Markets and Morality
by Fr. Roger J. Landry - June 1, 2007
The second controversy — which raised eyebrows and ire in North America and Europe — was about economic systems and the political policies and culture that support them.
After Benedict unsurprisingly and at length condemned Marxism, which he said "left a sad heritage of economic and ecological destruction, but also a painful destruction of the human spirit," he then turned to capitalism and accused it of some of the same destructive materialistic tendencies. "Both capitalism and Marxism," he said, "promised to point out the path for the creation of just structures, and they declared that these, once established, would function by themselves [without a] need of any prior individual morality, [because] they would promote a communal morality. And this ideological promise has been proved false. The facts have clearly demonstrated it." Marxism has failed and capitalism in many places is failing, he summarized, because both pretend "God is absent" and such God-less structures cannot "find the necessary consensus on moral values or the strengthen to live according to [them] … when they are in conflict with private interests."
Unlike Marxism, which is based on a fundamental error about the spiritual dimension of the human person, his freedom, and the right to private property, capitalism is not immoral in itself, but Benedict say it will work to the overall benefit of the human person only if it is tied to an ethics that guides and disciplines it. Free market forces may produce economic growth, but left unbridled they also can lead to the cancer of consumerism; a growing distance between rich and poor; the exploitation of workers in the name of profit; corporate scandals, like Enron WorldCom, that fleeced hundreds of thousands from their savings; the desecration of women through prostitution or egg-harvesting under the principle of supply and demand; the devaluation of those who do not work, like the handicapped or elderly; treating human life as a thing in in-vitro fertilization or as disposable in abortion and embryonic stem cell research; the harvesting of human organs through vivisection of Chinese prisoners, and more.
Benedict was calling people back to the fundamental principles described by Pope John Paul II in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus. John Paul asked whether, after the fall of Marxism and communism, capitalism should be the goal of all countries, especially those in the Third World. "The answer is obviously complex," he replied. "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.' But if by 'capitalism' is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality and sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative."
The history of capitalism in Latin America has often featured the latter and not the former, which is why Pope Benedict spoke as forcefully as he did. For markets to serve the human person, they need to be tied to morality. When they're not, not only do they naturally make people exploited by capitalism resent it, but they pave the way for the return of "authoritarian forms of government and regimes wedded to certain ideologies" — read: totalitarianism and Marxism— that Benedict said he thought had happily been "superseded."
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
