Two Sisters

May 17, 2021 (611 words)

I started with two sisters, but lost one to melanoma in 1998. She was 34 at the time, the youngest of the litter, and our family’s glue. She was in charge of parties and reunions and such. The remaining five of us would be a closer-knit bunch if she were still here today.

There were ten years separating me and my baby sister, but we got along with each other from childhood, and related very easily as adults. My surviving sister, on the other hand, is only a year younger than I, and we’ve never agreed on anything. Over the years I have approached our intermittent encounters with trepidation. This sister could always be counted on to do or say something that would infuriate me, and leave me stewing for days afterwards.

(My father once confided how he saw this sister and I as very much alike. He suggested that was probably the reason I felt at loggerheads with her all the time. This was an interesting perspective I hadn’t considered until he mentioned it.)

Our clan recently assembled in Sedona, AZ, for the late-in-life, first-ever marriage of our youngest brother. (He will turn 60 in October, and met his love on-line five years ago.) It was a casual outdoor ceremony with a beautiful mountaintop view of the famous red hills. At the reception immediately following, something unexpected happened.

At one point I gathered my courage and approached my sister’s table, sat down of my own volition, and actually engaged her in conversation. Not much had changed – we were still disagreeing about everything, and she still displayed that unnerving tendency to get the last word in, no matter the topic. But I was granted some sort of grace that afternoon, allowing me to avoid my familiar pattern of contentiousness.

By maintaining my emotional equilibrium for a change, I was able to see my surviving sister for what she truly is, for what she has always been: a woman of great integrity who takes her work in medicine very seriously, and who tries to make whatever she is involved with better, whenever she can.

Here’s a few other adjectives that came to mind as we chatted that day: practical, unsentimental, and indominable.

Why wasn’t I able to embrace this sister’s essence before? Why have I spent so much time quibbling with and picking apart a few minor stylistic differences in how we each discern life’s grand design?

Developing perspective as time marches on is a healthy pastime. I often think of my late father in this regard, who had a knack for seeing things clearly. Though I didn’t always feel that way about him. As a young buck on the way up, I saw my father as not fulfilling his potential, not using his obvious intelligence to get ahead in the world. In some ways I thought of him back then as a fool and a failure.

Fortunately, by my late thirties I had come to my senses. Not only did I learn to appreciate all aspects of his worldview, I began to feel a deep sense of gratitude for the rich (non-material) legacy he was ready and willing to bequeath me. With my intellectual equilibrium thus properly restored, I was able to reap the benefits of his wit and wisdom over the last twenty years of his life. My father died eight years ago now, and I still haven’t really found anyone else to talk to since he passed.

To mourn the loss of one’s youth is a common affliction. But I’m finding it’s good to get older. I am glad to be exactly the age I am right now.

Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr
May 17, 2021

Foolish and Wise

April 30, 2021 (16 words)

When speaking extemporaneously I often feel foolish. When I write, I am able to approximate wisdom.

Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr
April 30, 2021

Individuals and the State

April 3, 2021 (1,210 words)

Catholic teaching on social justice is a slippery thing in many respects, hard to figure and difficult to pin down. To our modern way of thinking it flip-flops between sticking up for what it refers to as the dignity of the individual, and calling on the state to play a vital role in sorting out what can sometimes be conflicting individual interests.

Take the idea of private property. The Church has always been four-square in favor of maintaining the right to private property, one of many reasons it rejects communism and socialism.

But it does not teach a right to private property that is absolute. This confounds our contemporary understanding on the matter, grounded as it is in the seductive ideologies of (classical) liberalism and libertarianism.

Working from a historical perspective that acknowledges different societies have had different concepts of property, papal teaching points out while no government has the right to abolish private property, there is a role for the state to play in “making clearer” the social duties of property owners – since property has a social as well as an individual character.

In fleshing out this idea, the following explanation was penned by a long-dead pope almost one hundred years ago:

When civil authority adjusts ownership to meet the needs of the public good it acts not as an enemy, but as the friend of private owners; for thus it effectively prevents the possession of private property… from creating intolerable burdens and rushing to its own destruction. It does not therefore abolish but protects private ownership, and far from weakening the right to private property it gives it new strength.
Quadragesimo Anno, no. 49
(1931)

The take-away being property ownership has duties to the common good and is therefore subject to limits. Zoning laws – though not specifically mentioned in the brief excerpt quoted above – would be an example of ‘the state’ performing the function of making clearer “what is licit and what is illicit for property owners.”

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Catholic teaching on social justice is merely an extension of basic Christian anthropology, which understands the human person as being ‘relational’ by nature. We are meant to be in community with others. The individual is never wholly self-sufficient. We need each other to know ourselves, and we are more deeply defined by our membership in a larger unit of humanity.

The family we are born into is the first of many communities we encounter during the course of our lives, and these encounters present opportunities to interact with those whose sensibilities are often very different from our own. This relating can be awkward and difficult, but it produces the empathy that allows us to recognize and respect the inherent dignity of others. This respect expresses itself when we voluntarily restrain/temper our wants and desires to avoid creating intolerable burdens for those around us.

Modern anthropology takes a far different approach to all this. Rather than being relational by nature, the human person is a wholly Independent agent, apart from any “community” he or she may encounter or choose to affiliate with. The family one is born into is of no particular import, since comingling in close quarters is not the first step in a necessary process of learning to acclimate oneself to others.

As the basic entity of human existence – the only natural human entity there is – the individual is inherently free and equal in an ungoverned and non-relational state. In this context achieving social justice and honoring human dignity is a simple matter of being allowed to act on one’s inherent freedom to do whatever one pleases.

Any custom or tradition is likely to impose an unwanted restriction. Any authority or law is an unnatural restraint on the individual’s ability to pursue and achieve his or her own ends. The best form of government is no government at all. The next best form of government (i.e., liberal democracy) is one geared toward expanding the conditions that lead to a further realization of the individual’s wants and desires. The only legitimate goal of public policy, then, is to facilitate the greatest possible pursuit and satisfaction of individual appetites, with no mediating affiliations to complicate things.

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No wonder Catholic teaching on social justice makes no sense to us today. It runs directly counter to our contemporary understanding of the individual, and of the proper relationship of the individual to the larger community.

Yet Christian anthropology and modern anthropology do share a common objective: the promotion of justice based on the dignity of the human person – even if their respective paths could not be more divergent. The deep thinkers who dreamed up and continue to refine modern anthropology are surely inspired by a wish to see things improve. But they are also motivated by an unshakeable conviction that what came before has proven itself ineffective, if not downright mid-guided.

The medieval idea of a “Great Chain of Being,” which saw every aspect of reality as reflective of a hierarchy with divine perfection at the top, was not sufficiently egalitarian for their taste.

The old-timey Christian concept of the “common good” also needed an update, since it was based on what might be called ‘trickle down virtue.’ If we all keep the other guy in mind before we act in our self-interest, and if public policy is geared to what’s best for all, the individual will eventually see some amelioration of their circumstances. This process was deemed too slow and unreliable by the deep thinkers and cultural revolutionaries. The new paradigm they came up with doesn’t take any chances, in that it focuses on an individual’s immediate situation right out of the gate.

Following this logic, we modern men and women have come to believe our freedom is the one, true God. We refuse to submit to any authority that does not derive its mandate from the will of the people. Even though this amounts to an unfailing tendency to seek liberation from any limitations on the achievement of desire. Oddly enough, our economic life becomes the primary agent of this liberation – in how it expands opportunities and the materials needed to realize existing desires, and in how it creates new ones we did not know we had.

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All this talk of appetites and desires and liberation may prompt the casual reader to think I am discussing sexual gratification. Especially since Catholic anthropology is being referenced, and we all know the Church’s dour reputation for being opposed to people having any fun in their sex lives.

This is a common misunderstanding, and it’s yet another reason the casual reader will be surprised to learn from Catholic teaching on social justice it is our economic life, and not our sometimes-wayward choices regarding sexual mores, that has been the primary agent of liberation from any restraint on behavior.

Even more unexpected is this final irony. The lack of prudence and personal restraint in the economic realm – celebrated as a victory over hidebound tradition and political tyranny, and a major advance in the heralded cause of individual rights – is the very thing standing in the way of achieving the social justice all proponents of modern anthropology and liberal democracy routinely cite as their highest priority.

(Based on my reading of Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deenen, and An Economics of Justice and Charity by Thomas Storck.)

Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr
April 3, 2021

Some Practical Application

March 20, 2021 (1,075 words)

Catholic teaching on social justice is a system of thought that seeks to integrate law, politics, and economics. But there is nothing particularly ‘Catholic’ about it. The implementation does not require you to recite special prayers, observe the feast day of saints, or be proficient in Latin. There are no secret handshakes to learn, or inner sanctum to enter.

Its wisdom is readily accessible to all, and its practice requires only the application of what used to be called common courtesy.

But a little knowledge of recent history is always helpful. ‘Social justice’ has been at the core of papal teaching on economics since 1891, though the phrase didn’t formally enter its lexicon until 1923. Its focus has always been the “state of economic life” that does not allow workers to receive a sufficient wage to meet ordinary domestic needs, support a family, and enjoy “reasonable and frugal comfort.”

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Social justice compels those involved in the political and economic order to restructure society, if necessary, so wage justice can be achieved. That’s a pretty tall order. So far the burden for that restructuring has fallen on the political side of the equation, while those running the show on the economic side have gotten a free pass.

If social justice boils down to our duty to society as a whole, we must find a way of getting business owners and the companies they run to sign on. The notion that ‘profitably’ is a corporation’s only social responsibility must be exposed and discredited, once and for all.

Turning over a new leaf in this regard means fighting against the natural inclination toward self-interest and personal aggrandizement. What makes the proposed transformation so much harder is how these traits have been enshrined as positive virtues in the modern era. But the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. So here are a few suggestions culled from papal teaching on social justice designed to help the business community do a better job of balancing the scales.

HOW BUSINESS CAN BETTER BALANCE THE SCALES:

#1) Recognize the dignity of the human person. Every employee – managers to line workers, executives to mailroom people – is a child of God, as they say. Though employees have differing skill levels that will lead them to take on greater or lesser responsibilities within an organization, every employee should be recognized as a stakeholder in the business.

#2) This means when a business succeeds, it’s not enough for the owners and investors to benefit. Employees must also be rewarded proportionately. As things stand now, the serious distribution of profit is limited to owners, high-level executives, and investors.

#3) Not only does the definition of ‘stakeholder’ need to extend beyond owners and investors to include employees, but it must widen the circle even further – to suppliers and customers and the community at large. A successful business should not only be investing in its employees but should also be looking out for its suppliers and the people who buy its products. The net result is a positive impact on the communities in which a successful business operates.

This radical notion was endorsed in August 2019 by an influential think tank of CEO’s from the largest companies in the United States called the Business Roundtable. Its revised “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation” repudiates the Friedman Doctrine that states: ”There is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase profits.”

What has prompted this select group of CEOs to change their tune? As far as I know, the Business Roundtable did not recently affiliate itself with the Vatican. The new and most welcome philosophical re-alignment may just be another case of great minds thinking alike, and how everything that rises must converge.

#4) Once employees are recognized as stakeholders, it follows their every movement need not be directed from on high, filtered through multiple layers of management. It is more efficient when decisions can be made at the lowest level in an organization where competency exists. The trick is identifying and nurturing what can sometimes be the ‘hidden’ competence of lower-tier employees. Once such employees are trusted to make and implement decisions, innovation often thrives.

#5) What’s left after running the business, investing in growth, and giving owners a good return should belong to everyone – not just the stockholders. The difficulty here is determining what constitutes a ‘good return.’ The current paradigm is based on a ‘winner take all’ mentality that assumes only those at the top get to share in the spoils of war, as it were.

#6) Workers should be allowed to voluntarily join a labor union that will represent their interests in a collective bargaining setting. And employers should form trade associations with other businesses in the same industry. But when these two groups operate independently of each other, it only exacerbates the class conflict between owner and worker.

#7) This is where things get interesting. Everyone who earns their livelihood in a given industry – from company president to mailroom messenger – has a stake in seeing that things go well. An “industry council” that represents the entire workforce would bind people together not by their slot on the org chart, but by the fact they all care about the prosperity of their industry.

#8) When every worker has a voice on an industry council, it encourages even the last-hired employee to think about their industry’s “markets, sources of supplies, potential customers, and technology – everything that contributes to the industry’s health and profits.”

#9) As the circle widens even further, all members of a given industry should also be interested in more than merely enriching individual producers and workers. Their concern should extend to the common good, making sure the product or services being produced or provided are helpful to society as a whole.

#10) These proposed industry councils would self-regulate the activities of their own industries, and see to it those activities are directed toward the common good. Such councils would therefore wield more power and exert more influence “in the constitution of society” than existing private organizations, political parties, labor unions, and trade organizations do now. This is turn would mean the state – in the form of the central government – would no longer have to concern itself with “many matters of detail it should not have to bother with.”

(Based on my reading of An Economics of Justice and Charity by Thomas Storck.)

Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr
March 20, 2021

Catholic Social Teaching to the Rescue

March 12, 2021 (1,857 words)

A recent feature story in a mainstream publication shouts the following question from its title block: “Can Catholic Social Teaching Unite a Divided America?”

What a completely unexpected proposition this is, considering a) most Americans don’t know that such a thing as Catholic teaching on social justice even exists, and b) most assume anything falling under the general heading of “Catholic teaching” can be safely dismissed as yet another outdated prohibition on personal behavior.

But such a specialized body of knowledge does indeed exist, and it comprises a system of thought that seeks to integrate law, politics, and economics. Some trace its basic precepts back to the four Gospels. But the Catholic brain trust didn’t really engage the modern iteration of these subjects until late in the 19^th century. Since then the teaching has been continuously developed and adapted to changing circumstances by every pope that’s sat in the big chair since Leo XIII formally kicked off the discussion in 1891.

Despite the obscurity of the suggested solution, my answer to the editorial’s query would be a resounding “yes.” But only if the warring factions (liberals and conservatives) stop claiming to already embody the fullness of the teaching with their respective take on two of its central concepts: “solidarity” and “subsidiarity.”

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The textbook definition of solidarity is pretty much what it sounds like it should be: “Unity of feeling or action, especially among individuals with a common interest; mutual support within a group.”

Papal teaching expands that by including all of humanity as having a common interest. Updated as recently as 1991 by John Paul II, solidarity is best expressed as “a determination to commit oneself to the good of all, and to each individual, because we are really responsible for all.”

It’s easy to see how liberals believe they are capturing this aspect of Catholic social teaching, most notably when it comes to Democrat policy proscriptions on economic equity and expanded health care, strengthening unions and prioritizing workers’ rights, etc.

On the other hand subsidiarity is less familiar to most ears, and its definition is a bit more arcane: “A principle of organization that holds all social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate level that is consistent with their resolution.” In plain English, political decisions should be made at a local level rather than by a central authority.

It’s just as easy to see how conservatives have latched on to this one, most notably in Republican opposition to ‘big government.’ But the Catholic definition of subsidiarity is more nuanced than what conservatives allow. Again, as spelled out by JPII in 1991:

“A community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its function, but rather should support it in case of need, and help coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.”

It’s the second part of the Catholic definition of subsidiarity that conservatives conveniently ignore.

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This notion of solidarity and subsidiarity draws inspiration from the inherent dignity of every human being, regardless of innate ability or geographic location or material circumstance. The source of this dignity is that we have all been made in the image and likeness of our Creator.

Solidarity respects human dignity by helping those unable to see to their own basic temporal needs. Subsidiarity respects it by promoting the freedom people need to figure things out and make their own decisions regarding those same temporal needs.

These concepts are meant to be complimentary. But in the American tradition there is a pronounced tension between the two. There is probably plenty of blame to go around for this situation. But I tend to finger the conservatives first, because they essentially deny that some problems are systemic in nature and cannot be improved – let alone resolved – at the local level. Conservatives hew to a ‘rugged individualist’ reading of subsidiarity, what they like to call “a more diversified and localized way of reaching people.”

To contend “human problems are better resolved at the interpersonal level where people can see each other, so that’s where our problems should be taken up” is a noble thought, and true enough. But how long has it been since any of us were able to live exclusively in that world?

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This is not to suggest every piece of liberal policy-making has a Catholic seal of approval. Doctrine on social justice cannot be separated from long-held teaching on morals, which extend to sexual and medical ethics. This is where liberals come up notoriously short.

But the Church’s social teaching also has a strong economic component, and this is where conservatives have proven to be deaf, dumb, and blind. They like to complain about what liberals are doing wrong in the name of solidarity. They turn up their nose and take the high road, criticizing the Democrat agenda as “secular progressivism” that has no relationship whatsoever to Catholic teaching on social justice.

Their protestations seem to be on a continuous loop that never stops. One longs for the day conservatives will finally tire of hearing the sound of their own voice. In the event they ever decide to cut through the noise and effect real change, they will first have to acknowledge their lopsided view of subsidiarity.

In confronting the inequities that plague society, we are long past the point of sitting back and doing nothing beyond insisting “big institutions” not “substitute, replace or interfere” with smaller institutions. Long past the point of expecting faith-based initiatives to adequately address the needs of the swelling population being left behind. According to John Paul II, big institutions must support the smaller institution in its time of need, “and help coordinate its activities with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.”

In other words, it’s time to invoke the Catholic version of subsidiarity, instead of the conservative one.

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Unfortunately it’s the conservative version that has taken hold and entered the vernacular. In the early 1980s a popular philosopher and Catholic theologian of a conservative bent achieved breakthrough recognition for himself by arguing a familiar theme: economic competition is compatible with the Christian values of charity and community. It’s not that this formulation is patently false, only that “economic competition” hardly covers the many variations of unfettered capitalism that ensnare so many of us.

Thinking one’s conservative politics are a perfect vehicle for one’s Christian beliefs is a miscalculation that’s been going on for a very long time – since our Founding, really. The largely privileged, land-owning rebels who demanded their independence from England were seeking their absolute freedom from all previously-held authority, above all else. The residual Christian sentiment possessed by that group enabled it to justify their actions as a demand for their inherent dignity to be recognized. This premise was not entirely wrong, but it did overstate the case. Our leading lights allowed the emotion of the moment to get the better of them.

So the conservative aversion to any sort of governmental oversight or intervention in economic matters has very deep roots. What they see as their principled opposition is based on quasi-religious grounds, always harkening back to our founding fathers, as if that hallowed reference alone should stop any further discussion in its tracks. This pseudo-Christian posture is what the Catholic popes have been up against when trying to retro-fit their teaching on social justice into a “don’t tread on me”, “live free or die” worldview.

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When John Paul II used his big 1991 encyclical on social justice (“Centesimus Annus”) to announce “the free market is the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs,” conservative Catholic scholars at prestigious, privately-funded think tanks jumped for joy. See, they shouted from the rooftops, the Catholic Church now officially agrees with what we’ve been saying all along about free enterprise – and its superiority to government-mandated programs.

What these enthusiasts missed is how their favorite pope was quick to add that too many remain unjustly excluded from what he describes as “the circle of exchange.” In the end John Paul II merely puts a slightly different spin on the very same reservations every pope since 1891 has expressed about capitalism’s wayward tendencies.

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I began with the observation that most Americans don’t know that such a thing as Catholic teaching on social justice exists. I’ll end by pointing out the ones who do are unwilling to embrace that teaching in its totality, and limit their understanding by applying their preferred liberal or conservative filter.

This started as an American problem, but since our culture has come to dominant the entire developed world the problem has spread exponentially. We here in the United States have been struggling to reconcile the ethos of Christianity (compassion) with the mythos of capitalism (acquisition) since our Founding. The rest of the West has taken on that same struggle, to one degree or another.

All is not lost, though. The American Experiment has much to recommend it, and America’s inability to thread the eye of Christianity’s needle is probably no worse than any other society over the course of the last two thousand years. It should also be noted that despite my minor quibbles with the established order I have no plans to leave the country and live out my remaining days elsewhere. But it sure would be nice if I could break through the self-assured façade my fellow citizens seem to bask in, whatever side of the political dialectic they have chosen as their philosophical home.

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Old habits die hard. When one Catholic bishop says “Our new President has pledged to pursue certain policies that would advance moral evils and threaten human life and dignity, most seriously in the areas of abortion, contraception, marriage and gender,” he is identified as “conservative.”

When another bishop comes along and says “It is a great sadness that President Biden and Democrat political leaders across the spectrum do not support legal sanctions to protect the unborn. But that is not the pre-eminent issue. The pre-eminent issue for our country at this time is healing and coming together. Because unless we can get a political culture that’s healed in some fundamental ways, we cannot advance the common good in any sustainable way,” that bishop is described as “liberal.”

Even though this same “liberal” bishop is on record as saying, “It’s very hard to find a candidate who reflects even 40% of Catholic social teaching in their views. Both parties bifurcate what Catholic social teaching holds out as most crucial.”

These two devoted prelates are merely trying to articulate different facets of the same teaching. We can’t see that, because our haste in choosing up sides doesn’t allow the space for any complexity to register. We settle for being boisterous, card-carrying members of the left or right, when we should aim higher – trying to be patient, salt-of-the-earth Christians. And that, my friends, is not as easy as it may seem at first glance.

(Based on my reading of the Francis X. Rocca piece, Can Catholic Social Teaching Unite a Divided America?, from the Saturday. February 5 edition of the Wall Street Journal.)

Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr
March 12, 2021

Are Hedge Funds Evil Incarnate?

March 1, 2021 (1,734 words)

Not that anybody is paying attention to this sort of thing, but the corruption of the Catholic mind over the course of the last sixty years has had a distinctly economic component.

As recently as 1960 the official party line celebrated the common good and a concern for the less fortunate. These broad principles enjoyed unanimous support from all concerned – the hierarchy to the lay intelligentsia to the simple folk in the pews.

That consensus began to crumble when firebrand conservatives decided to reject papal critiques of free-market excess, and interpret traditional Church teaching on social justice as tantamount to endorsing socialism. While the revolt erupted publicly and made headlines in 1961, the process actually started before WWII, when certain Catholics intellectuals took issue with New Deal policies designed to address the severe economic ramifications of the Great Depression.

This raised an eyebrow at the time, since those policies were known to be influenced by what’s referred to as the Catholic Magisterium. During his first campaign for president in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt quoted Pope Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical “Quadragesimo Anno,” calling it “just as radical as I am” and “one of the greatest documents of modern times.”

(QA, for those who may be unfamiliar, expressed grave doubts about capitalism’s one-size-fits-all approach in light of the October 1929 crash on Wall Street. It echoed concerns first articulated forty years earlier by a previous pope (Leo XIII) when confronting the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age. That 1891 encyclical, “Rerum Novarum,” kicked off Catholic teaching on social justice for the modern era.)

In the years following WWII the same critics became increasingly emboldened, and their understanding had now become unduly colored by the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Making an either/or choice between competing political ideologies undermined their adherence to a much more comprehensive ideology – Christianity. And this time instead of limiting their criticism to a politician or a party platform, by 1961 they came right out and criticized a different pope’s articulation of the same teaching on social justice.

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Spurred on by these influencers the general public began to strenuously extoll all things “American,” which unfortunately came at the expense of long-held religious identity. The trade-off was most evident in the realm of economic life. Average believers who were upwardly mobilizing at a steady clip naturally embraced “capitalism” as superior to the only other option under discussion – all without giving the matter much thought, I might add.

The great divide within American Catholicism we are so familiar with today between liberals and conservatives actually began with the latter’s open rebellion against any restraint on unfettered capitalism’s obvious and unfortunate excesses. But since this seminal event was immediately followed by a noisy breach on sexual mores, many everyday Catholics never quite got their feet under them in the wake of the conservatives’ economic heresy.

Those who still held to the Church’s traditional stance on sexual ethics found themselves taken in by the conservatives’ opposition to the defining moral issue of our time: a woman’s right to choose.

Since the 1970s political conservatives have made hay with the religious mainstream, successfully wielding a well-known opposition to abortion as a shield to fend off any legitimate criticism of their ‘trickle down’ fiscal policies. In this they have had lots of help from Catholic intelligentsia of a traditionalist stripe, kindred spirits of those who first trashed FDR’s take on “Quadragesimo Anno.”

In recent decades esteemed scholars with a political science orientation have gained fame and fortune for themselves by assuring the rest of us capitalism is “inherently moral.” This has proven to be a soothing idea many have been only too happy to swallow, despite all peripheral evidence to the contrary. Other tradition-oriented scholars who focus on theological matters and don’t much go in for monetary theory have adopted their colleagues’ economic proscriptions at face value.

This has led the dwindling number of rank-and-file Catholics to adopt the conservative brand – lock, stock, and barrel. An important element of that branding is the questionable belief our economic system is a sophisticated, self-contained entity – a science, if you will – that functions according to its own inner logic, and is not subject to the basic imperatives that guide our private lives.

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The splintering of the Catholic mind over the economic question has put the American hierarchy in a tough spot, at least where Church teaching on social justice is concerned. Faced with ongoing examples of collateral damage created by the laissez-faire free-for-all, even our most orthodox bishops can manage only a tepid response in support of the common good.

They don’t want to get too pushy in challenging certain cherished assumptions held by the remaining loyalists, who tend to support the economic status quo, and are usually the ones who can afford to make the charitable donations so vital to keeping our parishes and dioceses afloat.

The clergy is faced with the daunting task of trying to maintain as much of the inherited physical infrastructure as they possibly can, while continuing to serve the poorest of the poor. Funding for the former continues to shrink, while the number of disadvantaged falling into the latter category continues to grow.

For their herculean efforts in these worldly matters our prelates run the risk of being labeled “the Democratic Party at prayer.”

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Ah, if only I knew how to get through to the religious right – including my dear friends, the Catholics – who have turned a blind eye to unfettered capitalism’s obvious and unfortunate excesses. They key word in that last sentence is “unfettered,” of course. Capitalism as a system of exchange has much to recommend it, as we all know, and has been responsible for lifting waves of the previously downtrodden out of their once-dire circumstances.

But nothing that involves human agency can be considered “inherently moral.” One would think the religiously-minded would grasp this concept more readily than their secular counterparts. That so many earnest believers have suspended their wariness of flawed human nature, to buy into the fallacy of capitalism as inherently moral, can only be attributed to a willful ignorance that’s fueled by widespread material complacency.

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The best illustration of the unfortunate excesses of unfettered capitalism can be found in the highly speculative fields of venture capital, hedge funds, and private equity. Only the best and brightest receive initiation into the elaborate machinations of these financial instruments, with the instruction dispensed to the chosen few at our most prestigious business schools.

This segment of the financial industry receives the least amount of regulatory oversight from the SEC, which may explain why it yields the highest compensation for those aggressive acolytes who are practiced in its arts.

The fee structure enjoyed by hedge funds is shocking enough: 2% for just sitting on a pile of investor cash, and 20% of whatever profit is generated once those funds are put into play. But it’s more the day-to-day activity of hedge funds that should give us pause, above and beyond the lavish fee structure.

We all know what hedge funds do, right? They leverage their way to a majority stake in a ‘vulnerable’ company only to cut expenses by slashing jobs, raid the balance sheet of any assets, before eventually selling off the dead carcass to the highest bidder. Then they move on to their next victim.

The slash-and-burn technique obviously does not bode well for the job prospects of average wage-earners. Companies done in by hedge funds are frequently pillars in their communities, employing hundreds – if not thousands – of minding-their-own-business, middle-class citizens. Once the hedge fund takes over, these people are left twisting in the wind with nowhere else to go. And in the case of older established companies, whatever pension the ex-employees may have accrued ends up in the pockets of the hedge fund managers, since the new owners are not obligated to meet that prior commitment.

This ransacking and pillaging is going on in plain sight, right under our noses. None of it is technically illegal, but neither can any of it qualify as the least bit ‘moral,’ no matter how watered-down your definition of the term has become.

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In an impressive display of single-mindedness, principled conservatives are able to maintain their equilibrium in the face of the financial carnage that continues to pile up. They keep themselves distracted from the debris with abstract discussions worthy of a college debate team: ‘taking care of one’s neighbors in need is a personal responsibility’ versus ‘the state taking care of neighbors in need by confiscating resources from other neighbors.’

The key to their unflappable self-assurance is to dismiss the excesses as not being systemic. Rapacious greed on the part of certain flamboyant individuals is not a concern, only ‘big government’ that oversteps its bounds and interferes with a citizen’s God-given right to ‘freedom.’

And speaking of freedom, conservatives see no downside whatsoever to the “economic freedom” they hold in the highest esteem. They are convinced the American version of “faith” and “liberty” go hand-in-hand to form a more perfect union.

The really, really principled conservatives are the ones who insist President Joe Biden is disqualified from proposing solutions to society’s great inequities, because he supports abortion. They tell us social justice begins with recognizing the value of all human life, even life in the womb. And that trying to solve social issues without having a conversation about the value of human life is like trying to grow a plant without acknowledging the critical element of its root system.

This is a beautiful analogy, but I would suggest the root system we need to nourish is economic in nature. Since abortion is nothing but the bitter fruit from the tree of “economic freedom.”

At the end of the day we all desire peace, and most can agree nothing shouts a lack of peace quite like an abortion. But in order to achieve peace there must be a level of justice for all. That starts with a more just and equitable economy.

A woman’s decision to abort – whether out of desperate economic circumstances or to fulfill a misguided notion of ‘self-actualization’ – is merely the tragic by-product of the rugged individualism we have allowed to define our economic life.

And the most blatant example of this philosophy’s perils when applied to economic activity just might be hedge funds.

Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr
March 1, 2021