Catholic Business

The Signpost at the Crossroads

Joseph Bottum has an excellent piece on the politics of abortion in First Things: 

We should not accept a truce on abortion because the pro-life position is, in fact, winning. With horrifying slowness, yes, but each graduating class of young people is more opposed to abortion than the last, and in the long run the great task of persuasion and argument will prevail.

Read the whole article here.

Goldman Sachs doing God's Work

In an interview with the UK Sunday Times, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, claimed that he is doing God's work.  An article on the AOL DailyFinance site questions this claim.  I was quoted in the latter article, saying,

"The question of whether the CEO of Goldman Sachs is doing God's work is at one level a very complex one," says Dr. Andrew Abela, chairman of the Department of Business & Economics at the Catholic University of America. Abela, who is working on a book, Catechism for Business, says, "The vast size of the bank and its extensive influence on markets and on government policy, means that it is operating at all times in a moral minefield."

Unfortunately the rest of my quote didn't make it in:

"But at another level, the issue is a simple one: If you want to serve God in business then you need to have the intention to do so, and you need to act in ways that serve society. If your intention is instead to make lots of money, and you happen to do some social good along the way, there is not much honor or spiritual benefit there.  Similarly, if you intend to serve God and society, but the kinds of things you do actually harm people (government regulation often falls into this trap) then neither God nor society are served.  You need both the right intention and the right actions."