonomy in the current political climate, and author Thomas Frank will give a presentation of the political landscape from a liberal, and populist, perspective. Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston will speak about the dignity of work, and Trumka will give concluding remarks.
McElroy is a progressive unlikely to articulate libertarian or conservative views. Thomas Frank, of course, is a darling of the progressive movement and sharp critic of capitalism. And the Trumka in question is Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO.
One would have hoped that CUA would have included representative voices of pro-capitalist Catholic social thought thinkers such as Michael Novak, Fr. Robert Sirico, or, for that matter, yours truly.
Although I give due assent to the Church's teaching on these issues, I am compelled once again to observe that:
Michael Novak, the preeminent Catholic neoconservative, ... has sometimes been a harsh critic of the Church’s prudential pronouncements on the economy. In Toward a Theology of the Corporation, for example, Novak asserted that Christian theologians tend to be poorly trained in economics and inexperienced with the business world: They “are likely to inherit either a pre-capitalist or a frankly socialist set of ideals about political economy.”[1] Consequently, theologians “are more likely to err in this territory than in most others.”[2]
A persistent error “in this territory” is the tendency towards what Milton Friedman called “the collectivist moral strain” in Catholic social thought.[3] Indeed, it is fair to assert that some documents in the social teaching more closely resemble “the platforms of European social democratic parties” than Biblical exegesis.[4] Even some of John Paul’s encyclicals have a statist flavor. In Laborem Exercens, for example, his sharp criticism of Marxism is strikingly offset by the statement that “one cannot exclude the socialization, in suitable circumstances, of certain means of production.”[5]
Importantly, however, Novak’s critiques are widely acknowledged as having substantially influenced the current Pope’s encyclicals on the economy,[6] thereby shifting the direction of Catholic social thought.
Strikingly, as is so often the case with progressive Catholic discussions of CST, Laborem Exercens and Centesimus Annus are curiously missing from the lengthy description of the CUA program.
In sum, Catholic social thought is not simply a rehash of the Democratic Party's platform on economic issues, as much as events like the one to be held at CUA would like to claim.
[1] Michael Novak, Toward a Theology of the Corporation 59 (rev. ed.1990).
[2] Id. at 12.
[3] Milton Friedman, Good Ends, Bad Means, in The Catholic Challenge to the American Economy 99 (Thomas M. Gannon ed. 1987).
[4] Robert Benne, The Bishops’ Letter—A Protestant Reading, in The Catholic Challenge to the American Economy 76, 79 (Thomas M. Gannon ed. 1987).
[5] John Paul II, Laborem Exercens ¶ 14, reprinted in Proclaiming Justice & Peace: Papal Documents from Rerum Novarum Through Centesimus Annus 351 (Michael Walsh & Brian Davies eds. 1991).
[6] Edward W. Younkins, Michael Novak’s Portrait of Democratic Capitalism, available at http://www.acton.org/publicat/m_and_m/1999_spr/younkins.html.
