Papal Economics

Stuart Reid instructs the "American Catholic Church," a.k.a. "the Weigelian Church, which preaches liberal capitalism, pre-emptive war, the Little Way of Sarah Palin, global democratic revolution, and faith and works" — Is the Pope Capitalist? Mr. Reid writes:

The fact is that capitalist ideology—as it has emerged in modern times—has never been embraced by the Church, and it should come as no surprise that it is not now being embraced by Benedict. The historian Eamon Duffy summed up Catholic social teaching nicely when he wrote of Pope Pius XI (no lefty he), “he loathed the greed of capitalist society, ‘the unquenchable thirst for temporal possessions,’ and thought that liberal capitalism shared with communism ‘satanic optimism’ about human progress.”

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One of the things to remember about the Catholic Church, perhaps, is that it is Christian and therefore not inclined to look with great favor on Mammon. It seeks a way of pursuing the good life, even the prosperous life, that does not involve denial of God or—a key point in Benedict’s encyclical—the abandonment of life at any stage of its development. Not easy, of course, but, though Weigel contemptuously dismisses the idea, there is a Catholic third way between capitalism and socialism, not the one seen by Benedict’s co-religionist Tony Blair—that took us into Iraq and fed us to marketing men, with their spread sheets, Polish nannies, and suits without ties—but by such people as G.K. Chesterton, the Southern Agrarians, and Konrad Adenaeur, whose political principles were based on Catholic social teaching and who led West Germany into her Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle).