First Things magazine has an online symposium on the new papal encyclical Caritas in Veritate. The symposium includes an article by John Mueller, a commentator on this blog, called A Return to Augustinian Economics.
...Catholics on both the left and the right have analyzed Benedict XVI’s latest encyclical with the same dichotomous logic they applied to SRS [John Paul II's encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis]: The Church says there is no Third Way. If not, we must choose between the First Way of Adam Smith and the Second Way of Karl Marx.
But, by emphasizing in his new encyclical the central role of gifts in the divine economy of creation and salvation, as well as in personal, domestic, and political economy, Benedict XVI (like John Paul II before him) poses a very different choice.
Following that neglected economic realist St. Augustine (whom the pope has called “my great master”) and Augustine’s contemporaries the Cappadocian Fathers, Benedict XVI says the choice is among the same three world views that confronted one another in the marketplace of Athens when the Apostle Paul (probably in a.d. 51) prefaced his proclamation of the gospel with a biblically orthodox adaptation of Greco-Roman natural law and “some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers argued with him” (Acts 17:18). As Benedict XVI succinctly summarizes, “For believers, the world derives neither from blind chance, nor from strict necessity, but from God’s plan . . . living as a family under the Creator’s watchful eye” (CV, 57).
Read the full article here.
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