The learned Neil McCaffrey, founder of Arlington House, Publishers, and the Conservative Book Club, once told me that Pius XII was perhaps the most economically savvy of popes. He didn't address the topic in his encyclicals, of course, but in his allocutions. How wonderful to see, as Jeff Tucker notes, that Markets and Morality has an article on this subject. Here is the pope on free trade, from a 1950 address to representatives of Chambers of Commerce of the world:
It is not without impressive signficance that mythology gave wings to Mercury [the Roman god of commerce]. Should we not see in that the symbol of the liberty that commerce needs to go and come across the borders of its own country?
