A Catholic Defense of Freedom
For a generation, some Catholics in America believed that the Gospel injunction to help the poor meant to help them through government. Joined to that was a distaste for the WASP-dominated business culture of postwar American prosperity, even though Catholics had enjoyed the fruits of that prosperity along with other Americans. The long tradition of Catholic reflection on the need for limited government and the licitness of a robust free market, was obscured.
Samuel Gregg, director of research at the Acton Institute, has written a vigorous defense of that tradition in the face of fresh threats to liberty. He represents a second wave of thinkers reflecting on Catholicism and the American experiment since Vatican II. The first generation, dominated by thinkers such as Michael Novak, returned to Catholic thought a favorable view of limited government and the free market. This was no easy sell. On the one hand, there were still groups of traditionalist Catholics who, disdaining modernity, thought that the better—indeed, the only proper—relationship between the state and church was a premodern one in which the Church controlled the excesses of the state from an official position, and the state controlled the excesses of the market. This may have made sense in a premodern world where the apparatus of state control was undeveloped, and where improvements in trade and finance made free-market exchanges difficult. But that had not been the case for some centuries, and a residual distaste among some Catholics for bourgeois society was not a sufficient basis to reject the unprecedented prosperity the free market brought to the world, rich and poor alike.
On the other hand, there were significant numbers of Catholics and other Christians who also believed the state needed to intervene and control the economy, but with less emphasis on any formal union between church and state. These advocates of ‘social justice” were more than willing to let the Church take a backseat to political planners and a centralized economy. Thus an older generation of Catholic leaders, including bishops, equated the welfare state with Catholic teaching, and argued (for example, even recently against Congressman Paul Ryan and the United States Catholic Bishops Conference) that reduction of such programs was somehow contrary to Catholic teaching.
.................
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario