A similar red herring was refuted in post #36: ‘In Acts 2:44-47, where the faithful lived together and owned everything in common – foolishly called “primitive communism”. These so-called “Apostolics” were condemned by St Thomas and the Late Scholastics, who quote St Augustine.’
Now monasteries are targeted with similar confusion. What the Catholic Late Scholastics developed are the principles of free enterprise from which they were called the first real economists. Free enterprise enabled untold millions to be released from poverty and the first examples of free enterprise appeared in the great Catholic monasteries, about the ninth century. (John Gilchrist, The Church and Economic Activity in the Middle Ages, St Martin’s Press, 1969; The Victory of Reason, Rodney Stark, Random House, 2005, p xii, 55-58).
From the great monastic estates in the ninth century, immense increases in agricultural productivity grew from “such significant innovations as the switch to horses, the heavy moldboard plow, and the three-field system” away from subsistence agriculture to specialised crops and products, sold at a profit to initiate a cash economy. “As their incomes continued to mount, this led many monasteries to become banks, lending to the nobility.” [cf. op. cit. Stark, p 58].
What is missed here is that the free enterprise system was developed by the Catholic Late Scholastics. There is nothing that can compare with its economic laws – it is the economic approach that has revolutionised the standard of living of millions. Individual morality determines how owners or managers or employees treat each other and the customers, which ethic may derive from a policy set by the firm, and which can be valued by the morality taught by Christ’s Church.
Communism and Socialism have been condemned because they are political systems that deny basic human rights.
