Bishops and Economics

The National Conference of Catholic Bishops remains on a useful and constructive course as it develops a pastoral letter on “Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy.” The second draft, like the first one, focuses the attention of the nation on neglected problems and enlists a consensus to revive neglected principles, notably in assuring social justice.

There is a particular relevance to the bishops’ struggle to construct this statement because it comes at a time when national leadership and much of the population seem preoccupied with narrower, more personal, more selfish concerns, with diminished concern for the poor and powerless, a distraction that can place fundamental principles at risk.

One of the significant contributions of the first two drafts is to identify properly the moderate middle that has historically been the center of American political action and the source of the nation’s economic vigor. For almost five years, the nation has been besieged by extremists on the right who have sought to claim the center, dismissing moderates as leftists and those on the left as communists or worse. So it is refreshing to hear the bishops say: “We live in a ‘mixed’ economic system which is the product of a long history of reform and adjustment.” They reject imposing “an unfettered free-market economy” just as they reject those who would install “a radically different system that abolishes private property and the market system.”

They offer three questions by which a just economy must be tested: “What does the economy do for people? What does it do to people? And how do people participate in it?” In reaffirming theirspecial commitment to the poor, they offer a new clarification. This option for the poor “is not an adversarial slogan which pits one group or class against another. Rather, it states that the deprivation and powerlessness of the poor wounds the whole community.”

There is no alternative to a vigorous role by government, the bishops assert. “The challenge of today is to move beyond abstract disputes about whether more or less government intervention is needed, to consideration of creative ways of enabling government and private groups to work together effectively.”

The bishops do not conceal their disapproval of crucial economic elements as they propose in broad outline ways that government, management, labor, stockholders and the Roman Catholic Church itself can respond to the “unacceptable” disparity in income and wealth. Job creation is cited as “the most urgent priority for domestic economic policy.” A healthy economy is a key element in preventing poverty, they emphasize.

They call for “a new American experiment: Partnership for the public good.” For this they propose “imaginative new forms of cooperation and partnership,” adding that “All of us must move from observation and analysis, through judgment and exhortation, to action. We have to move from our devotion to independence, through an understanding of interdependence, to a commitment to human solidarity.”

There is the risk in this exercise that much may be dismissed as dream and rhetoric. But a careful reading exposes an understanding and pragmatism that lend credibility to the draft pastoral letter. It is clear that this venture is already helping restore to the national political and economic debate the sometimes neglected commitment to social justice.