Regarding the debate between Fleming and Woods, I would just point out that Tom Woods is certainly not the only person who is aguing for the Catholic church to adopt a little economic education. Father Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute has devoted a good deal of his life to just that task. Some years ago I sponsored him to give a talk at Loyola College, and I recall his being quite excited to see a newly reprinted version of Rothbard’s Man, Economy and State on my desk. He gave a great talk on “Markets and Morality” that was very well informed economically as well as theologically.
When I arrived at Loyola in 1992 the dean of the business school was a Jesuit priest who also said that part of his calling was to introduce some economic and business education into the Catholic church. Many others have done the same, including a large number of laypersons. This has apparently borne fruit, since Pope John Paul II’s pronouncements on the economy are greatly improved, and much less socialistic, than similar pronouncements by earlier popes.
On a more insidious note, the hard-core leftists at my school routinely mask their political propagandizing in the classroom (and elsewhere) by saying, “it’s in the Jesuit tradition.” That is, they preach socialism, which they claim is to the advantage of the poor. Some of these people are not even Catholics, let alone Jesuits, but leftists teaching at a Jesuit institution. At a faculty meeting I asked some of them, “Do you have to be a socialist to be in the Jesuit tradition? Or can peaceful, mutually advantageous, prosperity-enhancing market exchange be part of the tradition, too? The response was dead silence.
6:14 am on June 24, 2004
