On Christians and Prosperity

Table of Contents

Foreword Acknowledgments I Introduction II On Wealth and Poverty III Do Christians Love Poverty? IV Confessions of a Practicing ‘Socialist’ V On Justice, Rights, and Poverty VI On Intellectual and Material Poverty VII On World Poverty VIII Redistributionism IX The Economics of Popes Benedict and Francis X Conclusion References About the Author

James V. Schall

Christian Social Thought Series

Kindle Edition

An imprint of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty

Scripture texts in this work are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C. and are used by permission of the copyright owner. All Rights Reserved. No part of the New American Bible may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner. Let us acknowledge then that each one has just so much of happiness as he has of virtue and wisdom, and of virtuous and wise action. God is a witness to us of this truth; for he is happy and blessed, not by reason of any external good, but in himself and by reason of his own nature.… Let us assume then that the best life, both for individuals and states, is the life of virtue, when virtue has external goods enough for the performance of good actions. —Aristotle[1] God prefers to act by providence rather than miracles, because He loves the nature of all things. He created and wants to perfect them rather than bypass them. He is like a wise, unselfish king Who exalts and empowers His servants rather than distrusting them and micro- managing His kingdom. —Peter Kreeft[2]

By identifying a capitalist economy chiefly as a knowledge system rather than a mechanistic incentive system, the new economics obviates all concerns over greed and avarice as crucial to the creation of wealth. The enabling theory of telecommunications and the Internet, Information Theory offers a path to a new economics that places the surprising creations of entrepreneurs and innovation at the very center of the system rather than patching them in from the outside as “exogenous” inputs. Information Theory also shows that knowledge is not merely a source of wealth; it is wealth. —George Gilder[3]

The world’s achievement in the field of poverty reduction is, by almost any measure, impressive. Although many of the original Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) —such as cutting maternal mortality by three-quarters and child mortality two-thirds—will not be met, the aim of halving global poverty between 1990 and 2015 was achieved five years ago. The MDGs may have helped marginally by creating a yardstick for measuring progress, and by focusing minds on the evil of poverty. Most of the credit, however, must go to capitalism and free trade, for they enable economies to grow—and it was growth, principally, that has eased destitution.

—The Economist [4]

The empirical evidence from the swift upward thrust of the war-leveled economies of 1940–48—those of Japan and Germany, but also those of Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea, which turned to democracy and one form or another of capitalism— is overwhelming. But so also is the evidence from us in the United States, whose grandparents were the “wretched refuse” of earth, yet now in a short time their families are counted among the most affluent people in the world. How was this possible? Through what system was that done, and what are its imitable secrets? Those who wish to be practical and successful in breaking the remaining claims of poverty in the world might learn from what has worked until now, right before our eyes. —Michael Novak[5]

[1]Aristotle, Politics, VII, 1, 1323b22–25; b4– 1324a1–3. [2] Peter Kreeft, The Philosophy of Tolkien (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 54. [3] George Gilder, “Notes Towards a New Economics,” The Weekly Standard, August 5, 2013. [4]The Economist, “Towards the End of Poverty,” June 1, 2013. [5] Michael Novak, “Agreeing with Pope Francis,” National Review, December 7, 2013.

Foreword

Concern for the poor is at the heart of Christianity. It is not simply one option among many but a central part of what it means to live as a Christian. As Saint James writes in his epistle (1:27), “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” We are to be “in” the world but not “of” it (cf. John 17:14– 19). This discernment is particularly relevant today where there can be a false dichotomy between social justice on one hand and moral theology and doctrine on the other. The power of Christian charity is precisely that it flows from theology and sound doctrine about God and man. Yet, despite clear commands to care for those in need, it is easy to become complacent. As Pope Francis writes in Evangelii Gaudium: Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, … as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.[1]

This problem is not unique to our age. We see it reflected in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16). Saint Augustine, commenting on this passage, says it was not wealth that sent the rich man to hell; it was his indifference. He ignored the poor man. Saint John Chrysostom and others have noted that care for the poor is not only a question of charity, it is also a question of justice. Nevertheless, both our charity and our justice must be rooted in truth. As Pope Benedict writes in Caritas in Veritate: Only in truth does charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived. Truth is the light that gives meaning and value to charity. That light is both the light of reason and the light of faith, through which the intellect attains to the natural and supernatural truth of charity: it grasps its meaning as gift, acceptance, and communion. Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality.[2]

Charity also must be grounded in prudence. We may think of prudence as being careful or avoiding risk, but this is incorrect. In fact, it sometimes means being bold. Josef Pieper summarizes the classical understanding of prudence as seeing the world as it is and acting accordingly.[3] This is why prudence is considered to be the mother of the virtues: If we do not see the world as it is, we cannot be just or brave. Saint Thomas Aquinas goes as far as to say that imprudence can lead to injustice. He writes that injustice can occur in two ways, first by “the violent act of the man who possesses power,” and second through “the false prudence of the sage.”[4] The poor throughout the developing world have unfortunately suffered both: brutal dictators on one the hand and “internationalist” social engineers who have used the developing world as a lab for their experiments on the other. The combination has resulted in a host of problems, including crony capitalism, the rise of a multibillion- dollar-poverty industry, and widespread exclusion of the poor. The point here is not to challenge the benevolent intentions of aid and charity workers; but I do think it is fair to question the prudence of many of the policies of the last several decades. In On Christians and Prosperity, Father James V. Schall, one of the great teachers of political philosophy of our time, calls us to think prudently about poverty and prosperity within the Christian tradition. He also asks us to think seriously about economics and human incentives. He applies a lifetime of studying philosophy and theology to encourage us to think beyond the constraints of Enlightenment notions of rationality and the sentimentality that it breeds and engage with core questions about the sources of poverty and prosperity. Father Schall wrestles with Catholic social teaching, the hunger for justice, and how to think about those who are poor—not as objects but as subjects and protagonists of their own story of development—a core theme of the PovertyCure Series. He engages foundational concepts such as mercy, justice, inequality, and the moral dimension of work. He also reminds us that while economic development and the creation of prosperity are important, they are always in service to the higher things; indeed, economic prosperity alone is insufficient. Poverty is a complex topic, and good people can and do disagree. Father Schall’s contribution is to challenge some of the deeply embedded assumptions that arise not primarily from Christian teaching but from the dominant humanitarian framework of our day. I am delighted to have such a distinguished scholar and philosopher contribute to the PovertyCure Series, and I hope this book provokes much discussion and debate about one of the great moral challenges of our time.

Michael Matheson Miller Research Fellow, Acton Institute Director/Producer, Poverty, Inc.

[1] Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (2013), n. 54. [2] Pope Benedict XVI, Encyclical Letter Caritas in Veritate (2009), n. 3. [3] Josef Pieper, Prudence (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1959), trans. Richard and Clara Winston. [4] Saint Thomas, On the Book of Job, 8,1. Foreword

Acknowledgments

Portions of this book were previously published in various articles. The author wishes to thank the editors of these publications for permission to use these: James V. Schall, SJ, “Confessions of a Practicing Socialist,” www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/ryan- mcmaken/james-v-schall/, July 2003.

James V. Schall, SJ, “Sense and Nonsense: Social Justice,” Crisis Magazine, 23 (October 1, 2005), 63, www.crisismagazine.com/2005/sense- and-nonsense-social-justice.

James V. Schall, SJ, “On Wealth and Poverty,” In All Things: A Jesuit Journal of the Social Apostolate (Winter 2005–2006), 13.

James V. Schall, SJ, “Redistributionism,” Last Things, Inter-collegiate Studies Institute, November 10, 2008.

James V. Schall, SJ, “On the Pope’s Recent Essay in the London Financial Times,” Catholic World Report online, January 21, 2013, http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Blog/1901/on_the_pope’s_recent_essay_in_the_london_financial_times.aspx.

James V. Schall, SJ, “How Environmentalism Harms the Poor,” Crisis Magazine, April 5, 2013, http://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/how- environmentalism-harms-the-poor.

James V. Schall, SJ, “On Poverty: Both Material and Intel-lectual,” The Catholic Pulse online, May 6, 2013, http://www.catholicpulse.com/en/columnists/schall/050613.html. James V. Schall, SJ, “Do Christians Love Poverty?” Catholic World Report, August 16, 2013, http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/2503/Do_Christians_Love_Poverty.aspx.

James V. Schall, SJ, “Justice, Mercy, and the Drama of Redemption,” Catholic World Report, November 17, 2013, http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/2718/Justice_Mercy_and_the_Drama_of_Redemption.aspx.

James V. Schall, SJ, “Pope Francis, Economics, and Poverty,” Catholic World Report online, January 6, 2014, http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/2827/pope_francis_economics_and_poverty.aspx

I Introduction

The thesis of this book is as follows: Poverty is not best dealt with by attending to the immediate relief of the very poor. Yet, we do not here avoid or bypass the fact and nature of dire poverty. We do concern ourselves with help for the actual poor. We argue significantly that the great numbers of the poor are best helped to be what they initially strive to be, namely, not poor, when everyone prospers as a result of his own initiative and work. The distinctions—very rich, moderately rich, middle class, poor, and very poor—will exist in every society, whether it be, on the whole, rich or poor. Some rich will become less rich and some poor more prosperous within every society, whether it be a dynamic or a static one. In principle, this relative gradation is not a bad thing. It reflects differences of goals, energy, talents, tastes, discipline, and fortune that are the results of free choice and other forces not primarily political or economic. To reduce the problems of the world to one factor, poverty, shows little comprehension of the forces within human nature. The concern of this book was well stated by a writer at the American Thinker: “For the first time in history humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve poverty in the world. The number of poor people in the world fell by half from 1990 to 2010. Why then do Catholic Church leaders continue to criticize capitalism as an evil market tool that hurts the poor and disadvantaged?”[1] Religious, political, and cultural leaders who know the facts and faces of real poverty are often so upset by seeing it that they want to stop all else to attend to what seems to be the most pressing issue at the time. This is a praiseworthy sentiment, except that it does not clearly distinguish charity from justice. Some human problems can never be resolved by justice alone. More often than not, attention to dire poverty encourages and leads to political and economic policies that, in fact, are detrimental to any real prospect of helping the actual poor. They end up creating something worse, most often by empowering the state to pursue programs that do not work or that merely increase dependency and state power. The issue is not whether the poor ought to be helped or attended to as part of the common good. Rather, the question is: How does one best accomplish the end of bringing the poor into a situation where they can help themselves? In 1972, I wrote a book that addressed a then-pressing issue: the supposed crisis of a starving world caused by too many people (between three and four billion at the time).[2] The way to aid the poor, in many people’s estimation, was to drastically reduce population. Widespread programs of sterilization, abortion, and other antilife techniques resulted from these dubious premises. It turned out, of course, that the production of wealth, of foods and goods, was increasing more rapidly than the population. The fact of more people meant more demand and occasioned more incentive. It also meant more brains and intelligence in existence to cope with what human beings need for a good life. If we have learned anything in recent decades, it is that there is capacity for astonishing growth in science, economy, and technology among people such as the Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans, Japanese, and Indians. In 1990, I wrote another book that developed the core notion of what I want to reexamine here: Donating to the poor what they need is not a viable way to solve poverty.[3] Instead, the poor need to be incorporated into thriving market economies. Within these economies, they can work their way out of poverty themselves by contributing to what everybody needs. As the remarks of The Economist and of Michael Novak cited in the opening pages indicate, this growth is pretty much what has been happening in the meantime. I do not conceive of a free market to be one based solely on self-interest (though self-interest as such is a good thing). I am not a theoretic libertarian, and I do presuppose some reasonable limits in a genuinely free market. I think that in every society some, for reasons of health, accident, addiction, war, laziness, or social turmoil, will always need a degree of help. The admonitions to the rich of any time or place to help the poor obviously presuppose that some riches have already been produced. Throughout history, many political and cultural systems have been static. They have produced little new wealth. Even in such relatively unchanging societies, helping the poor made moral sense, but there were few resources to draw on for this purpose. In more modern times, with the dissemination of certain ideas about the nature of the cosmos and man, humankind learned that everyone could become richer. The earth could and probably should support more people than it contains at present. It is within this latter context that the thinking about poverty in this book proceeds. It argues that virtue and vice make both personal and economic differences. Questions of wealth and poverty are often questions of greed and envy. Such questions are usually independent of any objective statistical question about the degree of actual wealth and poverty. The words of the apostle James about the poor still ring in the ears of even the most rabid secularist as well as in the conscience of the Christian: “If a brother or sister has nothing to wear and has no food for the day, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well,’ but you do not give them the necessities of the body, what good is it?” (James 2:15–16). Most people most of the time need such an admonition to stay alert to what goes on around them, to prod their lethargy, and to clarify their priorities. Yet, the greatest contribution of Christianity to the poverty question has not been the oft-repeated admonition to give to the poor, an admonition already well developed in the Hebrew Bible. The great Christian contribution concerns the proper understanding of what the world is for and of what man’s place is within it. We need to know that man is the central figure in the creation of the world, which was itself fashioned to his goals. His ultimate purpose is, in turn, ordered to a transcendent end, not just to some never-to-be-accomplished worldly kingdom. We also need to know that creation is good, that its goodness and productivity relate to man’s human purposes so it is all right to work on it, improve it, and beautify it. The world was not intended to be an empty wilderness with no sign of intelligence in it. Likewise, as the passage from Peter Kreeft, cited above, indicated, God did not do everything for us himself. He left his great purpose to be largely carried out by beings other than himself. He left much to be done by secondary causes, by beings who could really act and carry out those purposes that were found in human nature. God was not a sort of divine supplier who simply gave us everything. If God were to have done this supplying of everything, he would really have had no reason for creation in the first place. He would have created man with the power to act, and then removed from him any reason for doing anything. In Aristotle’s phrase, it would have been a creation made “in vain,” for no purpose. Instead, he gave us minds and hands whereby we could, if we would, freely accomplish his purposes through our intelligence, will, and work. This book argues that poverty can be put in a better framework if we see it not as something to be alleviated by the rich but as something to be diminished and removed by the poor themselves in cooperation with those who have previously learned how not to be poor. To confront poverty, however, we have to realize that some proposals (modern thought is full of them) to accomplish this purpose work and others do not. The proposals that do not work, the socialist ones above all, are often well intentioned. Ultimately, they escalate state control in the most dangerous ways. Socialist and statist theories usually limit the free choices and initiatives of the actors in a society. They give power to a few minds that cannot cope with the vast complexity of the human enterprise. This argument is not, however, a denial that some political authority is needed. [4] It is instead an argument that government and economy both need severe and defined limitations that are enforced by the structures of free societies. At the beginning of this book are also passages from Aristotle and George Gilder. With the others, these citations set forth the spirit of this book. Poverty is not merely an economic or political problem. It is a human problem; a moral problem; and a question of talent, of discipline, and of experience. It falls within the broader purpose of the meaning of man’s life on earth and of man’s personal transcendent destiny. If we reach the goal of not being poor, of everyone being relatively rich, we have not necessarily said anything about the purpose of life. In the first citation, Aristotle, reacting to Plato’s proposals for communality of wives, children, and property, observes that man needs a certain amount of property or goods to be virtuous. This position in one sense reiterates that man is a being with a body and its needs. These are the grounds of his higher political and intellectual purposes. Yet our happiness is not in “external” goods, however needed they are for the normal practice of virtue for most people. Even in this life, as Aristotle argues, the economic order exists to aid us in the pursuit of virtue. Neither are we virtuous for virtue’s own sake. We practice virtue so that we might be free to pursue the truth and to encounter those things beyond use. Aristotle’s discussion of the virtues of liberality and magnanimity in book 4 of his Ethics was designed not only to show that even those with moderate amounts of wealth could practice virtue but also that they could use this wealth for the wrong purposes. People are not “determined” by their external circumstances. The poor can be greedy; the rich can be generous. Yet, all of this is said with the wise realization that both poverty and wealth can be dangerous to our souls. Aristotle thus preferred societies with members who were neither very rich nor very poor, where wealth was widely distributed to everyone. This approach still acknowledged significant variation in amounts of wealth but recognized that wealth or poverty, in themselves, always left human beings with choices of virtue or vice. Economists today talk of societies with little work and much capital. George Gilder has rightly argued that we can no longer think of wealth in terms of land or the accumulation of things. The real wealth of the universe is the human mind—the working out of the possibilities that are present in the universe on a scale hitherto unimagined. Catholic social thought has long held that the worker is more important than the work. This principle is true but it must be careful not to imply that what one does is unimportant. If a man is given a high paying job that has no meaning, if his work is merely what is called “make work,” he will soon be disillusioned. He has to know that what he does is worthwhile not only for himself and his family but also for others in some productive sense. This recognition is the import of Gilder’s emphasis on knowledge, as well as of Aristotle’s realization that virtue is not for its own sake but must be related to the greater good. With these observations in mind, this book seeks to shift our attention to those strategies that really do give ways in which the poor can cope with their own problems. Aid to the poor should not be a way for governments to gain more complete control over their citizens or to create make-work bureaucratic jobs. Nor should it restrict itself to addressing immediate crises. These needs should be met, of course, and that is why there will always be a need for what is properly called “charity,” the help that will have no return because of the incapacities of the persons involved. “The poor you will always have with you” (Matt. 26:11). For the majority of the poor, however, what is needed is access to a growing economy that allows and encourages learning and innovation, and permits the worker to live by what he does. The reason why more and more people can and do live in prosperity is because we know more and thus can do more. We have learned and will learn more ways to solve our economic problems. We can also make huge economic and moral mistakes that result in depressions and economic crises because we choose theories that do not work or practice vices that can only result in failure. The primary cause of the vast improvement in the condition of the world’s poor in recent decades is not so much our giving to the poor what they wanted or needed. It is the development of the means of production and distribution that made it possible for the poor to enter into a more productive relationship with those who had already figured out how not to be poor. Thus, the real question is not: “Why are the poor, poor?” The real question is: “Why are those who are not poor, not poor?” Until we can answer this latter question, we will never succeed in answering the first question. One final introductory point must be made. Just because we do, in fact, learn how not to be poor, it does not follow that we will put the means not to be poor into effect. That latter issue is a matter of human virtue and motivation, of politics and of man’s understanding of what human life is about. When the poverty problem ends, the purpose of human life, beyond economics and politics, remains. This is why Aristotle wrote both a book on politics and one on metaphysics, and this is why Christ admonished us to seek first the kingdom of God.

[1] Elvira F. Hasty, “Misleading the Faithful,” American Thinker, March 16, 2014, http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/03/misleading_the_faithful.html. [2] James V. Schall, Human Dignity & Human Numbers (Canfield, OH: Alba House, 1971). See also, James V. Schall, Welcome Number 4,000,000,000 (Canfield, OH: Alba House, 1977). [3] James V. Schall, Religion, Wealth, and Poverty (Vancouver: The Fraser Institute, 1990). [4] The best argument for such authority is probably that found in Yves Simon, A General Theory of Authority (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980).

II On Wealth and Poverty

The perfection of the whole of corporeal nature depends in a certain sense on the perfection of man. —Thomas Aquinas, Compendium Theologiae, I, 148

The most famous book in economics is The Wealth of Nations, not The Poverty of Nations. Yet, Christ says (Matt. 26:11), “the poor you will always have with you.” Throughout the world, not a few still are. This observation about the poor was understood to be an abiding fact. Someone would always see himself as poorer than someone else. Poverty, however, in spite of warnings about the moral dangers of wealth, was not calculated to be the purpose or end of society. No one needs to learn to be poor. It is easy. Do not make, develop, invent, or work at anything productive, anything that would increase or distribute the total amount of available goods. Do not have any laws protecting property. Do not allow competition. With such standards in place, everyone would quickly be poor, and they may not even realize that it is possible to be not poor. For anyone to be not poor, someone had to invent the wheel, plumbing, toothbrushes, tractors, hybrid corn, and computers. The question of existing poverty implies: How do we become not poor? If we do not know how to produce wealth or if we choose not to learn or put into effect those things that actually work to produce prosperity, we will be poor. We will, likewise, make or keep others poor. Not all seemingly “good” ideas, moreover, work for the good. Nowhere is this insight more pertinent than in discussions of the causes and cures of poverty. The alleviation of poverty does not just happen; it is the result of knowledge and the will to put into effect those actions that, in fact, increase real wealth that is broad enough for the many to participate in its creation and use. All existing societies, as Plato told us, are divided between rich and poor, and they are usually antagonistic to one another. Each sees the other as the cause of its plight or a danger to its well- being. The notions that no one should be poor and that no one needs to be antagonistic in their wealth-making are modern ideas, though that was what Plato was driving at. Wealth production and its distribution were things that had to be invented and put into effect, with each person doing that which was in his real capacity to do. Not everyone invented production and distribution or learned how to use the means that worked to create wealth. Certain famous ideas about wealth production, such as socialism, generally will not and cannot work correctly. As fundamental to their dignity, human beings are left free to learn or not to learn how best to take care of themselves during their period in this passing world. It was not because of some sort of divine oversight that we were not given everything but were required to figure out things ourselves. What we mean and even feel to be poverty or riches usually refers to the relative riches available in the society, or even neighborhood, in which we live. Poor people can envy those not quite so poor. Rich people can envy the very rich. Both, by objective standards, are simply poor or rich according to how they perceive themselves. Those considered poor in today’s advanced nations have many things available to them that even the kings of old could not dream of. The question of poverty and riches is always a comparative situation. If we look for the richest or the poorest in terms of income, we can find them. If we look for the rich and poor in terms of their effect on our moral life, we will find that statistical figures are mostly meaningless. The poor can be virtuous, the rich can lie, cheat, steal, and abuse their families, but the rich can also be virtuous while the poor can be corrupt. We cannot a priori identify virtue with income or vice with lack of it. A certain amount of property or wealth is necessary to practice virtue, as Aristotle said. He also said that the greatest crimes do not arise from a lack of means or sustenance. Riches are often the worst environment in which to practice virtue. “Woe to you who are rich,” we read in Luke (6:24), but Aristotle did not think that the poor, as such, were particularly virtuous. Nor are the rich vicious simply because they are rich. No one’s economic condition determines the condition of his soul. A spark of freedom remains in every soul in every situation. Not everyone even wants to be rich. Socrates, for example, did not bother to work for riches. He saw them as an impediment to his real work as a philosopher and a teacher of virtue. The monastic tradition inherited this sense of preferring poverty in a more Christian context. “Go, sell what you have and give to [the] poor.… Then come, follow me” (Matt. 19:21). The philosopher, Thales, told us that he was too interested in higher things to concern himself with riches. To prove that he could be rich if he wanted, he cornered the market on wine and oil presses. He made a bundle during harvest season when everyone needed the presses. Ever since, though not always admirably, monopolies have been a source of riches, both for governments and for private individuals. The monastic vow of poverty, however, was not intended to imply that wealth creation was wrong, just as the vow of chastity did not reflect a judgment that marriage was immoral. In both cases, both are good. Thus, to not have many worldly goods is not of itself an evil, provided we have some minimum with which to live and devote ourselves to good causes. For the rich young man to give up his riches was senseless if the reason for doing so was that riches were intrinsically evil. Otherwise, he would have been morally obliged to follow Christ, not just free to do so. Following Christ only made sense if riches were good. The young man did not go away sad merely because he had “many riches.” He could have said to the Lord: “Look, I will use my income for some charitable purpose; you name it.” Nonetheless, he still would have gone away sad; he would have missed what the Lord was teaching him. The idea that the poor are poor because the rich are rich is probably the single greatest obstacle to dealing properly with the issue of poverty. The only way that the poor will become not poor is for them to learn how to be rich from those who have already learned. This learning requires a dynamic, changing society—not a static one. The main reason that people are poor today is the political, moral, and religious system in which they live. Most of the poverty in modern times is caused by ideologies that usually propose to eliminate poverty by government control. Governments, though, cannot do so. They cannot do so because they follow a theory that violates basic tenets of human nature. Aristotle already understood that common property would not be cared for. Governments that reduce or eliminate positive incentives through faulty tax policies produce neither wealth nor the satisfaction of people responsible for their own lives. A vibrant economy, characterized by free enterprise, a responsible political system, rule of law and fair courts, and the control of corruption—government and private—is the only real mechanism for the elimination of poverty. Poverty that is caused by human disaster or by physical or moral deficiency, however, is the proper arena for benevolence or charity. Every decent society should have some voluntary or governmental mechanism to meet such extreme needs. Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est pointed out that for many of the problems of poverty, bureaucratic means are never enough because they do not reach the real needs of actual persons.[1] The main question raised by poverty concerns the knowledge and energy necessary to engage a whole people in the productive work that causes wealth. In recent times, poverty on a wide scale is largely a result of having chosen the wrong political, economic, and moral systems. No ideological alternatives have worked. At this, we should not be surprised.

[1] Benedict XVI, Encyclical Letter Deus Caritas Est (2005), n. 28b.

III Do Christians Love Poverty?

[Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation, “Joy of the Gospel,”] attacks free- market capitalism because it takes too long for the poor to get rich. “They are still waiting,” the pope wrote. Without capitalism, which rewards hard work and sacrifice, they will wait forever. No economic system in history has alleviated more poverty, generated more opportunity and helped more formerly poor people become rich than capitalism. The essence of capitalism goes to the core of Catholic teaching: the personal freedom of every person. Capitalism is freedom to risk, freedom to work, freedom to save, freedom to retain the fruits of one’s labors, freedom to own property, and freedom to give to charity. —Judge Andrew Napolitano[1] Washington Times, December 4, 2013

For some time, after listening to much rhetoric on the topic, this question has bothered me: Do Christians love poverty, as such, as a positive good? Do they want people to be poor so that they need their love and help? Somewhere in my platonic memory, I recall a similar question: If we love our neighbor because we are “commanded” to love him, do we really love him? Or, are we just obeying the commandment? Will the person whom we claim to love recognize what is really going on? Are we gaining virtue points by making it appear that we love him by law? These are questions asked without guile. Poverty is not just a Christian concern; it is also a socialist and a liberal one, though both may have somehow gotten the idea from Christians. Poverty is of some concern in most religions, though seldom so aggressively as in Scripture. Are the poor the moral basis that justifies the actions of governments or philanthropists? Does concern for the poor become a substitute for God—the only way to prove visibly that we are not being selfish? In either case, the poor and our “options” for them can become tools with which to rationalize self- centered lives that have no other reason for existing except for their own self- esteem. It is not the purpose of Christianity to make men poor or to keep them poor. I grant that riches or wealth can, if not ordered, be morally dangerous. “All those beautiful things,” can become, as Augustine reflected, a means to obtain whatever we want. Some observers have remarked that the reason evangelical Christians make such headway in Latin America is because they perceive the need for discipline, work, virtue, honesty, knowledge, enterprise, and other aspects of learning to become productive—to become not poor.[2] Many Catholics (shades here of Max Weber’s famous thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) seem, by contrast, content with the status quo ; and with a static distribution or redistribution of goods that pits one group against another. The Catholics, it is said, are not concerned with creating more goods, more wealth. They think in terms of distributing their own, someone else’s, or the state’s limited store of goods, rather than thinking primarily of producing and making available more goods, of increasing the whole of what is available. Although this thesis about Catholics’ economically lagging behind was challenged by George O’Brien, Amintore Fanfani, and others, they did so by pointing to those Catholics, usually German or northern Italian, who understood growth and innovation as something to be learned and put into practice.[3] We can also distinguish between loving or helping poor persons (real individuals in need here and now,) and loving poverty as such, an abstraction. Our love of the poor, in some basic sense, ought to include not only our helping the poor in their immediate needs but also mainly inciting the poor man’s capacity to help himself and others. We want him not to need us to help him, except in the sense that we all need an economic and social system that works for everyone. We want this system to be growing. We do not want a static system that always produces the same number of goods. The poor person is not interested in our love if we do not know how not to be poor. He does not want our love if he suspects that, on our part, we exercise it in behalf of our private virtue and vanity —“See how I am concerned with the poor!” Furthermore, we do not need good will toward, or love of, the poor wrapped around politics or economics that would in practice make things worse or more oppressive for everyone, including the poor. Almost every modern tyranny has ridden to power on a claim (sometimes even a sincere claim) to help the poor. We must ask where claims to help the poor actually lead and not blindly accept assertions about where their claimants say they lead. In that sense, claiming to “be on the side of” the poor might well be both a Christian heresy and a failure of reason. The cause of even sincerely intended poverty elimination has become too much tied up with political and economic systems that seek complete control over citizens in the names of the “common good” and “social justice.” We should not think of the poor or poverty without likewise thinking of freedom, virtue, reason, and experience.

Two Kinds of Poverty Part of the reason that I raise this issue is a letter I received from a Midwestern correspondent whom I had never met. She wrote the following: I have been reading Anne Carey’s revised book about religious sisters.[4] They have a very strange attitude toward the poor and the “marginalized.” I’ve noticed—they seem to LIKE them to be poor and marginalized. They seem to want them to stay that way. In the meantime, they themselves, the most educated group of women ever who can pretty much count on being taken care of, can think of themselves as champions of the poor and downtrodden. They are not all like that, of course, I know some really wonderful women who are members of some of the wacky congregations. But there really is a strange dichotomy among many of these.

This bluntly stated observation of an ordinary housewife does not just apply to some religious women from “wacky” congregations. Whenever someone, religious or secular, tells us that he wants to “identify” with the poor, especially someone who has little clue about the causes of wealth and poverty, we can suspect that the poor are being used as a cloak to justify a political or personal agenda that should be carefully examined. The Old and New Testaments, as well as other literature, are filled with admonitions to give to and care for the poor. In the course of history, two kinds of poverty have been distinguished. In part, this distinction had to do with the meaning of what we now call works of “charity.” That is, some people are poor because of natural or accidental defects in intelligence or health, whereby it was impossible for them to care for themselves and their own interests. Someone else had to care for them at least in part. This group was in reality what Aristotle meant by “slaves”— people who were by nature or by accident unable to care for themselves. The other group contained those who could care for themselves if they had an opportunity to do so. Ideally, they would be able to work themselves out of poverty if they lived in a system that allowed or encouraged them to do so. Not every economic or political system can or will do this. The best intentions in the world or the highest talents and discipline will not work if either the system is disordered or the people are not basically virtuous. Let us ask, however: Why did God give us a world in which all things were not provided to us by nature? We can best answer this query by affirming that God intended for us to learn by ourselves how to take the raw earth and transform it into something that serves our temporal and transcendent purposes. The greater good was not that everything was provided for us with no input of our own. The greater good was that we actually had something to learn and do, something that included our responsibility to others and to what works. That is why we were given reason and time, with a planet and cosmos full of riches if we could but learn of them. We have to think of these two groups in different ways. The first group will always need someone else to care for them. The latter will not if they learn how to be not poor. Laziness and sloth are real negative factors, as are ignorance and lack of insight. Religion can confuse these two groups. It can identify itself with the poor in the second sense as if they were poor in the first sense. They will then look on the poor to be permanently in a condition of need, of needing someone “taking care” of them. The justification for one’s religious life is thus to care for the poor rather than to find ways to teach them how to escape poverty. Keeping Poverty in Proper Perspective If we add to this mix the vow of poverty, we find, along with the classic philosophers such as Socrates, a voluntary choice not to be rich, not to be bothered by the cares that wealth of whatever size may bring. This choice to be poor does not mean that those with vows of poverty do not need enough resources to care for themselves. It means that they are free to do myriads of other worthy things such as philosophize or assist others who are poor. Saint Benedict said that monks are both “to pray and to work.” Saint Ignatius said that we can pray in anything we do. Later economists have realized that this monastic working and not spending was the origin of capital savings. By being poor, they became rich. This wealth enabled further growth to take place, a growth that built some of the most beautiful places on our planet. Whenever anyone wants to build something noble or beautiful, we suddenly hear cries (first spoken by Judas) that it would be better “to give something to the poor” (John 13:29). This passage shows that poverty is not always the most important thing to consider. It has always been my contention that money spent on beautiful things is money spent for the poor. The poor are human beings who are not restricted to one thought alone—riches. The poor have need of beauty as much as they have need of bread. If, however, we insist that the only thing the poor need is bread, we will not only insult the poor who can appreciate beauty, but we will lock them into a world with no signs of transcendence. We need not choose between the alternatives of beauty or helping the poor; we can achieve both. For economists and theologians, it is always worth meditating on how small towns of two or three thousand inhabitants, by our standards poor people, managed over the course of centuries to build some of the most beautiful edifices in the world —the medieval cathedrals. It was this beauty that so enchanted a non-Catholic scion of a great American political family, Henry Adams, as he toured Europe in the nineteenth century.[5] My main thesis, however, is that Catholic social thought should shift the direction of its rhetoric concerning the poor. It should not primarily stress the Christian’s association with the poor. The poor man does not want everyone to be destitute. He is not delighted to see well-off folks joining him in his poverty. That would be a loss of hope. The religious emphasis needs to be more oriented to teaching how to be not poor on a large scale. Catholic social thought ought to realize that the first step in this change of emphasis is to rid itself of the idea that redistribution of existing goods is anything other than a revolutionary method that would indeed make everyone poor. Again, the purpose of Christianity is not to make everyone poor. Catholic social thought must learn to understand intelligence, profit, markets, and innovation as the primary ways to enable the poor, by their own efforts, to become not poor. The poor are not really helped by well-meaning souls who identify with them but who have only confused or detrimental ideas about wealth production. The only real resource in the world is the human brain. It is not oil or material goods, or location. Human intelligence is itself designed to know and deal with what exists in the world. The world is intended to be a place wherein humans can become through their own enterprises more fully what they ought to be. The virtue of charity, the need to give of one’s abundance, includes learning what works and what does not work. Not only do human beings need a certain amount of material goods to be virtuous, as Aristotle said, they also need virtue to use those goods rightly. They need to reject vice and corruption. The worst thing that can happen to Christianity, itself responsible for much of the grounding of science in its teaching about the existence of a real world with secondary causality in it, is that it becomes associated with the love of poverty in such a way that Christians seem to want everyone to be poor. Many seem to think that by claiming to be on the side of the poor the poor will be grateful and will reconnect with Christianity. How one is perceived surely does make a difference. The poor, however, usually see where such sympathies lead: too often to political and ideological control in the name of poverty alleviation. In this area, we have little room for deluding ourselves. Much of world poverty has in fact been reduced or alleviated.[6] Many Christians seem not to know that this change has happened or why. Although Christians should concern themselves with the causes and solutions of poverty, it is critical to remember that the question of material welfare is ultimately secondary. The urgency of poverty alleviation often makes it seem that the main purpose of the Church in this world is horizontal, but the Church exists to lead us, rich and poor alike, to a transcendent end. Modern thought has often been an effort to substitute this transcendent end for an inner-worldly one. Salvation comes into the world whether it is perfect or not. Christianity holds that the poor qua poor have as good a chance of reaching beatitude as the rich qua rich—probably a better one. Unless this end is understood, no amount of discussion of wealth and poverty in this world will make much difference.

[1] Andrew Napolitano, Washington Times, December 4, 2013, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/dec/4/napolitano- liberty-the-wellspring-of-capitalism-an/. [2] See, for example, “Study: Latin Americans Abandoning Catholic Church for Evangelical, Protestant Churches,” Catholic Online, November 17, 2014, which posits that one reason for the shift is that evangelical churches “offer practical answers to the question of poverty.” Available at http://www.catholic.org/news/hf/faith/story.php? id=57681. [3] George O’Brien, An Essay on the Economic Effects of the Reformation (1923; repr., Norfolk, VA: IHS Press, 2003); Amintore Fanfani, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism (1935; repr., Norfolk, VA: IHS Press, 2002 [1935]). [4] The reference is to Ann Carey, Sisters in Crisis Revisited: From Unraveling to Reform and Renewal (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2013). [5] Henry Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913). [6]See the Economist article cited at the front of this book, “Towards the End of Poverty,” June 1, 2013.

IV Confessions of a Practicing ‘Socialist’

Socialists are collectivist in their proposals. But they are Communist in their idealism. Now there is a real pleasure in sharing. We have all felt it in the case of nuts off a tree or the National Gallery, or such things. But it is not the only pleasure nor the only altruistic pleasure, nor (I think) the highest or most human of altruistic pleasures. I greatly prefer the pleasure of giving and receiving. Giving is not the same as sharing: giving is even the opposite of sharing. Sharing is based on the idea that there is no property, or at least no personal property. But giving a thing to another man is as much based on personal property as keeping it to yourself. —G. K. Chesterton[1]

A man cannot be fully explained in terms of geography and time. However, these are not insignificant data. I was born on a farm in Pocahontas County, Iowa, the year Herbert Hoover was elected president. I grew up mostly in small towns in Iowa: Eagle Grove, Carroll, Dubuque, and Knoxville. After the death of my mother and the remarriage of my father, we moved to San Jose, California, where I began college at the University of Santa Clara in the fall of 1945. As the war had just finished that summer, the draft was still in effect, so I joined the Army for a short enlistment. It was, in fact, a good experience. (A society without widespread military experience among its men is, I think, a dangerous one.) When I left the Army, I returned to college and joined the Society of Jesus in the fall of 1948 at Los Gatos, California. This novitiate, at the time, was famous for having quite an excellent winery at which we worked during the season. Later, in part due to its having signed an expensive labor contract, the winery ceased operation— at a time when the wine industry in California was about to explode. A considerable number of my ideas on economics came later, during graduate school at Georgetown University. There, I assiduously audited the courses of Professors Goetz Briefs and Josef Solterer, who were respectively German and Austrian economists of some repute. Both were also philosophers and theologians, and both knew the social teachings of the Church. It was from them that I learned to wonder what exactly was the effect of labor unions on an economy, what was entrepreneurship, and other questions of importance that I had not yet considered. Solterer in particular was quite lucid on the fact that no society really gets ahead unless all parts of it progress. Redistribution never solves a society’s economic or moral problems. These were also the days in which it was widely believed that there were too many people and that we would all starve to death because of it. My book Human Dignity & Human Numbers was written just after this time and remains important in my mind because I understood that agriculture always grows faster than population, largely because of free markets and entrepreneurship. It was about this time, too, that I learned that the real basis of wealth is not property but the human mind, which in its own way is infinite. This means that the roots of the problems that the world experiences do not lie in economics but in intelligence, politics, and morality. The great cause of poverty is generally faulty government policies or individual immorality that requires bribes and other forms of civic corruption. The Church has placed much emphasis on the poor and the alleviation of poverty. Indeed, for much modern ideology, alleviating the circumstances of the poor became almost a religion, but the serious question was how best this alleviation was to be accomplished. The first principle has to be for the poor to have the incentives and opportunity to help themselves. The real relation of charity to this question was not fully confronted until Benedict XVI’s encyclical Deus Caritas Est (2005). It was somewhat later that I ran into E. F. Schumacher’s idea that, in fact, all the economic problems, as problems, had already been solved.[2] We know how to alleviate the situation of the poor. What we do not know is the political side of the question: how to allow or encourage to take place that which we know will help. With these reflections articulated, I can better face the question that really lies behind most modern poverty, namely, the issue of property and socialism—an issue that in some sense goes back to Plato and Aristotle.

Capitalism at Work: Belmont Park If I am asked: “How does capitalism work?” I like to recount the story of Belmont Park in the early 2000s.[3] After the surprising run of Funny Cide in the first two legs of the Triple Crown (2003), there was a sudden increase in interest in thoroughbred racing. Some 101,864 fans showed up on a terribly rainy and chilly day for the Belmont Stakes, the third event of the series, the first chance for a single winner of all three races—the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont—in over a quarter century. Track owners naturally were seeking to capitalize on this increased interest in racing. They saw it as a way both to help the business and to make a profit. They were legitimate capitalists using their minds to expand their business.Nevertheless, how to make it work was also a legitimate and essential capitalist question. Belmont Park had earlier devised a surefire, entrepreneurial way to accomplish this purpose. They sought to lure those bettors who had showed up in large numbers on one Saturday for the popular Belmont Stakes back to the track on the other Saturdays when attendance and revenue were way down. The managers of the track shrewdly thought that if they put a coupon into the Belmont Stakes Program, entitling every holder to a free entrance to any other Saturday of the Meet, they would have a perfect gimmick for increasing attendance and hence profit. Once the bettors were in the stands they would make up for any loss of gate fees by cash on the nose of multiple losing horses, not to mention food and drink sales and parking fees. What happened, however, was just the opposite of expectations. The fact is that most people are not going to go to ordinary race days no matter what its cost. They come to the Belmont because of its excitement, especially with the possibility of a Triple Crown Winner. However, the regular, much smaller crowd that would go to the races every Saturday and pay the fee anyway, spotted the many hundreds of free coupons that the Stakes attendees threw away. This abundance of free coupons meant that the regulars, by picking them up, would get in free for the rest of the season without paying the normal entrance fee that they would have gladly paid anyhow. In addition to this boon, several innovative bettors sold their extra collected coupons for 50 cents apiece. Seeing their plan to increase attendance go awry, naturally the capitalist owners cut their losses and did not try that scheme again. I conclude from this amusing incident that, at least at the track, capitalism is working as it should work. That is, entrepreneurs seek to increase revenue from their product. They dream up (that is, innovate) schemes to do so. They try them out. Other lesser entrepreneurs in the stands see an opportunity to make some money on the failed plan and do so. The lesson learned is that tracks must figure out other ways to increase attendance and revenue. The market tests the plan. Someone wins; someone loses. Capitalism includes the possibility of spending money to make money with the connotation that this making money is caused by producing something new, needed, or desirable. Profit has a title of legitimacy. The world can be improved for human purposes. Capitalism also includes the possibility of losing money to make money, or even losing money period. Without this possibility of risk, we are socialists. The government not only covers all our risks but also claims any profit. We risk nothing if our losses are covered by someone else. Indeed socialism discourages risks, whereas what we need to do is encourage risk- taking. If no one is allowed to fail, we will not know the difference between what works and what does not. Without a free market, we have no real or objective test of cost or of the worth of innovations and their relation to costs of production. Employees and employers tend to think they have a “right” to their income no matter what they do, no matter what their product costs, and no matter whether anyone wants it. Work becomes valued for its own sake with no relation to the worth of the product on which we labored. A free market enables us to test out ideas. We need to see and evaluate whether people think what we do is worth anything. If the government owned the track and paid for its operation from tax money, we would not have to worry about the track’s profit and loss. However, this alternative would be a form of “bread and circuses.” The present system has the advantage of letting those who want to spend their money in this way do so— granted, of course, that the government still taxes all entry fees, all winnings, and all racing corporations, as well as guaranteeing the integrity of the operation through state racing commissions. This tax, if set too high, makes gambling prohibitive. Capitalism also allows unsuccessful tracks to declare bankruptcy, to cease operation. Those who want nothing to do with the track or betting can simply do something else, whereas in a socialist system where the government ran the track, the public would have to foot the losses. I began this discussion of how I came to understand the value of a free market with a homey example of betting because I learned to understand capitalism from such incidents. In some sense, capitalism is the natural order of things. It proposes that if we want to make money, we have to do something to warrant it. It does not start out with an abstract idea that everyone is owed a living or an income apart from anything he does. Almost all ideologies arise from some noble purpose that, when put into effect, does not work in practice. What capitalism is, then, is a scheme to test what works.

Social Justice The title of these reflections is related to a wonderful essay by G. K. Chesterton, “Why I Am Not a Socialist.” Although I do not recall ever being a socialist in theory, my understanding of free enterprise in practice comes in part from critiques of socialism in its various forms. Intellectually, I learned about the market not by running a business but from reading about socialism. The Chesterton essay was originally written in 1908, the same year that Chesterton published Orthodoxy, four years after the birth of my father in Iowa. The essay suggests that if you do not own anything, you cannot give anything away. If you cannot give something away, there is no risk. Giving something to someone implies that something is already yours by real title. It also implies the existence of someone else to whom you actually want to give something, not just “share” it. This is the whole point of giving a gift: its symbolism of love and generosity. Thus, it means something; it reveals your character. There is no virtue in my giving away what is not actually mine. Indeed, if I give away what is not mine, it is a form of stealing, just as receiving stolen goods, even as a gift, is illicit. One of the main problems of modern governments is their assumption that they can give away what is not theirs under the guise of social purpose. They call it a virtue, usually some sort of “social justice.” Social justice can be a dangerous term. How so? Justice is “to render each his due.” Justice is always in motion from an inner source, but never complete or automatic. No historic situation is ever the same. Classically, justice is a moral, practical virtue. I must acquire it and practice it “towards others.” No one can “make” me just. I can always choose to be unjust. Since justice already means “related to others,” why add social? Herein lies the problem. Social justice in modern philosophy derives from Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. It does not have the same meaning found in Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, or Aquinas, for whom justice was a personally acquired habit. It existed only in its practice. A just polity was one in which citizens freely practiced virtues, acquired with difficulty, toward others. Is the dominant contemporary view of social justice identified with Aristotle’s legal justice? No. Aristotle and Aquinas meant by legal justice that each virtue— namely, temperance, bravery, liberality, prudence, the guidance of anger, manners, wit, and truth-telling—could have some relationship with another for a common good. When any moral act affected someone else, it became a matter of both, for instance, justice and temperance. “Don’t drink and drive,” means that one virtue, temperance, can involve another virtue, justice. In this latter capacity, for a common good, legislation can specify temperance, hence the term legal justice. Depending on whether its citizenry is just or unjust, a polity designs its political institutions to accomplish the end by which its people choose to live. An unjust regime means one in which citizens do not practice justice toward others. Rather they organize themselves so as to accomplish their unjust purpose more easily. Aristotle’s analysis of regimes accounted for the different institutions that fostered these ends. Because of the difficulty of acquiring virtue, also associated with original sin, a good regime is unlikely to last. The origins of social justice lie in Machiavelli’s rejection of the possibility of virtue. He lowered moral sights to achieve, as he thought, a “best” workable regime. He wanted to establish a regime of success, not virtue, a regime free of the so-called restrictions of virtue. From Hobbes to Kant, the question was how to erect a just (i.e., successful) regime—one that keeps power but without the personal practice of virtue. A good regime in this line of thought means not that individuals are just but that the laws or structures are just. Whatever the laws, if citizens “obey” (usually by force), they will be prosperous, happy, and peaceful. Law is “will.” Modern political philosophy constructed constitutions and laws as devices to secure contentment apart from the inner moral order of the citizens measured by objective standards. Citizens would be made to be happy or free wherein happiness or freedom implied nothing about moral or theological virtue. A good regime could be one in which widespread vices, measured by classical standards, are both prevalent and justified. What positive law commanded was by definition good (right). We have a right to whatever the law allows. Following Hobbes, citizens of regimes of social justice have no duties, only rights, a word that is by no means neutral. Citizens are not responsible for doing anything. They are entitled to receive whatever the law grants to them. In practice, the principal virtue of the “rights-state” is compassion, the virtue capable of overturning each natural law norm. The state defines which right is owed to everyone. Compassion also replaces charity, which has no real place in a social justice-rights state. If I do not have what I am entitled to by right, I am a victim of society. It is responsible for my condition. Modern states based on this concept of social justice guarantee that I have all my rights, themselves wholly defined by law. I am “taken care of,” but not by myself or others through virtuous acts— particularly personal acts of justice, friendship, and charity. To conceive of justice as an ideal set of institutions waiting to be established so that everyone will be taken care of is a latent form of totalitarianism. If by the phrase, “working for social justice,” we mean that we are seeking to erect a regime in which everyone else, especially the poor, will be provided for by our structurally oriented efforts, we will mistake what justice signifies. Justice cannot be automatically acquired outside of ourselves. Its acquisition includes the intellectual and moral virtues in their proper sense. We cannot help others unless we understand what virtue is and how to acquire it. Strictly speaking, a modern social justice regime obviates any real relation, be it of justice, charity, or friendship of one person to another. What the government possesses to give away is necessarily first taken away, in the form of taxes, from the people who produce it. (Any production requires a public order, with laws and enforcement systems, to enable it to happen.) Governments are tempted to think of themselves as being responsible for taking care of everyone in all walks of life—the all-caring state—whereas what they ought to do is let human lives be lived by free people who decide what they should do with themselves and with their own money and efforts. I do not argue that there is no need for government. I do argue that, in the name of high purpose, government can and often does undermine the actual lives and wealth of its people. The government is not itself the common good, but it is one of the means by which that good can be achieved by each person’s own talents, efforts, and wealth. Both capitalism and socialism are rooted in the desire to eliminate poverty. However, capitalism does so by making everyone richer, albeit at differing rates. In any system, many can become poorer for various reasons. The turmoil of capitalism is in part a function of envy, that is, chagrin that others legitimately have what we do not. Socialism begins in equality. It is content if everyone is poorer, so long as they are equally poor. The problem with socialism is generally greed: the desire for what is unavailable through our own efforts. Socialism suggests that the ideal answer to the human problem is that no one owns anything. If this nonownership were to be the case, many of the higher virtues could not be practiced at all. Nor could most people be adequately taken care of by their own labors. In a certain sense, socialism undermines any direct relationship that one person can have with another because it implies that everything is due to everyone whether or not he owns it or does anything to cause it. Charity and generosity are thus communalized, reduced to distributive, not commutative, justice. Equality, rather than proportionate contribution or bearing of burdens, is seen as the only object of distributive justice. If this commonality of property is in effect, then the very notion of giving something to someone is subverted. The possibility of widespread individual virtue acquired in the exercise of one’s own responsibilities over one’s own property is taken away from the majority of people. Historically, there are religious and philosophical origins to the idea that the less property we have the better. The rich young man in the Gospels was told to sell what he had and give it to the poor. He was not told to open a business to put the local unemployed to work, though that seems to have been part of the motive of the vineyard owner who paid every laborer a day’s wages, no matter how long he worked (Matt. 20:1– 15). Greek philosophers claimed that their personal poverty was chosen, that they did not want to be distracted by material goods. They rightly saw how riches could interfere with their pursuit of higher virtues. Both the Old and New Testaments manifest a special concern for the poor, who, we are assured, will always be with us but whose needs are especially to be looked after. This poverty seems to be still rather widespread, even though there are economists who maintain that the problem of poverty is, in principle, solved (as I think it is). This conclusion suggests that the problem of poverty may not, at bottom, be a wholly economic problem. If our neighbor has more than we do, we can be relatively well-off and still feel comparatively poor, still feel envious, even though our neighbor’s wealth is acquired legitimately and we are by no means in a dire condition. This observation raises the issue of relative wealth, of how little is enough or of how much is too much. Most people, following Aristotle, recognize that we generally need a certain amount of property or wealth to practice minimal virtue. Many also recognize with this same Aristotle that we can put too much emphasis on wealth to the detriment of other more important things in life. Moreover, contrary to many ecology schools, the world is in fact an abundant place, almost as if it is inviting us to “increase, multiply, and dominate” it. There would be something radically wrong with a position suggesting that we ought not work on, improve, and make beautiful and productive the land and seas we are given. This consideration also brings us to the Platonic notion that our faculty for desiring material things is unlimited. Desire by itself is a potential cause of disorder among us. It needs to be controlled by virtues, specifically the virtues of liberality and munificence. Liberality enables the use of a moderate amount of riches for our real good, including that of freely giving. Munificence is the quality of being unusually generous with one’s wealth. Aristotle was quite clear that wealth in itself is neither an evil nor a detriment to virtue. He proposed that a great amount of wealth could have a high social purpose when used for beauty, truth, and goodness—for art galleries, university chairs, and hospitals, for example. He understood the need for graciousness in the use of property. Rich and poor did not differ when it came to their respective possibilities of practicing virtue. The poor could be generous, as could the wealthy. Both could be stingy and narrow. Virtue and vice are not external to our own souls.

A Practicing “Socialist” The reason for the peculiar title to this chapter is that I belong to a religious order whose members take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. The effect of these vows is that members have no private property of their own in any form. In Aristotle, property was designated as the material support of family life. Not having a family means that one does not have a great personal need for private property. The purpose of such vows is much the same as that found in Plato’s proposal for commonality of property, wives, and children; namely, to be freed from certain real and worthy obligations in order to be at liberty to devote one’s full attention to other projects. The Christian response to the Platonic proposal was to not have wives, children, and property in the first place. This was a more humane and manageable solution, though one not meant for everyone. Thus, I have lived most of my life as a practicing socialist. Any income I receive from work or gifts belongs by right to the Society of Jesus. The Order can by law own property, but individual members of the Order cannot. “From each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs” is pretty much the principle of monastic living. Such vows do not mean that one has no access to food, clothing, or shelter but that these are not one’s personal property to do with as he wishes. Like Plato’s guardians, we dine in common dining halls. This way of life was neither seen to be that of everyone nor most, neither by Plato nor by the religious tradition. It was a separate way of life, with its own dangers and goods. It was not, furthermore, considered to be in principle antagonistic to the normal life of families or to wealth production and distribution. Indeed, without the latter, without families, there could be no new members or normal way of life for monastic communities. A responsible government, moreover, would let such forms of voluntary religious life or secular associations exist on their own legal terms. The contribution of the monastic orders was measured in new ideas and initiatives that directly or indirectly benefited both its members and the public. Indeed, economic historians have seen the vows of poverty to be responsible for the initial savings and, hence, accumulations of wealth from which banking and public or religious buildings and institutions sprang.

Private Property I am, however, in agreement with the basic point of the Aristotelian critique of Plato’s proposal of common wives, children, and property in book 5 of The Republic. Aristotle, who seems to have taken Plato’s proposal as a serious, not ironical, one for actual polities, observed that if everyone was our parent or child, no particular person would really be adequately taken care of. He saw that good order required private property. Paradoxically, people took better care of what was theirs than what was public, no matter how noble- sounding public concern might be. Accountability followed ownership. The general destruction of family or property harmed rather than improved human enterprise. Moreover, property made the family, in which children with their own parents could flourish, much more possible and secure. Thus, institutions such as monastic life, while justified, were extraordinary. Monasteries have to take special precautions that their members do not become sloppy or neglectful or unconcerned. Human nature remains the same and needs to be counteracted if such a life is to be possible. The point is not that it is impossible or inadvisable to live such a life but that it is a very special and often dangerous way of life if the virtues that support it are not practiced. Thus, my experience as a practicing socialist has been a major factor in seeing the value and worth of a private- property system for most people. The great attack on this view today is, paradoxically, in the name of the poor who, generally speaking if given a choice, want nothing more than their own homes, families, and some sort of private property. Moreover, this concern for the poor has been a major factor in pronouncements of religious leaders, including Catholic ones. Modern economic systems are generally faulted for failure to help the poor in the developing world and sometimes at home. Schemes to remedy this failure are prevalent in modern parliaments and economic discussions. The question remains as to the best way to help the poor, as well as enhancing the growth and abundance that is necessary to manifest the myriad things that people do when they are free and no longer poor. A society concentrated only on poverty relief would be one that missed the purpose of life. “Man does not live by bread alone” may still be the most revolutionary social principle yet enunciated. If I were to answer as to why I, even though a practicing socialist, am an advocate of a free market, it is because I think it is the only way in which the poor will be helped and the only way in which a rich society can remain free to deal with things beyond politics. We are in an antigrowth, ecologically oriented ideological world that is not based on the idea of the real abundance of nature and of the effects of the mind with regard to things. The real enemies of the poor are those who maintain ideas or institutions including governmental ones that do not work. Envy and Greed Although envy is generally associated with the rich, it can also be a vice of the poor. Although greed is considered a vice of the rich, it, too, can be a vice of the poor. In other words, the virtues and vices that make life worth living are not the exclusive property of anyone. For Aristotle, envy was the desire of honors due to another. Greed was the desire of another’s property. Aristotle recognized that both greed and envy needed to be ruled through the will. Aristotle in addition stated that if someone steals because he is poor, the proper solution is to see that he has some property so that he can produce his own necessities. Nevertheless, some would steal for pleasure. The solution for this vice, he thought, was virtue. There were yet others who might steal because of some grandiose scheme to cure mankind. He thought a correct philosophy was the only solution for this more deep-seated and dangerous problem. When we read the classics, it looks at first as if we confront the economic problem, then the political problem, then the philosophical or religious problems of humankind. In terms of analysis, this is a perfectly good way to proceed. In terms of action, however, it seems quite obvious that the economic problem, which can be solved, is not allowed to work because of prior problems of vice or more likely of philosophy. Plato was not wrong to point his whole philosophy toward properly understanding the highest virtures, in the light of which, generally speaking, worldly and economic matters are structured. Chesterton’s remark about a world in which giving was possible contains a comprehensive philosophic understanding of the right order of worldly things. We can have private property or wealth and still be stingy or miserly. However, we cannot have common property and still be able to give a gift or give a cup of water. Entrepreneurship means the possibility of devising a system whereby people can have pure water to drink and wash and water their lawns or their animals and at the same time be providing a service to each other and an income for themselves by way of the market. Politics means allowing these systems to be put into effect at a reasonable cost. The only possibility that the poor be not poor—a reasonable desire for all including socialist monks —is for them to imitate the ways to be not poor. The ultimate battles are not economic or even political. They are philosophical and theological. It has been the tradition of the West that such battles are fought in the academy. It has been the unfortunate experience of modernity that they have been fought in the streets. In the end, a good idea, an idea that works, can be rejected. It is the virtue of the free market that a good idea can at least be tried.

[1] G. K. Chesterton, “Why I Am Not a Socialist,” New Age, January 4, 1908, reprinted in The Chesterton Review, 7 (August 1981): 189–95. [2] See the quotation at the beginning of chapter 7. [3] Andrew Beyer, “Riding High All the Way Around,” The Washington Post, June 20, 2003.

V On Justice, Rights, and Poverty

Bernard de Mandeville (1670–1733) famously (or infamously) suggested that the cause of wealth is vice. If everyone were perfect, Mandeville thought, no one would demand anything. Everyone would be content with little. With no aggregate demand, no incentive for production would arise to meet that demand. With no production and demand, no exchange and increase of wealth would be possible. If no one drinks beer, no brewing industry would exist. No brewing industry would mean no growing of hops and barley, thus no farmers, no market for bottles or cans, no Clydesdales, nor anything refreshing to drink at baseball games. Plato, by contrast, had indicated, through Glaucon in The Republic, that a society driven by unlimited demands would be a “city of pigs.” It would be a people with no interest higher than producing ever more sophisticated items for consumption. Such a people, without military guardians, would be unable to defend themselves from their own passions or from the desires of other armed cities coveting what they had produced for their luxury. In another variant of this theme, Hegel was later to suggest that virtuous societies have no history, that nothing much goes on in them except a repetition of rather boring events associated with ordinary life. In some sense, then, economics has been saddled with a dubious heritage. Growth will be caused by vice and distribution by greed. Virtue will produce stagnation. We see, moreover, certain governments, because their own people lack internal virtue, desperately buying out the opium poppy supply of other countries that sell them for heroin in order not to ruin the “legitimate” business of the enterprising farmers in their own poor countries who grow the plant’s narcotic for profit. We also have seen that giving or selling surplus farm products at a low price on a foreign market for humanitarian purposes often ruins the higher-priced production of local farmers. Doing good, in other words, seems to foster further wrong. Clearly, the connection between vice and growth needs to be addressed. Is there a case for virtue and growth? One major interpretation of the industrial revolution and its ongoing consequences suggests that the market mechanism that enabled such widespread wealth in the first place ended up impoverishing the masses. This is the stuff of classic socialist rhetoric. The fact is, however, that Marx’s taunt that over the years the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer is not true. Rather, what has happened is that everyone becomes richer, provided he enters the market with knowledge of how it works and a will to work within it. Exploitation is not the main explanation of poverty. The theory of exploitation itself impedes growth as it misunderstands its requirements. Long-range economic growth does not deny that wars and rumors of war will happen, though it does doubt that economics itself is their main cause. Nor does it doubt that many individuals, by accident or by their own choices, will fall by the wayside and need help. The need for something beyond justice always remains. The fact is, however, that the world has seen sustained growth of wealth and population for four centuries. This growth suggests that the problems of historic poverty can be and are being solved gradually as we apply the proper means to them. As the world has become richer at differing rates and in differing circumstances, the possibility of using this wealth wrongly has likewise increased. Freedom means that no automatic way exists to guarantee that wealth will be used properly unless those who produce and use it themselves act virtuously. The moral drama does not lie in the wealth itself but in the souls of those who produce, distribute, and use it —in the habits of those who need it and make it work. Provided it is itself well-ordered—by no means a certainty—government can to some extent contribute to the proper development and use of wealth, but the records of few governments on this score have been encouraging. Government will not be the primary means for correcting any imbalances in the human condition. Indeed, the abuse of governmental power is the cause of the greatest and bloodiest slaughters of the twentieth century. This slaughter, like widespread poverty itself, has been caused by faulty economic ideas chosen by ideological governments, most often in the name of human benefit and helping the poor. We can thus continue these reflections with several now familiar propositions: 1. The rich are not rich because the poor are poor; in the beginning, all were poor. 2. The ultimate cause of wealth is not land or resources or even labor but the human mind— itself ordained to know what is. 3. The poor can most easily become better off by learning from those who have grasped how to be not poor. 4. Not every proposal for passing from poverty to wealth works. 5. The purpose of political economy is not that the citizens, poor and rich, be taken care of by someone else but that they provide for their own lives by virtue of their own enterprise, work, and sacrifice in a system of exchange that is fair. 6. Governments do not exist primarily to generate wealth for the populace but to provide that what is just can be manifest and secured. 7. Freedom means that new and improved ways of doing things can come to be; it also means that men can do evil and thereby distort the workings of justice and brotherhood. 8. A relatively poor society can be a virtuous one; a relatively rich one can be corrupt, and vice versa.

Economics Is a Means to Higher Things Plato devoted himself particularly to those potential philosophers whose souls ought to be open to the highest things but whose internal lack of discipline or unguided desire could easily deflect them from what is; from what is important. It has long been popularly assumed, even philosophically affirmed, contrary to both Plato and Aristotle, that those who devote themselves to the highest things are, by that very fact, neglecting the “human things”; the things of this world. In his recollection of Matthew 6:33, “Seek first the kingdom (of God),” Lord Acton held that a prosperous political economy either will not exist or will not operate well if the production of the economy itself and of its workings is seen to be the first and only purpose of human living.[1] Economics is not the primary end of man. Indeed, as modernity continues, we begin to see that the myth of a prosperous economy can itself be pictured as an alternative to God. The Commandments and the principles of virtue are presented not as the way to ultimate human well-being but as the primary impediment to prosperity. Morality is proposed as detrimental to, not as an aid to, human well-being. We can contrast appetite and duty. Eating and drinking, for instance, are not just ways of satisfying appetites. They are mainly the means by which we continue to live within the order of nature and reason that exists within each person. Appetite as such is part of our natural endowment. All appetite has a purpose. The pleasure that follows the exercise of our desires for our proper goods is not an evil or a disorder, as Aristotle and Aquinas remind us. Eating and drinking are enjoyable even if we need them to keep in being, which is their primary function. Indeed, making it possible to eat and drink in safety, abundance, and comfort is one of the primary purposes of any economy and the proud boast of a modern productive society. Duty, moreover, is not something that exists for its own sake, in some Kantian sense. If we have a duty, it is because of what we are. All our proper activities have their proper pleasures and purposes. These pleasures and purposes can be the occasion of our misusing them, but we should not think that the fact that we have appetite or pleasure is somehow a sign that something is wrong with us. These are our “inclinations,” as Aquinas calls them, and indicate, when we consider them properly, what is right with us. They indicate the kind of beings we are—mortal beings composed of body and a soul that are integrated in each of us as a person. We are directed to that which is beyond or that which is more than ourselves. We do not cause ourselves to be human beings; we find ourselves to be human beings. This is why Aristotle told us not to listen to those who tell us to attend merely to human things and not also to those things that are divine. This is also why Christ told us to seek first the kingdom of God.

The Moral Dimension of Work “The moral foundation of political economy,” to use Lord Acton’s phrase, rests on the connection of liberty with right, of right with duty, of duty with leisure and delight, and of all with transcendence. Our most unsettling economic problems are actually not economic but moral—moral ones that cannot be simply passed on from generation to generation. They need to be chosen and internalized by each person in each generation at the risk of deflecting material goods from their proper purposes. Work likewise is not exclusively for its own sake. Rather work, while being an expression of human dignity and concrete accomplishment, aims at a product, aims at the material well-being in which something more than work can happen. The basis of culture, as Josef Pieper wrote in a famous thesis, is not only work but also leisure that lies beyond work.[2] We work in order to have leisure, not the other way around. John Paul II spoke of work and the primacy of the worker with his needs and those of his family over some impersonal economic system.[3] Yet, the need of work implies a system in which work is normal and possible. The purpose of work is not just to work, even though the fact that we have craft and artistic powers as constitutive in our nature indicates that we ought to work in and improve the world. We are not only to make the world capable of providing for us but also to make things elegant and noble. The world is not a parsimonious place, in spite of the dogmas of the ecologists. When Aristotle talked of commutative justice, he indicated that its immediate object fell into two general areas. The first had to do with restoring the damages that we do to others by accidents or deliberate fault. The second, the one that is important here, is that this form of justice enables us to enter into agreements—binding promises —as Lord Acton said. With these, we can organize the future to cause something worthwhile to come into being. In so doing, we gain our livelihood. The common good is a context for just relationships. Through it, we recognize that an abundance of good things is possible. This prosperity is possible if we keep our contracts. If we permit and encourage all to bring forth their talents in an organized way, they can be offered to others. Work, genius, and ordinary endeavor ought to become present to others in an exchange whereby everyone does not do the same thing. Everyone in the economy ought to reflect that what he does, in some significant way, is actually worthwhile for the human good taken in its broadest sense. A principal reason for the malfunctioning or nonfunctioning of economies is precisely the lack of moral, not technical, criteria whereby these desired results are obtained. The “option for the poor” is largely a question of choosing the right system that will enable the poor to become not poor. Likewise, poverty may also be the result of refusing to embrace the discipline and the ethic whereby what is known can actually come about. Adam Smith understood the importance of discipline and virtue. Yet, discipline and virtue are not solely ends in themselves. They are in turn oriented to what is beyond them, to what is no longer economic or political. While it is permissible to speak of duty and virtue as goods in themselves, as they are in their own orders, they are themselves ordained to the good to be achieved by work and exchange in pursuance of duty and virtue. Duty and virtue do not consist in simply doing what we want, yet our desire has an ontological basis. Desire is a power directed to what is worthy and good. We should see in duty not just something we “must” do but also something worth doing because it is good. The highest human purposes for which all the orders of economics and politics exist still need to be consciously recognized and articulated. The kingdom of God, as Augustine taught us, is the end of our being. Without it, we will spend our lives searching for it everywhere but where it is. The tragedy of our times is not that we have denied the existence of the City of God, but rather that we have sought to locate it where it is not. The economy is ordered to the polity. The polity is ordered to the transcendent purpose of man in this world and beyond it.

Justice and Mercy “God, who is justice and truth, does not judge by appearances,” says the Antiphon from my breviary.[4] Psalm 86:15–16 adds: “But you, Lord, are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in mercy and truth. Turn to me, be gracious to me.” In the same vein, the Roman jurist Seneca explains: Clemency, though she is invoked by those who deserve punishment, is respected by innocent people as well. Next, she can exist in the person of the innocent, because sometimes misfortune takes the place of crime; indeed, clemency not only succors the innocent, but often the virtuous, since in the course of time it happens that men are punished for acts that deserve pardon. Besides this, there is a large part of mankind which might return to virtue, if the hope of pardon were not denied them.[5]

Plato was worried about whether the world was created in justice, since it did not seem to be. For in it, the innocent were often punished, while many of the guilty went away untouched. While tyrants died in their beds, heroes languished in prison. Pope Benedict XVI held that the best chance of our seeing the good and necessity of the resurrection was through the logic of the virtue of justice. The actual persons who committed the crimes or who did the virtuous act had to be judged and properly punished or rewarded. Otherwise, no real and ultimate justice could take place. Without the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body, the world is created in injustice. Aquinas, too, wondered whether the world was created in justice. He said that it was created in mercy, not justice. Machiavelli, however, held that if we were merely just, we would be destroyed by the unjust. Thus, it was necessary also to be wicked at times, lest we perish. In C. S. Lewis’ novel Till We Have Faces the Greek philosopher is asked, “Then the world is not created in justice?” He replies, “Thank God that it is not.” Finally, one of the first and most celebrated remarks of Pope Francis was: “The truth is that I am a sinner whom the mercy of God has loved in a special way.”[6] If there are sinners in the world, they have no hope without there also being mercy, not merely justice. Christianity professes to be a revelation of God’s love, the full dimensions of which are incomprehensible to us because of the limited nature of our being. We are finite beings who are created good but not gods. Because we depend on them and acknowledge them as true, however, Christianity affirms that things can be figured out by human reason. We can know what is true. We know it when we affirm in our minds what is actually there in reality. The truths about the inner life of God and our relationship to it are beyond the power of our reason, though not contradictory to it. We can think about them when we come to know them. In thinking of them, we learn to think better than when we only think of natural and human things. Christianity purports to be grounded in the truth, the whole truth, not just that part of truth naturally open to human reason. It acknowledges that all truth fits together in a consistent order. It determines that the purpose of the mind is to know this order. But can a society without justice or mercy be a society of truth? Mercy and justice, the truth and the good, must belong together. Likewise, can injustices be forgiven even while we admit the truth that unjust things do happen? Does not mercy imply the denial of justice? Mercy without justice seems to undermine reality because it takes nothing as being serious. Can we be merciful but unjust at the same time? Can mercy itself be a form of injustice? Does not the virtue of clemency overlook real guilt? Does it not prevent justice from taking place? Here, I want to say something about the relationship of justice and mercy in the light of love, compassion, and truth. Not to speak accurately of these virtues can cause serious errors. Generally speaking, if we do not think rightly, we will not live rightly. This fact does not deny the experiential truth that many people who live good lives cannot accurately explain what these virtues are. They do the right things without quite knowing why, just as other people do wrong things without knowing just why. We must always keep in mind that the ability to define justice is not the same thing as being just. Still, if we do not know what justice is, it is not likely that we will consistently put it in practice with the full attention of our minds. Governors of states are given the power of clemency. That is, even though a legally guilty person is fairly convicted and taken to punishment, the executive is given the authority, if he judges some truth or good is at stake, to pardon the guilty. This pardon does not mean that the guilty person was not guilty of the crime he committed. Nor does it mean that the assigned punishment was unjust. Even less does it give to the official blanket authority to pardon everything no matter what, as if justice were irrelevant. With clemency, both the guilt and the punishment are left in place. Still, the world is a complex, particular place. No law can cover everything presumably falling under it. For reasons that have to do with public or family order, or for concerns about the clarity of the trial or the character of the criminal, it may be prudent on the part of the one assigned to carry out the sentence to reduce the criminal’s punishment or set him free altogether. What is the difference between clemency and mercy? Clemency is a legalized version of mercy. It defines who, in specific cases, is to exercise mercy and in what conditions. When we look at mercy, however, we must begin by considering justice. God is said to be just even when he is also said to be merciful. Justice implies an order. Some actions are rightly done; others are not. We should want what is ours to be ours. What is not ours should belong to him to whom it is due. We do not want others to covet our goods, nor we theirs. Yet, if we look at it carefully, a just world, however good, is a very cold world. In such a world, what we do for others is owed to them. What they do to us is owed to us. In being just, we are not being generous. We give to others what is theirs. While it is honorable for us to do so, still we are doing it because it is right, not because of any abundance or generosity of our own. A just world is a “giftless” world. Thus, justice is not a gift, though the world in which just things are possible may itself be a gift. A gift is the bequeathing or reception of something that is not owed to us. It is always a surprise. Aquinas says that the world is not created in justice because God does not owe it to anyone to create it. God is perfectly God even if he does not create. Here we sense that something more than justice is needed if there is to be a world at all. If justice is returning what is due, can we imagine something that is real but not exactly due to us? Indeed, is our very own existence due to us, or is it something else, something real but not exactly owed to us? What this something more is can only be love. God did not first create the world and then decide to love it. He did not create the world as a repayment for something that was due to someone else. His love is itself the cause of its creation. It comes out of the abundance of his being. The philosophers used to say that bonum est diffusum sui: good seeks to diffuse itself but not of necessity. God can put into existence something that is not himself but that nonetheless exists and is good. Before God or anyone else could do this, he would have to choose to do it because he has no need of anything but himself and his inner life. We are not quite yet at mercy. Mercy implies a love in which something could go wrong. The only world in which something could knowingly go wrong would be a world in which a free creature who was not God existed. Could God in fact love a creature who sinned? Luke tells us that there is more rejoicing in heaven over the one sinner who repents than over the ninety-nine who have no need of repentance (Luke 15:7). At first sight, this story goes against justice. Are we supposed to sin so that we can repent? The point here is whether there can be anything that is lost. The lost must be returned to the fold. We do not want a world in which it is impossible for anyone to be lost. Archbishop Bergoglio, the future Pope Francis, was hearing the confession of an elderly lady in Buenos Aires. Evidently, the lady told him that everyone has sins but the Lord “forgives all things.” The bishop asked her, “How do you know that, Madam?” She replied, as he recalled, “If the Lord did not forgive everything, the world would not exist.”[7] This is a remarkable statement. What does it imply? Initially, it implies that, if justice were the only virtue to be considered, God could not have created a world in which free and rational beings existed with their own autonomy. Justice would require punishment with no clemency, but mercy and forgiveness imply that God can permit evil to take place without immediately withdrawing the sinner from existence. Why would he do this? So that the free being could repent and, once repentant, be forgiven. He could then return to the fold with great rejoicing. This means that, beyond justice, which still prevails, there is room for a free response to the love in which the free being is initially created. To be sure, there is no certainty that the free being will acknowledge his sins. That is why justice remains. The fact that sins can be repented— this, after all, was the principal purpose of the Incarnation—means that God can, without contradicting himself, create a good world in which evil is possible, but not definitive. It is thus a world in which freedom and drama and risk, even for God, is actually possible. What is not possible, however, is that God saves a free creature by denying him his freedom. A world of automatic salvation would not be worth creating. This again is why redemption is also a drama; why each human life, at bottom, is the story of a person’s response to an offer of mercy in a world of justice. This offer is not some abstract thing but something spelled out in the life of Christ who preached not only a doctrine of justice but also one of mercy and forgiveness. Therefore, the elderly Argentine woman was quite right. The world itself, as we know it, could not exist unless it was formed in mercy, just as Aquinas said. Pope Benedict pondered these things also. With Plato, he understood that the world must, at a minimum, be created in justice. Because it was clear that in the existing world of Plato’s experience, justice was not evident, the only way to save God would be for the soul to be immortal so that some judgment of justice could be rendered after death to those who caused evil. Both the Old and New Testaments concur in this view, but there is still a problem. It is not just the soul that commits sins; it is the whole person, body and soul. In this sense, the world would not be actually just unless each person is judged in his wholeness. Essentially, as Benedict says, this fact is at least one basic reason why we also have the resurrection of the body and why the doctrines of purgatory and hell, as well as death and heaven, make logical sense.[8] Thus, we have reconciled justice and mercy, truth and forgiveness, freedom and punishment, reason and revelation. The world does exist and forgiveness does exist in it. This is the truth of creation from before the foundations of the world when we each were first known in the divine being. The world is created in mercy, not justice, but not without justice. You do not have to be an elderly lady in Argentina to see these things, but it surely helps.

[1] Lord Acton, “Course of Political Economy (1855),” Home and Foreign Review 4 (January 1864): 313–15, http://praxeology.net/LA-GM-CPE.htm. [2] Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Foreword by James V. Schall (1946; repr., San Francisco: Ignatius, 2010). [3] See John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Laborem Exercens (1981), no. 13 inter alia. [4] Antiphon #3, Daytime Prayer, Wednesday, Week III, Roman Breviary. [5] Seneca, Of Clemency, I, 2. [6] Quoted in Andrea Tornielli, “A Cardinal on the Subway,” Catholic World Report, April 18, 2013, http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/2193/a_cardinal_on_the_subway.aspx. [7] Andrea Tornielli, Jorge Mario Bergoglio: Francis: Pope of a New World (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2013), 148. [8] Pope Benedict XVI, Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi (2007).

VI On Intellectual and Material Poverty

Pope Francis has spoken of fighting “the many forms of material and spiritual poverty present in our human family.”[1] While we habitually associate the name of Francis of Assisi with material poverty, my first recollection of the term spiritual poverty comes from Mother Teresa of Calcutta. She said it was much worse than material poverty. One could be materially rich but still be considered spiritually poor. Spiritual poverty has various forms, including intellectual poverty. Often material poverty is presented as the worst thing that we can suffer. Such a view is usually part of an ideological understanding of man that allows him to be only body, only matter, rather than fully what he is, body and soul. The cruelest sufferings are in the spiritual order and are usually those caused by ourselves. Benedict XVI asked in Jesus of Nazareth: “Is it not on account of our knowledge that we are incapable of recognizing Truth, which tries to reach us through what we know?”[2] Benedict had in mind those intellectuals and scholars who, while knowing many things, still would not believe a truth that put into question a favored theory that justified what they wanted to do. Each kind of poverty has something to do both with thinking and with the refusal to think what is true. We hear much about poverty in the world, but these pleas seldom accompany real examination of the cause, nature, and alternatives to poverty. The common answers to questions about poverty, as we have seen, are: (1) the poor are poor because someone exploits them, or (2) the poor are poor because the wealth of the earth is mal- distributed. Both answers are often wrong. They are the residue of a failed Marxist mind and its intellectual predecessors. If we would suddenly succeed in equitably redistributing all the world’s goods, the result would be that everyone would suddenly be poor. No one would have any incentive to be not poor. We are familiar with the remark of Christ that “the poor you will always have with you.” This remark was made in the context of a costly jar of ointment being “wasted” rather than sold and the proceeds given to the poor (Matt. 26:11). This passage can be taken as a subtle critique of any utopianism that promises a perfect society without actual poverty of some kind. We know how difficult it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 19:23). We also know the chastisement that the man with only one talent received because he did nothing with his loan (Matt. 25:1– 30). This failure to make one’s goods productive is pictured as a vice. The poor want to be at least not poor, even if they do not want to be very rich. To be rich or poor, though, is itself a relative thing. The poor in many nations would consider themselves to be rich if they had the same amount of goods and income that the poor have in richer countries. This is why they try to immigrate there. To be rich is not an evil, nor is to be poor a virtue. Therefore, morally pertinent questions are: (1) How did we become rich? (2) How do we live decently even if we are not as prosperous as others? Some people lie and steal but blame it on their poverty. Other people, equally or more poor, neither lie nor steal because they think that it is not right. We must then ask further: Were the means by which we became rich legitimate? Is there a relationship between our poverty and our unwillingness to work or to work well? Is the main reason we dislike poverty really envy?

Inequality Is Not Injustice Clement of Rome (d. 99 AD), in his Letter to the Corinthians, writes: “Not everyone can be a prefect, a tribune, a centurion, or a captain of fifty, but each man, in his own rank executes the orders of the Emperor and the officers in command. The great cannot exist without those of humble condition, nor can those of humble condition exist without the great.”[3] Plato made the same point in the Republic. Diversity of wealth and intelligence exists in any society, at any time, and in any place. These differences are not always, or even primarily, caused by injustice. The notion of a common good was designed to point out how the contributions of the least and the greater were related to each other. It is possible for those who are considered to be great to be unworthy of their position. It is possible for those who are considered to be least to be the greatest complainers and to be least willing to do what is necessary to improve their lot. However, people performing different tasks, and people with different talents are the real source of the wealth of all. The first step to allaying material poverty has to do with the relation of the earth and its resources to the well-being of humanity. This is where we must take a stand about the purpose of the earth and man’s place it. Many modern ecological or environmental theories maintain that the preservation of the earth as a physical object is more important than the purpose of man on the earth. As a result, ecology has become a perfect vehicle for expanding the state; the state that now has justification to control its population in the name of some higher good. Second, as we have seen, wealth is not primarily an issue of resources. It is primarily an issue of intelligence—of what things are and how they are to be used. We hear of panic because the world is running out of gas, or copper, or any of a myriad other items. Yet, the world was relatively very poor before anyone thought of using all the oil or coal in the earth’s crust. We learned how to use these resources through the ingenuity of the mind. We learned how to make them available through economics. We have no reason to think that other resources will not be discovered when we need them. Indeed, we usually do not discover or solve a problem until faced with the problem.

Intellectual Poverty In regard to intellectual poverty, however, we use the word poverty in an analogous way. The opposite of intellectual poverty is best described as truth and logic, not as intellectual riches. Among those who are intellectually poor, not a few have doctorates and other credentials of academic or professional rank. I remember reading in a novel by Christopher Morley that the books in a bookstore or on library shelves are there waiting to be read. However, a book is only a book when and while it is actually being read. It only comes alive in the minds of the writer and the reader. Books are subject to the same criteria as all discourse. They are intended to speak the truth or at least what an author thinks is true. The two—what is true and what one thinks is true—clearly are not always the same. As Plato understood from the very beginning, political disorder comes first from disorder of the soul. Disorder of the soul usually comes from writers who are charming and exciting but who do not necessarily speak the truth. In the Acts of the Apostles, we find many stories in which Paul, Peter, John, or Barnabas have been invited to a synagogue. They discuss the law with the learned locals. A controversy arises. The apostles are flogged or tossed out. They rejoice, and some Jews and Gentles are converted. The issue always comes down to the apostles’ insisting that Scripture spoke of Christ and that they speak in his name. The local scribes do not buy this explanation. The people of the city were divided: some were with the Jews; others, with the apostles. When there was an attempt by both the Gentiles and the Jews, together with their leaders, to attack and stone them, they realized it and fled to the Lycaonian cities of Lystra and Derbe and to the surrounding countryside, where they continued to proclaim the good news. (14:4–7)

When looked at from this angle, not much has changed over the centuries. The same refusal to believe abides over time, and it has its own historical and scientific reasons for doing so. Truth still speaks. We say that we no longer threaten people with stoning for their Christian belief but that all depends on where you are. Pope Francis said in a homily: “To find martyrs we don’t need to go to the Catacombs or the Colosseum. Today martyrs are alive in a great many countries. Christians are persecuted for their faith. In some countries they cannot carry the Cross; they are penalized for doing so. Today, in the twenty-first century, our Church is a Church of martyrs.”[4] This persecution is not spoken of much in the major media. The reason why has to do, more than anything else, with the issue of intellectual poverty. Thus, no effort will be made to confront its truth.

[1]Pope Francis, L’Osservatore Romano, April 17, 2013. [2] Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Image Books, 2007). [3] Clement of Rome, First Epistle (Letter to the Corinthians), chap. 37. As quoted in Christian Prayer (breviary), second reading, Friday, Fourth Week after Easter. [4] Pope Francis, L’Osservatore Romano, April 10, 2013.

VII On World Poverty

The economic problem is a convergent problem which has been solved already: we know how to produce enough and do not require any violent, inhuman, aggressive technologies to do so. There is no economic problem and, in a sense, there never has been. But there is a moral problem, and moral problems are not convergent, capable of being solved so that future generations can live without effort. —E. F. Schumacher[1]

While the income of a minority is increasing exponentially, that of the majority is crumbling. This imbalance results from ideologies which uphold the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and thus deny the right of control to States, which are themselves charged with providing for the common good. A new, invisible, and at times virtual, tyranny is established, one which unilaterally and irremediably imposes its own laws and rules. —Pope Francis[2]

The world has lately been making extraordinary progress in lifting people out of extreme poverty. Between 1990 and 2010, their number fell by half as a share of the total population in developing countries, from 43% to 21%—a reduction of almost 1 billion people. —The Economist[3]

A petition prayer at a parish Mass went something like this: “We pray, O Lord, for the homeless, the poor, and the destitute of the world that they may soon receive the goods of the earth that are rightfully theirs.” With careful distinctions and a valid understanding of economics and politics, such a petition might be defended. However, it leaves so many considerations out and assumes so many others that it can only be misunderstood. As it stands, it implies that the reason why people do not have what they need, what “is rightfully theirs,” is because someone else is deliberately keeping it from them. The petition bears a suspicious revolutionary tendency. We (the state?) should take what is “unrightfully” acquired and bestow it on the poor to whom it “justly” belongs. Nothing is said about how wealth is produced. Because many theories purpose to be able to distribute existing goods properly, it follows that we are praying for that politicized theory that can do what the petition asks. It is not enough to “intend” to help the poor or even pray for their relief. We must know how to do this work without imposing inhuman conditions on mankind in the process. In fact, we can decrease or eliminate poverty and increase absolutism at the same time. Modern China may be an example of this fact. Yet, this result is usually accomplished through “eliminating” a certain class of people who are said to be the “cause” of the problem in the first place, whether they be the Jews, the elderly, the aborted, the deformed, the owners, the peasants, or the incompetent. Indeed, many theories argue that this elimination is exactly what we must do to solve the poverty or exploitation problem. We must then change our morality to justify what we need to do.

The Two Sides of Genesis The broad rationale behind considerations of world poverty can often, paradoxically, be traced to Genesis, to the perfectly valid notion that the world was created for man. When anyone does not receive what he wants or need, he can take what he needs from those who have it. This “extreme case” situation was argued by Aquinas himself. This approach, unless understood, as Aquinas did, in a more reasonable manner, morally empowers a state or world-government to take from the rich and give it to the poor. The probable effect of such a view that pays little attention to how wealth is produced and distributed is that eventually everyone will be poor. That result will bring us to a situation where the wealth of one is seen to exist at the expense of the other. This approach is itself a major cause of turmoil in any society that adopts it. According to the book of Genesis, however, the world was created in such a way that each particular thing in it was good, while the whole of the created order was “very good.” Thus, things were ordered in themselves and, in being themselves, to one another. The Garden of Eden existed in such a way that the human beings within it, few as they were, had everything abundantly provided for them. Nature and human nature were in harmony—something that almost all subsequent political, economic, and religious thinking has, by human means, tried to replicate. The things that human beings needed or wanted in addition to what the world supplied naturally could be fashioned by their own rather effortless, indeed delightful, endeavors. The book of Genesis was written in part to counteract a theory later known as Manicheanism, which held that a god of good created spirit and a god of evil created matter. In this view, the more spiritual we are, the less we are connected to matter; by withdrawing from matter, we will become more spiritual. (Logically, this would make the fallen angels, who are pure spirit, models of spirituality.) Genesis, for its part, tells us that God looked on each level of creation and saw that it was good. Evil was not to be identified with matter because it was also a good created by God. Against Manicheanism, Genesis taught that evil was located outside of God in a good power of a good being, a power that could be freely used to redirect the natural purposes of matter with its given natural ends to the intentions of the one who used it. The good things of creation, therefore, could be used for purposes that were not proper to their being or to the being that used them. One side of Genesis, then, was to affirm the basic goodness of matter over against the notion that it was the essence of evil. Matter could “occasion” a use that was distorted but that distortion did not arise from the nature of matter as such. It follows from this position that the wonder and delight in nature, its beauty, is itself a good that deserves our attention, wonder, and care. Nature can seem cruel, but it also displays harmony. The notion of the delight of things is rooted in this side of Genesis with its emphasis on the good of all created things. The other side of Genesis is the admonition that man was to increase, multiply, and subdue the earth. The implication was that precisely by providing for man’s needs and purposes, the earth would be a better place. The notion that somehow man was not to use the earth but to forage off it was a cover for laziness. It indicated a failure to understand that man is himself a being who also naturally belongs to creation. He exists initially within the cosmos both for his own transcendent end and for completing creation, which cannot reach its true purpose by itself. We can imagine the beauty of the Amalfi Coast of southern Italy without any sign of human habitation along it. But it clearly is more beautiful with the towns, ports, trees, and gardens that men have added to it over the centuries. The so-called natural resources, while being what they are, have an order or intelligence about them that is open to human knowing and using. We have every reason to think that this knowing relation of the human mind to natural resources has to do with human purposes and the end of man as such. It is quite possible to think that sufficient natural resources were put on the earth to last as long as God intended man to last—no need for anything further.[4] Scripture does speak of a new heaven and a new earth, but this renovation is not in our power. It is folly to think that it is. Yet, this is the error made by many environmentalists. They speak of saving enough iron ore or oil so that down the centuries there will be enough for future populations. But oil existed for most of the history of mankind and no one knew what it was or what to do about it. We know now what it is. What we do not know is the future science that will render even oil unnecessary or easily replaced. The more significant error is the assumption that the purpose of man on this earth is to keep the earth in the same condition that it was when man first appeared. Behind this theory is a subtle denial of the resurrection of the body. Man’s ultimate end is not this earth but God. The earth and its development are the arena in which the drama of each person’s relationship to God is worked out. This working out also concerns one’s neighbor and one’s relationship to fellow man. Man was homo faber (“man the maker”) even before the fall. Indeed, the world was intended to be an incomplete place to be made better by the addition of what came from the mind and hand of man. Man was not an accidental occurrence or, worse, as many ecological theories imply, a cancerous growth roaming at random in the cosmos contrary to its overall purpose. Man’s very existence and his activities were themselves included in the purpose of the world. To conceive of the earth and the physical cosmos to be their own norms outside the purpose of man is to misconceive both the earth and man. When man was given dominion over the things of earth, it was so that the earth could become complete in what it was created to be. This purpose included the earth’s capacity to provide for man’s needs. These needs could not be, and would not be, provided for man without his learning how to fashion nature to his purposes, which he had to learn gradually through his own efforts and genius using the moral and intellectual capacities that made him unique in the universe. In so doing, he then completes the purpose of nature itself. Thus, we return to the issue of the use of the earth for man’s sake. Often this issue is cast in terms of the “preferential option for the poor.” Although the phrase has a legitimate meaning within the tradition of Catholic social teaching,[5] it is, unfortunately, often used in an ideological fashion. In one sense, modern atheism finds its moral justification in the claim to aid the poor. Do these systems help the poor or subject them to state control? As we have already seen, being not poor should be the result primarily of each person’s own intelligence and labor in cooperation with others. Thus, garden was the right word to identify where man initially found himself. It was a place of design and beauty. Within this garden, however, something went wrong, but it was not something caused by any lack of goods or accommodations that man needed for his physical well-being. In other words, the cause of evil is not, as many are inclined to think, man’s material needs or the lack thereof. Neither poverty nor riches are excuses for his acting sinfully. Unlike Prometheus, Adam and Eve did not have to steal fire from the gods in order to prosper. In fact, in their intelligence, human beings already possessed what this Promethean fire symbolized. Human sin was of a spiritual order, but its results and punishment had consequences in the world. Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden. Henceforth, they would have to work by the “sweat of their brow” to have nature produce what they needed in order to live and prosper. The fall, however, did not mean that nature, in principle, ceased to be a servant of man’s needs and ultimate purpose. If we look at the intellectual suppositions presented in Genesis, we can draw several lessons that remain valid today. The material world was itself designed to meet man’s needs, but man would now have to work to figure out how this production and distribution of goods was to be made available for his use. Man’s presence in the world is itself presupposed to what the world is about. If man were simply given everything, if nothing was required of his own initiative and talent, he would stagnate. He would be a useless creature. What he is given is given in order that he may make more of it through his own efforts. A “second,” internal order of creation more worthy of the gods would not come to exist without something that also came from man’s own initiative. What the world has to offer to man for his well- being is generally not available to him except with the aid of his own input at every level of being. The greatness of the Creator is shown not only by what the Creator does but also by what man transforms in freedom within the cosmos. This increase is the drama of secondary causality. That is, God shows his love and greatness not just by creating but by forming intelligent and free beings within the cosmos who also can judge and act. Their “secondary” activity includes what men understand to be their relation to both God and to their fellow human beings. Therefore, the two views of Genesis can serve as a general framework to place our thinking about the purpose of creation and its relation to the end of man in order. Poverty is always a relative thing, and the poor will always be with us. We will never completely solve the poverty problem in this world. Even if we do not solve it, it does not mean that the poor cannot reach the transcendent end for which they were created. Everyone—rich, poor, and in between—must and can work out his salvation in whatever society he lives in during the time in which he is alive. Moreover, when things went wrong in man’s soul, which was itself not merely material, they usually manifested themselves in what, broadly speaking, we call the economic order—itself rooted in the well-being and nature of a household; a family. It is tempting to suggest that if our material well-being is adequately attended to, our soul will be fine, but Genesis and later human experience suggest otherwise. We can go wrong in the best of circumstances because what is most fundamental about us is not what we make or possess but what we are, what we choose, and how we relate ourselves to the origin of being. Prosperity, while a good to be worked for and brought about, is also a seedbed for the most serious of our soul’s disorders, as Genesis teaches with the imagery of the Garden of Eden. Man does not live by bread alone, however much he is tempted to think otherwise.

Poverty and Wealth in Early Christianity Poverty and wealth are themselves relative to each other. Our perception of poverty and wealth is usually related in some degree to envy, the vice that refuses to recognize that a proper title to riches, when they occur, is possible. There are many ways to make us poor and keep us that way. The ways to make us richer are more narrowly defined, and they relate to our will, our self- discipline, and our talents. Riches are not usually a result of exploitation, injustice, or disorder, as too many like to think so they do not to have to admit to the real cause of wealth. The Christian tradition about the primacy of the poor grew out of roots in Jewish scripture and in the experience of life in the Roman Empire, which for its time was a relatively ordered and prosperous society compared to other political entities. The long controversy about material and spiritual poverty was intended to point out that we could be rich but still lack in the necessary access to what is true and good in our relation to God. Conversely, the attention in revelation to the poor was meant, in large part, not to make everyone rich but to assure us that the highest things, salvation and human goodness, were not to be denied to anyone simply because he was weak or poor. Both rich and poor could attain everlasting life by how they chose to live. There were rich saints and poor sinners and vice versa. The religious concern for the poor was also within the context of what could be done for the poor whom we meet in the here and now. This approach meant that it was not enough to wish the poor well. One had to give alms or a cloak or other kinds of help to those who truly needed it. With rare exceptions (e.g., 2 Thess. 3:10), the New Testament does not seem to have faced the problem of freeloaders, of those who rely on the generosity of others so that they do not have to work. Similarly, rarely is mention made of where the coat to be given away came from or how it was produced so that something could be given away. The early Church, like the Church through all ages, took up collections and sent the proceeds to distant people in need, as Paul often mentioned. The problem of whether it was stolen (Judas was said to be a thief) or used for ineffective purposes after the poor received these donations remains a factor in all charitable giving—one too often neglected. While the New Testament called attention to the plight of the poor, it also had certain “capitalist” tendencies. The parable of the talents, for example, praised the men who used their talents to increase their master’s wealth. It obviously presupposed that this improvement was possible. The man who buried his talent and did nothing with it, not even lending it out at interest, was severely chastised, as if to say that poverty is no excuse for lack of enterprise and effort to get out of it. The Problem of Poverty Within the Christian tradition, we have what we call a vow of poverty, which implies a limited form of communal ownership for a few in special circumstances. Such a concern about the dangers of wealth existed even among the rich. But primarily, after the admonition of Christ to the rich young man to sell his goods and give them to the poor, poverty was looked on as a chosen way of life. It was not necessarily meant for everyone. This vow was intended to show that the most important things were not material. The person with the vow of poverty could live side by side with family life, provided the two lives were not confused. It was necessary that a family have a place, material goods, and a sufficiency if not abundance of things. The latter was normal, not the former that was always seen as exceptional regardless of its value for both individuals and society. If we confuse these two legitimate ways of life, we will downplay the need for production, growth, and distribution that the increase of families and family size usually generates. One of the striking occurrences in modern times has been the increase in world population. What follows from this increase is the growth of means whereby people can flourish. Much of this growth in recent decades has taken place outside the domain of Christian influence, though the idea of economic growth is itself a product of Western reflection. The Catholic Church has found itself, at least logically, on the side of those who argue that the world has enough resources to provide for its increasing population. The Church has been opposed to those who have argued that population growth is a bad thing and must be curtailed by any means, whether it be abortion, contraception, or sterilization. The inclination of the modern state to be the primary agent in limiting the growth and use of any means necessary to accomplish this has been noted and duly criticized. What has not been noticed so well is that the world has learned to provide for large numbers of people. Poverty on a worldwide basis has in fact been gradually and steadily eliminated, something that would be expected from sound economic theory that considers enterprise, profit, work, law, markets, and a state that allows the free choices of the population to decide most market decisions. Instead of being astonished at this remarkable reduction of world poverty, which the Church has advocated all along, it has too often used a static economic notion that the gap between the rich and poor is the problem. What we need, it is said, is the redistribution of already existing wealth and not the production of new and increased means of making everyone richer. Likewise, the role of the state and of unions in preventing economic growth has not been adequately studied in most modern social thinking. The dominant refrain still seems to be maldistribution. If one focuses on maldistribution as the cause of modern poverty, the state will be empowered to correct this maldistribution. No organization has been more eager to gain control of all aspects of human life than the modern state that considers itself to be the ultimate arbiter of both right and power. Catholic thought has always been Aristotelian in the sense of seeing a legitimate place for the limited state. Modern popes, particularly John Paul II and Benedict XVI, have seen the totalitarian nature of a modern democratic state based on relativism, one that claims to control the life and death of its population in the name of the common good. Pope Francis has referred to his two predecessors on this point. Pope Francis has several times said that modern poverty is caused by an unrestricted capitalism in search of excessive profits. Without going into the nature of capital and investment, he calls this an ideology. Although not against capital and investment per se he seems to see the solution to the poverty problem to be one of control by the state over the corporations that manage these activities. No doubt the commitment of a society to wealth at any cost is a real modern problem. But the state throughout the world is largely an impediment to the sort of society that the Church recommends, one in which families are central, in which there is legitimate work to which all have the possibility of entering to support their own lives and families. The fact is that world poverty has been rather quickly alleviated. In many ways, this economic growth was accomplished by the capitalist effort to find new markets, labor productivity, and resources. This growth would not have happened without this system. What the Church has wanted has been taking place, in a sense, outside its awareness. Much of this development, however, involved radical measures of control over family life that has been so successful that it has resulted in declines in and aging of populations such that there is a question of being able to sustain growth precisely because of lack of labor. What needs to be developed is an understanding of wealth production and distribution, innovation, and knowledge that does not presuppose redistribution or population control theories as the main solution to poverty problems. In the light of these sundry opinions and comments, I should like again to suggest that future discussions of world poverty do not begin with the poor and the destitute, however right it is to know of poverty’s nature and extent. The only way for the poorest to be really helped is for the whole of the economy to grow. We need to acknowledge and reward those who show us ways to increase and distribute total wealth. Special concern for the poor, which is a noble attitude, should not be thought of in terms of giving something to someone who in turn simply consumes what is given. Aid to the destitute should be understood more in terms of charity, of helping those who cannot or will not help themselves, rather than in terms of solving the problem of world poverty. The fact is that world poverty is being solved. The world has in recent decades reduced the extent of its poverty through the growth of markets and labor forces in countries that did not know how to produce wealth or whose governments would not allow such mechanisms to exist. Many people were capable of learning once given a chance. Into this mix, the state can either be a help or the most serious impediment to growth. The same is true of religion. Whether we believe that the world is determined by fate or that there is no cause but God, wealth and poverty will simply exist in the same way in which they have been. Likewise, we must attend to the problem of crime and corruption. If structures of bribery and injustice cannot be stopped, we will be unable to inaugurate steps that would lead to any improvement. In short, we know how to produce and distribute enough to deal with the poor of the world, but we have to understand that markets, freedom, legal systems, honest work, and capital are the instruments of this capacity. No one would deny that instances of corruption, greed, or lack of talent exist. This is why the Church needs to teach and preach honesty and justice and virtue among the poor and the rich alike. Moreover, we need to recall Pope Benedict’s remark in Deus Caritas Est that justice by itself will never provide for the real needs of human persons. We need to change the paradigm in which we think about the poor. Our rhetoric about the poor should not make it look like we want everyone to be poor. Our explanations of why the poor are poor should not imply theories that, if put in effect, would not help the poor to be not poor. The worst-case scenario would be to end with a prosperous world that is controlled by a totalitarian state that demands full control of our minds, families, and bodies. This clarity, ultimately, is what is at stake in dealing with world poverty.

[1]E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Harper, 1977), 140. [2] “Address of Pope Francis to the New Non- Resident Ambassadors to the Holy See …” 16 May 2013, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2013/may/documents/papa- francesco_20130516 _nuovi-ambasciatori.html. [3] “Towards the End of Poverty,” The Economist, June 1, 2013. [4] See also James V. Schall, SJ, “On Sustainability,” http://www.thecatholicthing.org/, April 28, 2015; and James V. Schall, SJ, “On Natural Resources,” http://www.thecatholicthing.org/, January 6, 2015. [5] See Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (2004), nos. 182–84.

VIII Redistributionism

Readers of the Prince have long attested to the charm of the book. They smile at its advice to the shrewd tyrant who seeks successfully to retain the power that he has acquired, regardless of how he acquired it. The first thing the tyrant should do, after attending to less pleasant but necessary affairs, is to encourage talent. He should induce citizens to “go peaceably about their business” whatever it is that occupies them. Aristotle’s approach was rather different; he advised the tyrant to view the talented as potential rivals and to do away with them as quickly as possible. Machiavelli, however, in a passage we would least expect from him, says that, under the tyrant, “One man should not be afraid of improving his possessions, lest they be taken away from him, or another deterred by high taxes from starting a new business. Rather the prince should be ready to reward men who want to do these things and anyone who wants in any way to increase the prosperity of his city or his state.”[1] Although perhaps self-serving, this advice is not bad. It is advice that Hobbes will later incorporate into modern liberalism. One wonders, conversely, if the prince was equally worried, as he should have been, about citizens who made no effort to improve anything. They simply waited for him to supply their every need and desire from the gathered “surplus” without adding much effort on their part. To keep them quiet, public policy was to appease them or divert their attention from their concerns. From this policy, the “government” corrupted the people with bread and circuses, which became an ancient tradition. Today, this same corruption is more likely to be phrased in terms of a universal right to something, which is willingly provided by the government. It is not overly difficult to imagine an owner’s concern if he suspects that any improved property might be confiscated by his government as a sign of “exceptional” wealth. It may be considered to be unjustly acquired simply because it is large by the government’s definition of what is large. Its very size may be seen as an indication of unjust inequality or exploitation. Men will not work, or will not work much, if they are convinced that they will get little or nothing out of it and if a good portion of what they do earn is confiscated. Nor will they work if they are convinced that they are “owed” a living by the government. The same principle relates to the levy of high taxes on successful innovations. As Adam Smith indicated, the increase of wealth provided by an inventor’s discovery needs a just reward. Otherwise, the inventor will not bother. Such high taxes will discourage an entrepreneur from starting anything that might grow into taxable property that can be taken away. Machiavelli saw that the prince ought to encourage and reward those who want to improve their property and begin new businesses. This latter view, of course, presupposes a prince who does not want to increase prosperity for other reasons. He may rather have a theory of equality and inequality, for instance, that sees any notable difference in income as a sign of exploitation or, as Proudhon once said of property itself, as a result of “theft.” Not a few enthusiastic politicians are eager to distribute wealth without much wondering where it came from, how much work it took to produce, or even what wealth is. The spiritual origins of wealth are the most neglected of the economic sciences. The most important thing to know about wealth is that its source is not property, nor money, nor governmental confiscation. Wealth is based finally on the human mind and its capacity to produce something that we need or can appreciate. Wisdom from Rousseau? Rousseau’s Social Contract is another seemingly unlikely place for good economic advice. “In all the governments in the world,” Rousseau magisterially tells us, the public person consumes, but produces nothing. Whence therefore does it get the substance it consumes? It is from the labor of its members. It is the surplus of private individuals that produces what is needed by the public. Whence it follows that the civil state can subsist only so long as men’s labor produces more than they need (III, 8). Rousseau highlights here the necessity of a productive private sector, without which a public sector that serves the common good is impossible. Government must be careful, moreover, not to “kill the goose that lays the golden egg.” If the producer gets no reward for what he must do to produce the surplus, little reason remains for him to produce it in the first place. He must become an employee of the state to produce what it decides it needs and in what cause. The practice of such a theory is usually not pleasant. Even thinkers who argue for the common good, like Aristotle and Aquinas, speak of property as best owned privately while its usage would include the community of others who also need what is produced. The producer himself also needs the surplus of others. The market is conceived as the place where this happy event of what is produced by one can be exchanged for what is produced by another on some reasonably agreed upon standard for the benefit of each other. The state’s function itself needs to be earned. It is not in itself the primary object of what is produced. Taxes, that ancient and ever troubling reality of government power, provide the services that everyone needs in order that they might be productive. Disputes about prices and contracts happen. There are thieves and enemies. It is worth noting that Christ’s command to “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God’s the things that are Gods’” was originally occasioned by paying a tax. Aristotle had a virtue he called “liberality” that related to the proper use of one’s own property. Because some property was necessary to practice virtue, he thought that if the citizen did not have any, arrangements should be made so that he had some. He also thought that several other virtues would not be likely without property; among these was generosity. He had a special variety of this virtue for those who were rich. One might say they were “expected” to participate in certain public functions with their “surplus” wealth. Christianity always fostered this virtue of freely using wealth for noble purposes. It is interesting to look at the differences among countries in which private wealth is allowed to be munificent and those that have no room for it. It is not surprising that a good many of the most noble and beautiful things in the world came about, not through government spending of tax monies, but through the government’s allowing private wealth to work for the good of all. It is always a principle of the common good that things should be done at the lowest “governmental” level possible. The impersonality of government administration has itself always been a special kind of burden on the poor. Aristotle suggested that things of the good, the true, and the beautiful were the ways through which those with great wealth contributed to the good of all. The highest things of civic life are seldom the result of state distribution.

The Perils of Redistribution In his book The Ethics of Redistributism, Bertrand de Jouvenal writes about the effects on society of redistributing the property of the wealthy to the presumed needs of everyone. There is a famous adage: from each according to his accomplishments, to each according to his needs. De Jouvenal saw that this approach of redistribution would have the effect of depriving society of the motives for excellence, especially in the areas of goodness, truth, and beauty that arose from the virtues of munificence and charity. Proponents of such redistribution argue that the state would take over the function of providing for all the higher things so that it would funnel the wealth confiscated back to society according to its (the state’s) purpose. The objective of maximizing the common good through the use of the state as a redistributive agency is fraught with difficulty. De Jouvenal writes soberly: Surely when we achieve the distribution of incomes which, it is claimed, maximize the sum of satisfaction, we must let this distribution of incomes exert its influence upon the allocation of resources and productive activities, for it is only through this adjustment that the distribution of incomes is made meaningful. And when resources are so allocated, we must not interfere with their dispositions, since by doing so we shall, as a matter of course, decrease the sum of satisfactions. It is then an inconsistency, and a very blatant one, to intervene with state support for such cultural activities as do not find a market.[2]

The original notion of distribution came from an Aristotelian idea. It was called “distributive” justice. Its focus was on a realistic awareness that those who did more, or contributed more, deserved more. It was a cause of revolutionary concern when those who were equal in some things thought they were equal in everything—a view related to envy—or those who were unequal in some things thought they were superior in all—a view related to greed. But there always had to be title to the distribution. Some do produce more, are more intelligent or qualified in many ways. Our very existence depends on the encouragement of many forms of excellence and the way to encourage them is through rewards of honor and support. There is a long tradition that would say that if the government equitably distributes one hundred million dollars of tax monies in equal shares to ten thousand needier citizens, on a principle of redistribution, the most likely result is that all this money would simply disappear or end up in the hands of the most talented or most unscrupulous. Money does not do much good unless it is given to someone who knows how to use it and, more importantly, is self- disciplined enough to use it well. This is what loans and capital investment are about. No doubt the best way to redistribute wealth is not to take it in the first place from those who are offering it. The government’s taking and giving it back to someone else, or even to the one from whom it was taken in the first place, requires a hefty turnaround fee that benefits no one so much as employees of the government, themselves already one of the best provided for and powerful sectors of society.

Distributism Another movement, largely associated with Britain, called “distributism,” has a name that seems to sound like “redistribution.” People such as Eric Gill, G. K. Chesterton, and E. F. Schumacher, along with like-minded Americans such as the southern agrarians Wendell Berry and Allan Carlson are distributists but not redistributionists. America has been from its beginning a country in which the distribution of land to those who would work it has been a principle of our national prosperity. The GI Bill of Rights after World War II was an offshoot of this same spirit. While much of the world talks in terms of “globalism,” these latter distributists talk of local markets, control of local life, and protection against the radical social laws that come from courts and legislatures that corrupt families. The distributist option is a moral one. It is not so much about “re”distributing as it is supporting the human conditions of living, which include small units and the reappearance of crafts and face-to- face relationships. In the Outline of Sanity, Chesterton observed that the electric motor was the “tool” that was most helpful to the achievement of distributism as it provided power at the level of an individual home. Arguably, the computer in many ways makes the ideals of the distributist feasible because it makes possible so many home alternatives. (Though like the electric motor or any tool, including nuclear energy, it depends on how we use it.) The redistributionist language that has appeared in recent political campaigns has not been distributist, or liberal in the older sense. The notion of taking from the rich and giving to the poor always seems romantic until it is looked at more carefully. What does not exist cannot be either distributed or redistributed. One can defend distributive justice, but defending redistributist justice is quite another thing. It is one of those slogans that looks quite good at first sight, but once put into effect on a large scale it is rife with negative consequences. There are spiritual origins to wealth production and wealth distribution. Once these sources are threatened or undermined, less and less will be left to redistribute and what is there will be less and less desirable. It is a general lesson of the socialist societies that they produced a lot of what nobody wanted. Tax power accumulated wealth for the state. Wealth was distributed to those who had a right to it. It was not left with those who knew best how to cause it to come to be and to use it. Recalling Aquinas, Pieper says that the primary act of commutative justice (rendering to each person what is due) is “restitution.” It means that society is a huge web of individual exchanges that are constantly going on. Things new and old are being produced, redone, and exchanged on such a vast scale of personal choice and freedom that no central authority can comprehend it. Pieper then adds the following passage: If the basic act of commutative justice is called “re-stitution,” the very word implies that it is never possible for men to realize an ideal and definitive condition. What it means is, rather, that the fundamental condition of man and his world is provisory, temporary, non-definitive, tentative, as is proved by the “patchwork” character of all historical activity, and that, consequently, any claim to erect a definitive and unalterable order in the world must of necessity lead to something inhuman.[3]

This view reflects the dangers that lurk when commutative justice, the innumerable exchanges of individual persons with others, is not understood. Redistributionism, on the other hand, reflects the same danger when distributive justice is not understood. One hesitates to blame the great Plato for the origins of this problem, but certainly the image of the tyrant who will take from the rich and redistribute to those who “need” it betrays the same tendency to inhumanity. It presupposes a sort of divine mind that knows how to allocate. A theory that purports to give everyone the same amount is already deficient in its understanding of human nature. Redistribution is a covert formula for state control that in effect takes the sources of wealth out of society and dissipates them. It thereby furthers the dependence of everyone on the state with no incentive or hope of ever escaping from dependence on the next redistribution. Each redistribution will have a smaller and smaller pot to redistribute because the causes of what is the “surplus,” as Rousseau called it, are stifled by a theory of state benevolence that is based on the notion that the reason the poor are poor is that the rich are rich. It seems rather amusing, in the end, that Machiavelli and Rousseau, the two men perhaps most responsible for the rise of unlimited modern state power, would advise against taxing those who are most likely to produce what is needed by any society, including the tyrant in his own pursuits. Whenever the inhumanity appears, it usually does so under the guise of doing good for the people who, in the meantime, find themselves more and more beholden to him who redistributes what they need. What is received appears as something due in justice because it was taken away from those who had too much of it. It also, transformed by the taxing power, appears as the gift of a benevolent government that is generously giving us what we need rather than relying on us to do it ourselves.

[1] Machiavelli, The Prince (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 74. [2] Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Ethics of Redistribution (1951; repr., Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 43–44. [3] Josef Pieper: An Anthology (1981; repr., San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989, 63.

IX The Economics of Popes Benedict and Francis

In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI published a reflection in London’s Financial Times. [1] The pope began his comments by citing what is certainly the most famous and consequential passage in the New Testament about politics, namely, “Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God” (Matt. 22:21). Benedict immediately pointed out that this response had to do with the legitimacy of paying taxes. It was asked to trap Jesus because the Pharisees wanted to draw Christ into the politics of his day by presenting him with a dilemma. If Jesus was the awaited Messiah, surely he would oppose the Roman occupation of Palestine. Thus he was “either a threat to the regime or a fraud.” Jesus’ response avoided the trap. At the same time, he raised the level of discourse for both the Romans and the Jews. Implicitly, Jesus warned about the “politicizing of religion and the deification of the state.” Both politics and religion have a proper place, and they need not be enemies except when either politicization or deification occurs. The Jews needed to recognize that their Messiah would not be a Caesar. The Romans needed to know that their Caesar was not God. Jesus did come to establish a kingdom, but it would be of a higher order. At his trial, he bluntly told Pilate that his kingdom was not “of this world.” Next, Benedict turns to the “Christmas stories in the New Testament.” A similar message is found here. Jesus’ birth took place in Bethlehem because of a census edict of Caesar Augustus, the first emperor of the Romans; he brought all the conquered lands into some form of higher administrative unity. Jesus was born in an obscure place in this Empire. He was to open to the world a “far greater peace” than that of the Pax Romana. The peace that Christ offers “transcends the limitations of space and time.” How so? Jesus is presented in the New Testament as the “heir” of King David. His liberation is not about armies and conquering enemies. Rather, it deals with freeing us from “sin and death forever.” The birth of Christ causes us to question our priorities and values. Christmas is a time of glad tidings of “great joy.” Christmas should also be a time of reflection—an “examination of conscience.” The pope then notes that the year then ending has brought economic hardships and asks what we can learn from a man born in poverty in a manger. We can use Christmastime to read afresh the Gospels where this same child is “recognized as God made Man.” Here the pope, qua pope, is affirming, reminding us what in fact happened in Bethlehem and to whom it happened. The inspiration for our “daily affairs”—be it in the Houses of Parliament or the stock exchange— comes to Christians from this same Gospel. To engage in political or economic life is to be encouraged in a way that “transcends every form of ideology.” This latter avoidance in our day, of course, is not easy. An ideology is an explanation of things that usually does not leave itself open to any real transcendence or openness to what is.

Pope Benedict on Poverty In fighting poverty, Benedict explains, Christians should begin not with the fact of poverty but by recognizing “the supreme dignity of every human being created in God’s image and destined for eternal life.” This recognition in the poor, rich, and those in-between is the real basis for the Christian presence in the world. It transcends every political and economic form. It includes the individual persons at all stages of growth and rank in any place or any worldly condition whether they accept that Christian presence or not. Benedict adds that “Christians should work for a more equitable sharing of the earth’s resources out of a belief that, as stewards of God’s creation, we have a duty to care for the weaker and most vulnerable.” As we have noted, the obligation to care for the poor is central to the Christian tradition. However, we must also keep in mind the point made in previous chapters: Distribution (or redistribution) takes for granted the production of the wealth that is to be distributed. Moreover, “sharing” should not primarily be understood as a simple giving or taking care. It should be seen as the result of normal work and markets wherein everyone is involved. The pope adds, “Christians oppose greed and exploitation out of a conviction that generosity and selfless love, as taught by Jesus of Nazareth, are the way that leads to the fullness of life.” This is certainly true, but it is not only generosity and selfless love that are opposed to greed and exploitation. The latter are also opposed by innovation and normal work that provide the basic conditions of everyone’s earning his own way. Benedict recognizes that many others who are not Christian understand many of these things, but Christians draw a line. “Christians render to Caesar only what belongs to Caesar, not what belongs to God.” In many eras in history, Christians have been “unable” to do what Caesar demanded. The pope brings this principle up-to-date: “When Christians refuse to bow down before the false gods proposed today, it is not because of an antiquated world view.” In both subtle and overt ways, the state increasingly demands and threatens us to embrace principles and deeds that are objectively immoral. We never thought it would come to this, but it has. Because Christians are “free from ideology,” they can reject the rationale given for obeying only Caesar. Benedict ends his column with an interesting take on the crib scenes in Italy. There, Jesus is pictured as being born amidst the ruins of ancient Rome. “This shows that the birth of the child, Jesus, marks the end of the old order, the pagan world, in which Caesar’s claim was virtually unchallenged.” In the ruins, a new king arises. He has no armaments. He has love. He brings hope to all, even the lowliest. We are to live as “citizens of His heavenly Kingdom.” The pope ends with these words: This is a kingdom that “all people of good will can help to build here on earth.” The “building of the Kingdom of God on earth,” in the history of political philosophy, has been frequently used, as Augustine saw, to justify the elevation of politics over religion. What Benedict is saying here is that the legitimate goals of politics and economics will not come about even on earth until the fact of the transcendent purpose and destiny of each human person is recognized. As he said in Spe Salvi, the whole ethos of the modern age has been driven by the effort to replace the eschatological ends of faith with political, social, scientific, and economic accomplishments in this world. Benedict argues, to the contrary, that much improvement will come to the world itself only when it has its priorities right about what we can hope for in this world and what our eternal destiny is.

Pope Francis

The free-will actions of human beings, in addition to our own individual responsibility, have far- reaching consequences: they generate structures that endure over time and create a climate in which certain values can either occupy a central place in public life or be marginalized from the reigning culture. And this too falls under the moral sphere. —Jorge Bergoglio, 2010[2]

What happens is that the unemployed, in their hours of solitude, feel miserable because they are not “earning their living.” That is why it is very important that governments of all countries, through the relevant ministries and departments, cultivate a culture of work, not of charity.… They have to cultivate sources of work because, and I never tire of repeating, this, work confers dignity. —Jorge Bergoglio, 2010[3]

The two major criticisms concerning the perceived economic thought of the current pope are (1) he does not understand how normal capitalism functions with its relation to the poor, and (2) he habitually relies on the state for solutions, when the modern state is usually a major part of the problem. However, in a homily in the Chapel of Santa Marta, Pope Francis spoke of state officials who lose their dignity by taking bribes. The pope told of the man who “puts one hand in his pocket that helps the Church, while, with the other hand, he robs the State and the poor.”[4] No doubt, political and bureaucratic corruption in the form of bribes and favoritism is a major cause of poverty and injustices that go beyond those perpetrated on the poor. Few say so as bluntly as Pope Francis. The pope often talks of “unbridled capitalism,” which seems strange. Capitalism today is almost totally bridled by extensive state control. We do have a global flow of capital seeking a place to invest, however. This financial power can be misused and too often is, but it is also one of the great generators of economic growth. Unbridled capitalism, if it exists, is much less a problem than state-controlled capitalism when it comes to impediments to increasing wealth and labor possibilities for the poor. Moreover, as we have seen, the world in fact has made enormous strides in the worldwide alleviation of poverty, due mostly to capitalism and its imitators. This fact also needs to be stated. The pope often speaks of a “throw- away” society, something like the “consumer” society that John Paul II used to chastise. Just what are the consequences of not throwing useless or outmoded things away or not having the free demand that causes investment and employment? To prohibit a throw-away society seems close to mandating a stagnant economy in which what is inefficient or useless is legally kept functioning at higher and higher costs in the name of jobs or ecology. Innovation that would change things is stifled. The sources of growth flee the jurisdictions that prevent its growth. This movement, moreover, explains much of the economic gain of many poorer nations in the world today, particularly in Asia.[5] The pope is likewise famous for having remarked that the greatest problems in today’s world are “unemployed youth and loneliness in old age.” Yet, we cannot talk of unemployed youth without talking about what really causes the jobs needed to employ them. Insisting that the government will do the job simply will not suffice. As we will see below, Pope Francis seems to understand much of this.

Archbishop Bergoglio’s Economic Reflections With this background, I want to comment on several interesting and surprising remarks that Pope Francis made about economic affairs in a book of conversations that took place in Argentina while he was still archbishop there. This book is a wide-ranging discussion, not limited to economics. Archbishop Bergoglio identifies himself with the cause of the poor. Nothing is wrong with this concern, provided that one also has some concrete insight into what would help most of the poor. Otherwise, we are just wringing our hands. Pope Francis speaks like a man with a vow of poverty, which he is. People with vows of poverty can use their freedom to learn and are able to help others in a variety of ways. The essential issue concerns not those with vows of poverty but the free participation of the vast majority of men, who have no such vow, in a purposeful enterprise for real human goods. By his own labor and mind, man seeks both to earn a living and contribute to the good of others. At the same time, he strives to make the earth a more beautiful and abundant dwelling by his presence and work on it. The poverty of real want is itself an important thing to identify and to think carefully about. In the beginning, the whole world was poor, dependent solely on what nature by itself brought forth. Agriculture that made the earth more bountiful had to be discovered and put into operation. The pope wants a “poor Church,” but does he want a poor world? As I read him, I think he does not. One of the historic effects of Christianity, as Pope Benedict often said, was to make the world more elegant, more beautiful, and more fruitful. A position that wants everyone to be poor in the name of ecology or asceticism would be contrary to the whole dynamism of civilization, even as we recognize that wealth can be dangerous and that here we have no “lasting city.” Pope Francis understands the relation between work and a man’s dignity. When sufficient work for everyone is lacking, the pope points to government’s responsibility, instead of to the economy or free enterprise to create new jobs. It is true that government has to “cultivate the sources of work” but these sources are barely discussed. The Latin American tradition, from the time of the Spanish conquerors, has been a rather top-down view of the economy. It is this tradition that seems to look first not to a thriving economy but to the state for employment. Bergoglio points out that some states, in order to keep jobs and employment, limit hours of work to provide jobs for others. To this practice, the archbishop of Buenos Aires says something quite correct and, in the best sense, capitalist: “Fewer people working means fewer people consuming. Man intervenes even less in production, but at the same time who will buy the products?”[6] The real problem, Bergoglio remarks, is not leisure time; rather, it is “the first step is creating the sources of work.”[7] These are exactly the right observations. The question still remains: What does this first step in creating sources of work mean? Bergoglio next follows with a comment on leisure. Leisure, he observes, can mean either idleness or gratification. There must be a culture of work and of gratification. “People who work must take time to relax, to be with their families, enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, and enjoy a sport.”[8] He sees working on the Sabbath as a sign of eliminating leisure. It dehumanizes. The pope seems never to have read Josef Pieper’s seminal book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture.[9] Pieper, in the Aristotelian tradition, points out that leisure and recreation are not the same thing. Recreation or relaxation means a pause from work to return to work. However, the purpose of work is not more work but the higher things. In this sense, work exists for leisure, not the other way around. Bergoglio unfortunately does not make this distinction; therefore he tends to propose what is essentially a work society and not a society that works with the intention that something more human might exist.[10] The Marxist society that reduces everything to work, including the life of the mind, is one to be avoided. This approach does not mean that work is not important, but it does mean that work exists so that what is worked on comes into being. To work for work’s sake is like digging a hole and filling it up again just to be doing something. Work, to be human, must always have a purpose. Pope John Paul II maintained that the worker was more important than the work. This is true, but the worker must not see what he does or how he does it to be unnecessary or meaningless. Bergoglio’s treatment of the film Babette’s Feast is worth noting in light of his understanding of poverty. He relates his discussion to a more general comment on pain. At times, suffering has been “overemphasized.” The Calvinist community in the film is pictured as closed in a narrow world. They see the “redemption of Christ as a negation of the things of this world.” They are gradually freed of this illusion by realizing the goodness of an excellent dinner. “They were devoted to the grey side of life. They feared love.” Obviously, the pope is on the side of the blessings of the dinner and its appreciation of things.[11] Bergoglio remarks, as he often does, that he, too, is a “sinner.”[12] He does not have all the answers or even all the questions.[13] He understands the difference between ideology and morality. “We are redeemed only by what we accept. If we don’t accept that there are people with different opinions, even opposing opinions that you don’t share, and if you don’t respect them or pray for them, you will never redeem them in your heart. We must not let ideology trump morality.”[14] Focusing on the poor can be an occasion for ideology: “Catholicism’s greatest concern regarding the poor in the sixties was the issue of fertile ground that could give rise to any kind of ideology.”[15] His response to this ideology was not to embrace it but to get in touch with the people and their own lives. “So the more that pastoral agents discover popular piety the more that ideology falls away, because they are close to the people and their problems.”[16] Ought the Church not say much about these things? “Denouncing human rights abuses, situation of exploitation or exclusion, or shortages in education, or food, is not being partisan,” Bergoglio rightly insists. “Catholic social teaching is full of denunciations, yet it is not partisan. When we come out and say things, some accuse us of playing politics. I say to them, yes, we are playing politics in the Gospel sense of the word, but not the partisan sense.”[17] The Church has a place in the public forum not just because of its transcendent orientation but because of its understanding about what man is. Why do people fall away from ethical standards? “I would say,” Beroglio replies, “that there is a devaluation of the exercise of ethical principles in order to justify a lack of compliance with them.”[18] Here again is where ideology comes as a presumed explanation as to why it is permissible to fall away from moral standards. We need to give reasons, especially when we are wrong. The Argentine archbishop puts this in an amusing way: “There is almost always an element of deceit involved in selling someone the Brooklyn Bridge, and this is accepted because ‘everyone does it.’”[19] If everyone does it, it still may be wrong. Bergoglio sees some cultural advance. “The fact is, in general, cultures are progressing in terms of the appeal of a moral conscience. It’s not what’s moral that’s changing. What’s moral doesn’t change. We carry it inside us. Ethical behavior is part of our being. What happens is that we are continually defining it more clearly.”[20] This does not mean that we cannot slide back. When asked what he thought about opposition to abortion as a religious question, he answered: “Well a pregnant woman isn’t carrying a toothbrush in her stomach, or a tumor. Science has taught us that from the moment of conception, the new being has its entire genetic code. It’s impressive. Therefore, it’s not a religious issue but, rather, a clear moral issue with a scientific basis, because we are in the presence of a human being.”[21] Commenting on the case of Argentina, Bergoglio reveals that he understands the importance of development as the antidote to poverty: I can say that we [Argentinians] have not exploited what we have. On God’s judgment day, we will count ourselves among those who ignored the gifts we were given and did not use them productively, not only in terms of agriculture and raising cattle but in mining as well.… Throughout our history, we have not created jobs tied to our natural resources. It cannot be that most jobs in Argentina are found around large cities such as Buenos Aires or Rosário. It just can’t be. [22]

Part of this problem, of course, is that modern agriculture is very productive with relatively few laborers. Jobs are tied to machines and the capacity to use them, especially to the presence of the computer. Cities are themselves generators of wealth and jobs. The archbishop reflects on Argentina: “God gave us everything; there is not enough food or enough jobs. It is a great injustice and flagrant lack of responsibility to distributing our resources.”[23] The fact is that resources are not the real cause of wealth or the means for caring for others. The real source of wealth is the mind, leaning how to use the mind and what it can produce. Not everyone wants to learn this or learn it in a productive context. Bergoglio senses some of this: “I would say that, deep down, it is a problem of sin. For four years, Argentina has been living in a sinful existence because it has not taken responsibility for those who have no food or work. It is everyone’s responsibility.…”[24] Nevertheless, this responsibility needs to be directed to what works. What is it after all that generates work? Bergoglio seems to be quite aware of the complexity of this issue. He understands that work needs consumption, demand, and inventiveness. “The creative capacity to generate work, and coming out ahead, seems to occur, especially in the worst of cities, when there is nothing left to do.”[25] Cities that were once poor are now rich. Asia is becoming full of them. Bergoglio graphically put it this way: “Let us not forget that utopias lead to growth. Of course, the danger is not just in falling into the trap of reflecting on the past, of patriotic duty, in being satisfied with what one has received and not looking any further; but also in the non- historical utopia, the one without tradition, the pure fantasy.”[26] Traditional utopias can be models of stagnation or of fantasy. We must imagine, to plan what can be done, and then to do it. Today, the fall in the birth rate in many countries is one of the most inadequately faced issues; the other is what this decline does to the economy and to the way of life. Bergoglio shows himself quite up-to-date on this issue: Of course I’m concerned [about the falling birthrate]. It’s a form of social suicide. By the year 2022, Italy will not have enough revenue in its retirement coffers—that is, the country will not have the funds to pay its pensioners. At the end of 2002, France celebrated the figure of two children per woman. But Italy and Spain have less than one per woman. That means physical and social realities will be replaced; it implies that other cultures and perhaps another civilization will emerge. This will not take the slow form as the barbarian invasions of the year 400 or so, but the territory left by some will be occupied by others. As a result of the migrations, Europe may undergo changes in its culture. Although, actually, that’s not a new phenomenon. Let’s not forget the extensive Christian communities that inhabited northern Africa for several centuries [that] no longer exist there.[27]

The Argentine archbishop is cautious about what goes on internationally when he says: “But globalization is an ambiguous reality.”[28] Yet, he has a surprisingly strong statement about where we ought to be going: “That is what gives rise to a common ethic and openness toward a destiny of abundance that defines man as a spiritual being.”[29] The phrase “an abundance that defines man as a spiritual being” is memorable. We are not defined by our tight, negative existence but by bringing forth the abundance that has been there for men to discover since they first appeared on this planet. Finally, Bergoglio communicates his understanding of what a nation is. He does not indicate that nation comes from common blood lines (which is what the word nation means, while “state” is the modern post-Machiavellian word, in contrast to Aristotle’s polity). Instead, he writes: What is it that makes a bunch of people a nation? First of all, there is a natural law and then a heritage. Second, there is a psychological factor: man becomes man (each individual or the species as it evolved) through communication, interaction, love for this fellow being. Through words and through love. And third, these biological and psychological evolutionary factors become real and really come into play, in our free-will behavior, in the desire to bond with others in a certain way, to build our lives with our neighbors in a range of shared practices and preferences.[30]

One cannot help but see here his love of Argentina. The Argentine archbishop remains a man, who, like John Paul II and Benedict, does not forget his homeland. Yet he now finds himself a world figure. In the end, the papal economics of this pope show many signs of a practical wisdom that will serve us in good stead. Not everything is clear, as he himself often reminds us. Most economists themselves, in fact, admit that “the dismal science” really has a bad record about predicting what will happen. The pope, as an economist, is in good company. In pointing to jobs, innovation, and the poor, he is reminding us of what it is all about. He wants us to know that it is not just about economics, even for the poor.

[1] “A Time for Christians to Engage with the World,” Financial Times, December 20, 2012. In the L’Osservatore Romano reprint (January 3, 2013), it was entitled “Christians Without Compromise.” [2] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words: Conversations with Jorge Bergoglio, ed. Francisca Ambrogetti and Sergio Rubin (2010; repr., New York: Putnam, 2013), 238. [3] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 18. [4] Pope Francis, “Homily,” L’Osservatore Romano (English ed.), November 5, 2013. [5] See also James V. Schall, SJ, “On Obsolescence,” http://www.catholicworldreport.com/, January 18, 2015. [6] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 18. [7] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 19. [8] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 19–20. [9] Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, foreword by James V. Schall (1946; repr., San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010). [10] See Joseph Hebert, “Be Still and See: Leisure, Labor, and Human Dignity in Josef Pieper and Blessed John Paul II,” Logos 16 (Spring 2013), 144–59. [11] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 26. [12] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 46. [13] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 48. [14] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 88–89. [15] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 93. [16] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 94. [17] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 94–95. [18] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 100. [19] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 100–101. [20] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 101. [21] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 109–10. [22] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 127. [23] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 128. [24] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 129 [25] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 133. [26] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 142. [27] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 225–26. [28] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 211. [29] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 240–41. [30] Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words, 241.

X Conclusion

This book time and again makes the basic point that Christian concern for the poor ought to be one that first deals with and knows how to alleviate poverty. It is not enough merely to call attention to it or to assist people in need while they are in need, though these are noble tasks also. My views begin with the idea that the economy is an issue of intelligence and experience. Its intricacies and workings belong to the natural order for which God has left to man the responsibility and freedom to organize by his own efforts. Because this possibility was contained in the very being of man, revelation did not have to concern itself with the basic elements of economics. It is up to mankind to learn how to deal with its own material needs. In many ways, mankind has learned this task. Yet discussion and debate about better and worse ways to achieve prosperity will always remain, even in successful societies. Indeed, economies themselves are subject to being subsumed into larger political and ideological systems and considerations that either impede or reinforce the basic purpose of sustaining and fostering human abundance and well-being. Revelation, though this is not its main purpose, calls our attention to things left to be accomplished, without pointing out exactly how to accomplish them. We can talk about clothing the naked as we encounter them, but a large-scale clothing industry is the real long-term way to accomplish this purpose. The history of mankind’s craft making or artistic side is one of gradually learning how to do necessary and useful things that seemed at first sight to be impossible. These useful things were gradually extended so that everyone, not just the rich, possessed them. It is said, for instance, that the single best improvement to mankind’s health was the invention of systems for bringing pure water to the masses. Some areas of the world still do not have these systems in place, and the lack of general good health in those areas reflects their absence. It takes relatively few people to run such systems but they enable the ordinary work of life to go on. If we want to find those who have done the most for the poor and everyone else, we can justly point to those often unknown architects, scientists, biologists, and craftsmen who have constructed the water systems and the means to deliver water into cities and homes. It is this sort of poverty relief that does the greatest good—that helps not just one or two who need a cup of water but whole civilizations that need it in abundance. A second theme in this book is that we do not want a system of aid to the poor that makes them dependent on our charity or our politics. Charity is a good and important virtue that will be needed even in the most successful societies, but we want people to actually care for themselves. We do not want them to be dependent on government aid. The control of the poor often becomes a major justification of governments. This concern is not an argument for no government, but the dependence of citizens on government for their everyday needs is a defect that undermines the dignity and capacity of people to care for themselves. A third consideration has been to emphasize that the world is intended to be a basis of and support for man’s own purposes. The increasing conflict between ecological and human concerns is often really a theological one about the purpose of the cosmos. There is nothing wrong with using natural resources for human benefit. This is what they are for. Moreover, the most important natural resource is human intelligence—the real wealth in our universe. We do not principally suffer from the maldistribution of goods. While there is maldistribution in every society to some degree, the more basic issue is the increasing abundance of things to be made available and how this is to be accomplished. Finally, and most importantly, man’s main problems are not economic. One might argue that as prosperity increases, real human problems will increase exponentially. Our ultimate order and disorder are not primarily located outside of us. Aristotle wisely said that if a man steals because he needs goods, the solution is to give him a way to earn what he needs. But if he steals to foster his vices, the solution is to teach him virtue. The greatest crimes, moreover, arise from those who are bent on reforming the world according to some system. The only solution is to learn the real and transcendent purpose of man in this world and beyond. Paradoxically, the most important thing we can do for the poor is to teach and practice the highest virtues. Not only do we learn the dignity and destiny of each human being from this source, but we acquire the energy and purpose needed to do what is necessary. More has been done for the poor than we often recognize. Much of the world’s poverty problem is solved. Why are we not committed to do what remains using the means that have worked, rather than dillydallying with those that have not? We must beware of using the remaining poor for ideological purposes. We should not promise what we cannot deliver to gain power. If the function of revelation is to make us more graphically aware of the plight of the poor, its purpose is even more to make us aware of the plight of those who are well-off but lack the knowledge, freedom, or prospect of a life in which their talents can flourish. The reorientation of social thought in this positive direction, whereby the main issue is how to be not poor rather than the immediate options for the poor, seems to be a much better way to help the poor and everyone else. Benedict XVI wisely said in Spe Salvi that the modern world is, at bottom, an effort to achieve the eschatological ends of man but in this world by human means. In this sense, issues of prosperity and poverty seem to be earnest endeavors to produce the kingdom of God on this earth. Christianity is not utopian in character. It recognizes that many things that would need to be done to make the world a perfect place cannot or will not actually be done. Christianity is concerned with the transcendent salvation of each person, whether rich or poor. While it recognizes that a relation exists between what we do for others and our salvation, it does not reduce man simply to the confines of this world. Christianity is content often with compromises and with what can be done, aware of the potential to make matters worse in a heedless pursuit of perfection. “Seek first the kingdom (of God) and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides” (Matt. 6:33).

References

Church Documents Pope Francis. “Homily.” L’Osservatore Romano (English ed.). November 5, 2013. Pope Benedict XVI. Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi (2007). Pope Benedict XVI. Encyclical Letter Deus Caritas Est (2005). Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (2004). Pope John Paul II. Encyclical Letter Laborem Exercens (1981).

Other Sources Acton, Lord John. “Course of Political Economy (1855).” Home and Foreign Review 4 (January 1864): 313–15. http://praxeology.net/LA-GM-CPE.htm. Adams, Henry. Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913. Aristotle, Politics. Aquinas, Thomas. Compendium Theologiae. Benedict XVI. Jesus of Nazareth. New York: Image Books, 2007. Benedict XVI. “A Time for Christians to Engage with the World.” Financial Times, December 20, 2012. Beyer, Andrew. “Riding High All the Way Around.” The Washington Post, June 20, 2003. Carey, Ann. Sisters in Crisis Revisited: From Unraveling to Reform and Renewal. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2013. Chesterton, G. K. “Why I Am Not a Socialist.” New Age, January 4, 1908. Reprinted in The Chesterton Review, VII. August, 1981, 189–95. Clement of Rome. First Epistle (Letter to the Corinthians). Fanfani, Amintore. Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism. 1935. Reprint, Norfolk: IHS Press, 2002. Hebert, Joseph. “Be Still and See: Leisure, Labor, and Human Dignity in Josef Pieper and Blessed John Paul II.” Logos 16 (Spring 2013): 144–59. Jouvenel, Bertrand de. The Ethics of Redistribution. 1951. Reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Hasty, Elvira F. “Misleading the Faithful.” The American Thinker, March 16, 2014. http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/03/misleading_the_faithful.html. Josef Pieper—An Anthology. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989. Kreeft, Peter. The Philosophy of Tolkien. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005. Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince. O’Brien, George. An Essay on the Economic Effects of the Reformation. 1923. Reprint, Norfolk: IHS Press, 2003. Pieper, Josef. Leisure: The Basis of Culture. With a foreword by James V. Schall. 1946. Reprint, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010. Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words; Conversations with Jorge Bergoglio. Edited by Francisca Ambrogetti and Sergio Rubin. 2010. Reprint. New York: Putnam, 2013. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. Schall, James V. Human Dignity & Human Numbers. Canfield, OH: Alba House, 1971. Schall, James V. Welcome Number 4,000,000,000. Canfield, OH: Alba House, 1977. Schall, James V. Religion, Wealth, and Poverty. Vancouver: Fraser Institute, 1990. Schumacher, E. F. A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Seneca, Of Clemency. Simon, Yves. A General Theory of Authority. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980. Tornielli, Andrea. “A Cardinal on the Subway.” Catholic World Report, April 18, 2013. http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/2193/a_cardinal_on_the_subway.aspx. Tornielli, Andrea. Jorge Mario Bergoglio: Francis: Pope of a New World. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2013. References

About the Author

The Reverend James V. Schall, SJ, Professor Emeritus of Politics at Georgetown University, now resides in California. Among his many books are Political Philosophy and Revelation, At the Limits of Political Philosophy, Reasonable Pleasures, The Modern Age, and The Order of Things. He writes regularly for online journals such as The Catholic Thing and Catholic World Report.