Contarini #329
And yet the Catholic Church did not build Western civilization on “free enterprise.”
You’ve tried this gambit before, but everything outside of faith and morals is meant to be learned and developed by non-Magisterial Catholics (and others) in the world of living and acting using reason, without exercising "religious authority”.
Free enterprise economic development started in the great Catholic monastic estates of the ninth century, and a solid basis of economic Catholic thought developed from the fourteenth century. In the fifteenth century the Late Scholastics who were Thomists (followers of St Thomas) “writing and teaching at the University of Salamanca in Spain, sought to explain the full range of human action and social; organization.” They “observed the existence of economic law, inexorable forces of cause and effect that operate very much as other natural laws. Over the course of several generations, they discovered and explained the laws of supply and demand, the cause of inflation, the operation of foreign exchange rates, and the subjective nature of economic value…” For these reasons Joseph Schumpeter applauded them as the first real economists. (Thomas E Woods Jr,
The Church And The Market, Lexington Books, 2005, p 8).
Prudence, justice, and temperance are entirely opposed (in their traditional meanings) to modern capitalism.
False, as free enterprise based on the principles of cause and effect, where in the market wealth is produced and wealth is exchanged, has the undoubted affirmation of Bl John Paul II, and Benedict XVI where, in a democracy, it functions within a rule of law.
People, as opposed to the principles developed, may practice virtues or replace them with vices.
Now see the affirmation of free enterprise as Bl John Paul II teaches in
Centesimus Annus, 1991:
CA 42. ‘Returning now to the initial question: can it perhaps be said that, after the failure of , capitalism is the victorious social system, and that capitalism should be the goal of the countries now making efforts to rebuild their economy and society? Is this the model which ought to be proposed to the countries of the Third World which are searching for the path to true economic and civil progress?
‘The answer is obviously complex. If by “capitalism” is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a “business economy”, “market economy” or simply “free economy”.
‘CA 43. The Church has no models to present;’
You are using euphemistic language to glorify what the Christian tradition has historically regarded as a sinful disposition characterized by avarice and pride.
By contrast Catholic tradition follows Christ’s parable of the Talents which most strikingly acknowledges Christ’s respect for the work of business, as does the parable of the Dishonest Steward – the steward is dishonest, “but the nature of his work is not. In fact by praising his shrewdness, Christ admires his opportunism. While the steward abuses the trust his master extends to him, it must be recognised that the nature of the work that is entrusted to him is fundamentally good. The sin of the steward is his misuse of his master’s business, not the work of business itself.”
Entrepreneurship in the Catholic Tradition, Fr Anthony G Percy, Lexington Books, 2010, p 47].
