Catholic Business

Finance and ethics...

Pope Benedict, in Caritas in Veritate, wrote: 

What should be avoided is a speculative use of financial resources that yields to the temptation of seeking only short-term profit, without regard for the long-term sustainability of the enterprise, its benefit to the real economy and attention to the advancement, in suitable and appropriate ways, of further economic initiatives in countries in need of development (#40).

Financiers must rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity, so as not to abuse the sophisticated instruments which can serve to betray the interests of savers. Right intention, transparency, and the search for positive results are mutually compatible and must never be detached from one another (#65).

David P. Goldman, in First Things' Spengler blog, writes today:

A close look at the circumstances of the bank bailout of the past year, particularly the government’s decision to pay out AIG’s guarantees of other banks’ subprime derivative at 100 cents on the dollar, might reveal embezzlement on the grand scale. ... [more]

Response to Fr. Reese by Michael Novak

The encyclical was signed, but is not released yet, and the debate continues: Michael Novak responds to Fr. Reese's article.

What exactly is in Benedict XVI’s new encyclical on the economy and labor issues is not yet known. Catholic leftists and progressives, though, are already trembling with excitement. Three glaring errors have already appeared in these heavily panting anticipations.

...

In brief, nearly all the leftish critiques of American and other forms of capitalism are empirically false. They do not fit the actual facts. But these three—greed, unregulated markets, and the idea that capitalism makes the poor of the world worse off—are especially tiresome, and very far from reality.

[Full post here]

 

Benedict to the left of Obama?

Here we go - let's start politicizing the new encyclical. Fr. Thomas Reese SJ, writes in the Washington Post website that "... Benedict will show himself to be to the left of most Americans including President Obama."

If your world view is so narrow as to see everything through the myopic and distorting lens of the Left/Right dichotomy that we have inherited from the French Revolution, then you will never grasp the insights offered by Catholic Social Teaching.