Books: a Catechism for Business

A Free Market Gets 

Its Long-Overdue Catechism

by Peter Jesserer Smith

The editors of the new A Catechism for Business talk with the Register about how they’ve created a way for business to know an obligation to achieve a just society.

Running a business on the ethics and social teachings of the Catholic Church has never been easier, thanks to the production of a concise, easy-to-read handbook called A Catechism for Business.

A Catechism for Business is the product of a herculean seven-year labor by two professors at The Catholic University of America (CUA), Andrew Abela, dean of CUA’s School of Business and Economics, andJoseph Capizzi, associate professor of moral theology at CUA.

The two editors have made it easy for people in both small business and big business to engage with the Church’s social doctrine and understand what their obligations are to work for a just society as business people. The new book helps answer challenging ethical questions faced daily in the 21st-century global economy by providing quotations and references — not the editors’ interpretations — to the relevant social teaching.

The Register spoke with Abela and Capizzi before the March 26 launch of their book at the Catholic Information Center in Washington and discussed how A Catechism for Business can evangelize the business world and build the foundations for a more just economy inclusive of those on the margins of society.

Why is A Catechism for Business so important for our modern context?

Abela: What we wanted to do with this book is make [the Church’s social teachings] more accessible for busy business people — especially faithful business people who are trying to live the Gospel in their business but not sure how to do that. This treasure of the social doctrine is scattered throughout many, many documents, and they don’t necessarily know where to look. So the book collects all of that and makes it much more readily accessible.

How did you put the social teachings of the Church in this book for people?

Abela: This little volume is seven years in the making. It took a long time to gather and find all the materials because we had to read everything. All the social encyclicals, all the documents of Vatican II, the Catechism …

Capizzi: And then there’s the process of distillation. You’re obviously not putting in every quotation that pertains to every question. Instead, you’re trying to find the ones that are the most emblematic of the teaching as a whole or somehow crystallize the point as much as possible.


So you both did a lot of work to make it easy for people?

Capizzi: [Laughing] We think so; yes.

A lot of people view the purpose or end of the economy as just about profit and say that’s what business is all about. But what is actually the purpose, or end goal, of the economy, in the Catholic view?

Abela: Basically, serving the material needs of human beings. The view that profit is the end of business is actually a relatively recent innovation, even in the secular world.

Really? How recent is it?

Abela: Certainly the last 100 years, at the most; and in terms of making it the conventional wisdom, only probably in the last 30 or 40 years.

And it’s not even as widespread as you would think. We speak to small business people, and they don’t think they’re in it [for profit] — yes, they’re in it for profit, in the sense that they have to make profit, but they don’t get up every day and go to work and say, “I am going to make profit.” They say, “I am going to make shoes" or "I am going to run a shop.” So there’s this strange distortion.

So what are you trying to change here?

Abela: What we’re trying to do with this book — and it’s actually part of a broader strategy we’re doing at our School of Business and Economics at Catholic University — is to combat this notion that business is amoral.

Human beings — we’re moral beings. We don’t really do anything amoral. So if you pretend that business is amoral, then other people are going to try to shove morality in somehow, which usually involves heavier government regulations.

If businesses aren’t striving to care for society, then government feels like it has to do it. One of our board members said the other day, “If business had taken care of the 17% of Americans who didn’t have health insurance, then the Affordable Care Act never would have happened.” So when business leaders decline the responsibility, we hand it over to government. And how’s that working out for us?

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