Just for the record, we want to remind people that the Acton Institute cares. Last month I wrote a piece that received a lot of attention on the plight of Egypt’s Coptic Christians. It’s also an issue we heavily address in the next issue of Religion & Liberty, which features an interview with Nina Shea. Shea talks about many pressing issues concerning global Christian persecution. An exclusive preview of the interview is currently available on the PowerBlog. Christianity Today referred to Shea as the “Daniel of Religious Rights.”

Nicolae Ceausescu with his wife Elena

“Communism changed our mentality,” said Daniel Apostol, editor in chief of Romania’s Money Channel. “We are still fighting now to come back to what we were. We lost the culture of private property. We lost this sense of privacy and respecting each other’s time and respecting people as individuals, as human beings. That was the worst thing that happened to us. This is why we are struggling so much now to get back to the capitalist society, to the free market, which can run only if there is respect for private property…”

Totten details the continuing consequences of totalitarian rule in Romania, and the country’s struggle to rebuild itself. All in all, a fine reminder to all of us who experience the blessings of liberty to never take those blessings - or the systems that were built to protect and preserve them - for granted.

See also: The Architect as Totalitarian by Theodore Dalrymple

A phenomenal new resource in this area is Saving America’s Urban Catholic Schools, just released by the Philanthropy Roundtable. The main purpose of the book is to guide philanthropists who want to assist, but it would be beneficial reading for anyone interested in education policy or involved in education as a teacher or administrator. It covers some of the same territory, and takes much the same perspective, as my 2009 CSTS volume, Catholic Education and the Promise of School Choice, but it delves more deeply into topics whose surface my analysis merely skimmed. Authors Stephanie Sarocki and Christopher Levenick persuasively show why this problem is urgent not only for Catholics but for all Americans, while they balance the portrayal of crisis with real-world examples of victory against long odds and concrete ideas for future improvement. Highly recommended.

“Instead of stimulating families and society to again believe in the future and have children […] we have stopped having children and have created a situation, a negative economic context decrease,” Gotti Tedeschi observed. “And decrease means greater austerity.”

“With the decline in births,” he explained, “there are fewer young people that productively enter the working world. And there are many more elderly people that leave the system of production and become a cost for the collective.

“In practice the fixed costs of this economic and social structure increase. How dramatically they increase depends on how evidently unbalanced the structure of the population is and how much wealth it has. The fixed costs however increase: The costs of health increase and the social costs increase.”

This is from reporter Peter J. Smith’s article on LifeSiteNews.com:

Sirico explained that the Vatican economist’s view opposes that of population control groups, who subscribe to a different vision of economic activity: what he called a Marxist or “redistributivist” paradigm: “If there is a pie and there are more people added to the pie then there is more poverty.” But the reality, Sirico says is that “the pie is dynamic.”

“Mr. Tedeschi is saying is that: no, the human person is himself creative. Human beings are not mouths that consume, but minds that produce,” he said. Sirico added that John Paul II hit on this very point in his social encyclical Centesimus Annus, when he wrote that “Man is man’s greatest resource.”

Because human beings are also creative producers, the excess of what they produce becomes the basis for trade in the economy, and the creation of wealth, said Sirico. Contrary to population controllers obsessed with overpopulation, he noted, it is incredibly population dense cities like Tokyo and Hong Kong that are incredibly rich, while sparsely populated areas of the globe such as Angola are comparatively very poor.

Read “President of the Vatican Bank: Zero Population Growth Responsible for World-wide Recession” on LifeSiteNews.com

In today’s Acton Commentary, I review a new statement titled Choosing the Common Good (download it here) from the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales. In the introductory video linked above, The Most Rev. Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, introduces Choosing the Common Good and discusses the key themes in Catholic Social Teaching “as a contribution to the wide-ranging debate about the values and vision that underpin our society.”

Here is the text of my commentary:

Two Cheers for the Bishops of England and Wales

What a difference 15 years can make.

Back in 1996, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales issued a document, The Common Good and Catholic Social Teaching, to address political issues facing Britain at the time. Leaving aside the incoherence that characterized much of that text, a distinctly skeptical tone about market economies pervaded the document – almost to the point of being an anti-Thatcherite screed.

The 1996 document was written with a view to informing Catholics’ consciences before Britain’s 1997 General Election. Shaping Catholic consciences is, after all, part of a Catholic bishop’s job. But it was very difficult to read the 1996 text as anything other than a less-than-subtle appeal to vote for the then-opposition Labour Party.

Fast-forward to 2010. With a General Election imminent in Britain, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales have issued a new document, titled Choosing the Common Good. To the joy of many, it is a remarkably sound text. Characterized by a focus on principles, sobriety of expression, and avoidance of tedious policy-wonkery, the English and Welsh bishops have authored a document that repays careful reading.

Choosing the Common Good’s strength is that it speaks to what the Church is best qualified to discuss when it comes to social and political questions: the moral-cultural dimension. In this regard, three dominant themes pervade this concise text.

The first is the limits of politics. “Have we allowed ourselves,” the bishops write, “to be seduced by the myth that social problems are for the government to deal with?. No government can solve every problem, nor make us more generous or responsive to need.”

That’s a marked departure from much of the post-war British political consensus about government’s role that not even Margaret Thatcher could overturn.

A second theme is the centrality of truly free associations (as opposed to NGOs). “Local institutions,” the bishops state, “expressing good citizenship and neighbourliness, which are not beholden to government, form a vital part of civil society.” These networks of solidarity embody valuable social capital, the vitality of which “requires our society to rediscover the centrality of personal responsibility and the gift of service to others.”

This linkage between personal responsibility and concern for our neighbor (rather than delegating it to the state) underpins the bishops’ emphasis on trust. Trust’s significance as a force for genuine social cohesion is underscored by social and economic research. According to the bishops, the undermining of trust as a living force in much of contemporary Britain has proved costly, including in the economy.

While stressing that the causes of the financial crisis are complex, the bishops argue that a decline of trust helped facilitate the financial sector’s meltdown. It follows “that new and sweeping regulation [will not] of itself solve these deep-seated problem.” “[S]ystematic flaws in the economy,” they add, “cannot be repaired unless it is recognized that they stem from, and contribute to, equivalent flaws in our wider society.”

Yes, many irresponsible choices were made by people working in the financial industry. But, as the bishops observe, there was plenty of irresponsible behavior on the part of others – including politicians and ordinary folk – that contributed to the meltdown. Regulation in itself cannot solve this problem: indeed it can significantly worsen matters.

Then there is the theme of the indispensability of virtue for any decent society. Here the bishops really hit their stride. “In place of virtue”, they insist, “we have seen an expansion of regulation. A society that is held together just by compliance to rules is inherently fragile, open to further abuses which will be met by a further expansion of regulation.”

The bishops then detail how the classical virtues of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance have real and practical consequences for economic and social life. That’s an important argument which many on the British left and right presently seem incapable of articulating. It also makes a welcome contrast to those – including some Catholics – who invariably reduce morality to whatever happens to be the latest fashionable lefty cause.

Naturally there will be quibbles with any document on social-political issues produced by Catholic bishops. Choosing the Common Good’s section on the environment, for example, is not especially convincing. Others will wonder about its “seamless robe” reference.

The bishops themselves, however, emphasize that their statement does “not comprise a detailed political programme.” They also stress that Catholics are free to argue among themselves about those issues that are truly prudential matters (i.e., 90 percent of political questions).

In recent years, reasoned discourse in British politics – and elsewhere – has been increasingly supplanted by “activism,” an obsession with message, a near-slavery to political correctness, and avoidance of substance. By contrast, Choosing the Common Good shows that it is possible to articulate arguments that are simultaneously clear, substantive, and grounded in a rich two-and-a-half thousand year-old ethical tradition that dwarfs 1960s progressivism and its nefarious off-spring.

For this alone, all Britons should be grateful.

A taste: “Contrary to what Michael Moore thinks, capitalism promotes moral and ethical behavior. In Woods’ case, it punishes poor behavior. Sponsors such as Nielsen, AT&T, Gillete and Gatorade have all either suspended or removed their endorsement deals with Tiger due to his moral mistakes.”

El jueves 18 de marzo del 2010, el Acton Institute se une a la Universidad Austral y el Instituto Acton Argentina para co-patrocinar una conferencia de un día en Buenos Aires, Argentina, para examinar esas y otras preguntas en el Marriott Plaza Hotel. Académicos de renombre, expertos en políticas públicas y empresarios, abordarán el papel que desempeña la moneda, la banca, los derechos de propiedad y otras instituciones de crecimiento económico para promover la prosperidad de los países en vías de desarrollo y lo que depara el futuro para estos países. Se brindará especial atención al caso de Argentina. Esta es la segunda del ciclo de siete conferencias sobre “Pobreza, Libre Empresa y Desarrollo Humano Integral.”

Título: “Instituciones, Ética y Finanzas”
Ubicación: Marriott Plaza Hotel Buenos Aires, Florida 1005 Buenos Aires
Fecha: Jueves 18 de Marzo 2010
Hora: 8:30-14:00
Expositores:

• Dr. Roberto Bosca, Profesor Adjunto de Doctrina Social de la Iglesia, Universidad Austral
• Dr. Samuel Gregg, Director de Investigación, Acton Institute
• Dr. Peter Heslam, Director del Proyecto “Transforming Business”, Universidad de Cambridge
• Mr. Michael J. Miller, Director de Programas y Medios, Acton Institute
• Profesor Ramón Parellada, Tesorero y Miembro del Consejo Directivo Universidad Francisco Marroquín, Director Polímeros y Tecnología, S.A.
• Mr. Damian von Stauffenberg, Fundador y Presidente de MicroRate
• Dr. Gabriel Zanotti, Director Académico de Instituto Acton Argentina

(Information on the March 18 “Institutions, Ethics and Finance” conference in English here.)

We can read in Genesis that man was created by God, in His own image. Richards expands on that in a way that struck me as particularly novel. If God is the Creator with a capital ‘C’, then being created in His image, mankind has been endowed with the ability to create as well — we are creators with a little ‘c’. And mankind’s progress through history, with all of our worldly creations, should demonstrate that. But what have we “created” via our government, in the name of compassion? Is it working?

At the end of the day, most of the programs and policies of government initiated in the name of helping people amount to rounding up resources from the private sector and redistributing them to others. And there are plenty of people who argue we need to do more of that. But if these programs and policies are in fact not working, or perhaps even making things worse, and yet we continue to do them, I would suggest that we are ignoring the original goal of helping others and instead focusing on how these programs make us feel instead.

My guess is that it is a very rare sermon that gets into these areas. That is a shame, because it flies in the face of what believers in God are taught. As Saint James wrote (James 2:14-26 NRSV), “faith without works is dead.” But is faith though repeatedly failing works alive?

Read The Costs of False Compassion on the Civil Society Trust.

Benedict took the opportunity to remind the volunteers of their particular vocation to protect persons and their dignity and also compared their service to that of the Good Samaritan. These volunteers choose to serve when others decline out of indifference or hardness of heart.

The Holy Father then reiterated one of the central themes of his first encyclical Deus Caritas Est, that while the State is responsible for the provision of justice, justice is not enough to make a society fully Christian. A Christian society must not rely on the State to provide what is most essential, i.e. charity, and must go beyond the strict provision of rights and duties. Here’s the key paragraph from Saturday’s talk, translated from the Italian:

As the Gospel reminds us, love of neighbor cannot be delegated: The State and politics, even with the necessary concern for welfare, cannot substitute it. As I wrote in the encyclical Deus Caritas Est: “Love will always prove necessary, even in the most just society. There is no ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of love. Whoever wants to eliminate love is preparing to eliminate man as such. There will always be suffering which cries out for consolation and help. There will always be loneliness. There will always be situations of material need where help in the form of concrete love of neighbor is indispensable.” (n. 28). This recalls and will always recall personal and voluntary commitment. Because of this, volunteers are not “stopgaps” in the social net, but persons who truly contribute to outlining the human and Christian face of society. Without volunteers, the common good and society cannot last for long, because their progress and dignity depend in large measure on those persons who do more than their strict duty.

Of course, most people assume that the State is and should be responsible, at a minimum, for public order and safety. But with his praise and gratitude for the volunteers, the Pope is not suggesting that they should supplant the state’s legitimate functions. However, these legitimate functions rarely, if ever, incorporate a ministry of love, which is essential to a humane social order. When the volunteers successfully provide order and safety for millions of visitors to Rome, they are doing so much more than their “strict duty.” Indeed, they are showing us what a true “service of love” looks like.