Many people, including many Catholics, continue to express confusion on what the Church’s position is on socio-economic issues. Many believe that Church teaching stands against capitalism, while expressing tolerance for such evils as socialism and communism. I can understand the confusion. Various popes throughout the decades have expounded on these subjects, critiquing various economic systems and situations that negatively impact Christ’s children, and so the papacy has always opposed any roadblocks to human dignity. Since poverty is chief among these roadblocks, any system of government, economic system, or variant economic system, seen to promote paucity and exploitation has been a target for papal criticism. No economic system is perfect, and insofar as abuses of individual dignity have occurred in capitalist systems, capitalism at times has been subject to papal censure. This does not mean that the Church is opposed to capitalism in toto. At the same time the Church has consistently rejected the legacy of Marx. Consider this quote from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, section 2425:
The Church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies associated in modern times with “communism” or “socialism.” She has likewise refused to accept, in the practice of “capitalism,” individualism and the absolute primacy of the law of the marketplace over human labor.
In the second sentence of the above passage, note the italics that I have added to accent the word “in.” The Catechism is merely criticizing a sometimes abuse within capitalism, the brutal Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest that all Christians should deny. Contrast this with the absolute rejection of totalitarian socialism and communism in the first sentence. The Catechism continues:
Regulating the economy solely by centralized planning perverts the basis of social bonds; regulating it solely by the law of the marketplace fails social justice, for “there are many human needs which cannot be satisfied by the market.” Reasonable regulation of the marketplace and economic initiatives, in keeping with a just hierarchy of values and a view to the common good, is to be commended.”
Again, rejecting centralized planning is a total rejection of communism and socialism because centralized planning is a feature only of those two systems, there is no ambiguity here. Any government that sets itself above its citizens will ultimately set itself above God, and is thus atheistic and totalitarian. Some people read the remainder of the passage as anti-capitalistic; I don’t believe that it is. “Reasonable regulation of the marketplace” is something that the American Founders wouldn’t have disagreed with; after all, they created an orderly system of laws based upon human dignity and enshrined them in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. The preamble to the Constitution talks about the new government promoting “the general welfare” by “securing the blessings of liberty.” The Declaration talks about the inalienable natural rights of every person. Only a closed mind could interpret the Church’s total rejection of left-wing socio-economic ideologies, combined with criticism of Darwinian notions of survival of the fittest, and conclude they’re hearing a rejection of capitalism. It’s my belief that the Church does not expressly embrace any one economic system because it recognizes that any system run by sinners will have abuses. This is more a recognition of our fallen state than it is a critique of economic systems.
