Perhaps prompted by nervousness about the agenda of Pope Francis, recently there has been a flurry of activity pushing the compatibility of Catholicism with capitalism. In a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Tim Busch—trustee of the Catholic University of America—praises the power of free markets to lift people out of poverty. In his view, the free-market system advances the virtues enshrined in Catholic social teaching, and is therefore superior to “collectivist” economic systems in which big government impinges on personal freedom.
Busch presents a false dichotomy. Who does not oppose the collectivism associated with the oppressive Marxist regimes of the twentieth century? Catholic social teaching has always staked out a middle-ground position that opposes the excesses of collectivism on the one hand, and laissez-faire individualism on the other—the “twin rocks of shipwreck,” as Pope Pius XI put it in Quadragesimo anno (1931).
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