Via Henry Karlson, I see that one Daniel Indiviglio, of The Atlantic’s business channel, has up a post on Caritas in Veritate. Indiviglio is a Catholic who calls himself “knowledgeable about Catholic thought” and then admits to not having read the whole encyclical (“I have read a great deal of it, however” – well, good to hear!) before presuming to lecture the pope on what Jesus’ approach to economics and modern governance would have been. This leads to things like this enlightening interpretation of the famous “Leave to Caesar …” passage:

I think a few important lessons should be learned from this story. First, leave religion to priests and government to politicians. Second, pay your taxes, even if you don’t like it, because it’s only money. Third, religious leaders have more important things to worry about than economics. As a result, I think the Church needs to be very careful in telling governments what to do. And I think it agrees.

But do inexpert laymen who haven’t even done their homework need to be similarly careful in giving instruction to the Church? Heck no! I mean, where would we be without Indiviglio’s brilliant summary of the encyclical’s core theme?

I actually really love the notion of "Charity in Truth." By that phrase, the Pope means something like, by loving one another (God’s charitable truth), we’ll all be a lot better off. I think that’s right. Individuals, and even corporations, should be charitable. But that’s a lot different from saying that government needs to vastly redistribute wealth or crush profit-seeking business.

Or his take on how it applies to our present situation?

A denial of truth definitely played a major role in breaking the economy. I think a denial of charity had very little to do with it. Most of the banks or other corporations that failed, or nearly failed, were quite charitable. So were most of the wealthy individuals at the center of the tragedy. Goldman Sachs, a common symbol of greed, has a foundation that gave something like $120 million to charities in 2007. That number doesn’t include the countless of millions more their individual bankers gave to charity.

The past five to ten years also saw the growth of the non-profit industry — an entire branch of the economy entirely dedicated to charity. During this time, we also saw incredible sums of money go towards disaster relief for catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina, Darfur and the Tsunami in Southeast Asia. Charity seemed to be alive and well. Truth? Not so much.

I understand that I’m tilting at windmills here, but speaking as a libertarian-leaning Catholic with an almost reflexive skepticism of the real-world effects of governmental attempts to make our lives better, let me just say: Stop.

Please. Stop.

Not only does this sort of response to what is intended to be an authoritative proclamation rupture the Body of Christ and undercut the Church’s capacity to bear prophetic witness at a time when that witness is sorely needed, but it also contradicts any claim that you – we – might make to care more about fidelity than partisan alliances or ideological convenience. That many Catholic conservatives have consistently – and not unreasonably – levied exactly these sorts of criticisms against those who have dissented from texts like Humanae Vitae naturally makes this situation only worse; we can say what we will about widespread heterodoxy and ignorance about Church teaching being the result of liberal pastors and a generation of bad catechesis, but when this is how we respond to a document that is meant to, you know, catechize us, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the rot spreads much further than that.

If the activity of reading a document like this one doesn’t challenge your biases and move you to shift at least some of the contours of your preexisting thought, then the fact is that you’re doing it wrong.

Filed under: economics, religion