Cathonomics

How Catholic Tradition Can Create a More Just Economy

Anthony M. Annett

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781647121433
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Konfessionen

As inequality skyrockets, economists and politicians alike demand a new economic paradigm to promote the common good. In Cathonomics, Anthony M. Annett draws on economics, Catholic social thought, philosophy, climate science, and psychology to show how readers of all faiths and backgrounds can work together to create a more just economy.

1

The Old Stuff

Where It All Comes From

I mentioned in the preface that when Pope Francis talks about the economy, he is not speaking in a vacuum. He is not giving his mere personal opinion. What he says has deep roots in Catholic social teaching. These roots go back thousands of years to the twin sources of Hebrew Scriptures and the thought of Aristotle, continue with Jesus and the New Testament, move into the early Church, and culminate in the high synthesis of Saint Thomas Aquinas. The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of this deep and broad history.

The Hebrew Scriptures

About a decade ago, the British historian Diarmaid MacCulloch penned an expansive book with a thought-provoking title: A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years.¹ MacCulloch chose this title to underline the direct continuity between the tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures and the newly emergent Christianity. Nowhere is this clearer than in the obligation toward our fellow human beings and indeed all of creation.

Judaism was born out of the historical experience of marginalization and vulnerability. No phrase is more recurrent in the Hebrew Scriptures than a reminder that the Jewish people were once slaves in the land of Egypt; this is repeated thirty-six times. This history gives rise to a moral obligation to love the poor and the excluded.² In the Jewish tradition, this notion of justice to the poor became paramount, as—over and over again—God warns his people not to mistreat widows, orphans, and foreigners (synonymous with the poor of their day). As theologian Daniel Groody points out, obedience to God entails making sure that social structures aid rather than oppress the poor, because God is always their defender, protector, and liberator.³

Unsurprisingly, then, the Hebrew Bible is replete with injunctions concerning the needy, the stranger, the orphan, and the widow. For example, when a farmer harvested grain, the farmer was instructed to leave the corners of the field unharvested. And when grapes were gathered from vineyards, harvesters were told not to come back for the grapes that were insufficiently mature the first time. In both cases, what was leftover belonged to the poor. There was also injunction against usury, taking an interest on a loan. In an agricultural society, this would have been one of the ways to oppress the poor, and farmers would seek loans in times of crop failure and other disasters that could mean the difference between life and death.⁴

The strong religious call to protect and defend the poor was justified by the experience of the Jewish people under the Egyptian boot, as recounted in the Exodus narrative. We hear this over and over again, especially in the context of taking care of the stranger. As God says, “You shall not oppress a resident alien; you well know how it feels to be an alien, since you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9).⁵ Or later in Leviticus, “You shall treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you; you shall love the alien as yourself; for you too were once aliens in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). This belief has modern resonance for us in terms of how we are supposed to treat migrants and refugees.

Perhaps the most well-known economic injunctions in the Hebrew Scriptures relate to the various “cycles of seven”: the sabbath day, the sabbatical year, and the Jubilee. The idea of the sabbath is well-known and still honored by observing Jews—that since God rested on the seventh day, no work should be done on that day. Every seventh year was a sabbatical year, when fields were supposed to be left untilled so that the poor could feed from them. More than that, all agrarian debts were to be forgiven, and those who had sold themselves into slavery because of their debts—a common occurrence in the ancient Near East, especially in response to drought and crop failures—were to be released (notice again the theme of liberation from bondage). The most radical action of all occurred on every seventh Sabbatical, which was known as a Jubilee year. During this year, all the requirements of the sabbatical remained in place, with the addition that any land or crop rights either sold under distress or pledged to creditors since the last Jubilee were to be returned to the original owners. The justification was that the land belonged to God and that human beings only had conditional ownership of it. As Leviticus (25:23) says, “The land shall not be sold irrevocably; for the land is mine, and you are but resident aliens and under my authority.”

To the modern reader, these injunctions seem radical indeed. Yet Michael Hudson argues that debt cancellations were real, commonplace, and served a valuable social purpose.⁶ He demonstrates that in Bronze Age Mesopotamia, new rulers would frequently issue “clean slate” decrees, which canceled agrarian debts, liberated those in debt bondage, and reversed land forfeitures. These actions would serve to restore economic balance and preserve a land-tenured citizenry as the source of military fighters, public labor, taxation—and social stability as a whole. Without clean slates, and given the frequency of droughts and crop failures, credit oligarchies would have ended up controlling the land, in turn posing a threat to royal officials. So clean slates reflected an element of self-interest as well as justice. Clean slates mostly occurred on the accession of new rulers; it was the ancient Hebrews that made them regular occurrences. As the centuries passed, there was a shift toward more creditor power—culminating in Roman law, which we have inherited, giving supremacy to creditor over debtor rights.

The prophets of ancient Israel, especially Amos and Isaiah, denounced the mistreatment of the poor in language that still sounds fresh and pointed today. Some examples follow:

• “They hand over the just for silver, and the poor for a pair of sandals; they trample the heads of the destitute into the dust of the earth, and force the lowly out of the way.” (Amos 2:6–7)

• “I hate, I despise your feasts, I take no pleasure in your solemnities. Even though you bring me your burnt offerings and grain offerings I will not accept them; your stall-fed communion offerings, I will not look upon them. Take away from me your noisy songs; the melodies of your harps, I will not listen to them. Rather let justice surge like waters, and righteousness like an unfailing stream.” (Amos 5:21–24)

• “Hear this, you who trample upon the needy and destroy the poor of the land . . . ‘We will buy the destitute for silver, and the poor for a pair of sandals; even the worthless grain we will sell!’ The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Never will I forget a thing they have done!” (Amos 8:4–7)

• “Ah! Those who enact unjust statutes, who write oppressive decrees, depriving the needy of judgment, robbing my people’s poor of justice, making widows their plunder, and orphans their prey! What will you do on the day of punishment, when the storm comes from afar? To whom will you flee for help? Where will you leave your wealth, lest it sink beneath the captive or fall beneath the slain? For all this, his wrath is not turned back, his hand is still outstretched!” (Isaiah 10:1–4)

• “Is this not, rather, the fast that I choose: releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the yoke; setting free the oppressed, breaking off every yoke? Is it not sharing your bread with the hungry, bringing the afflicted and the homeless into your house; clothing the naked when you see them, and not turning your back on your own flesh?” (Isaiah 58:6–7).

• “Therefore they grow powerful and rich, fat and sleek. They pass over wicked deeds; justice they do not defend by advancing the claim of the orphan or judging the cause of the poor. Shall I not punish these things?—oracle of the LORD; on a nation such as this shall I not take vengeance?” (Jeremiah 5:27–29).

• “Ah! you plotters of iniquity, who work out evil on your beds! In the morning light you carry it out for it lies within your power. You covet fields, and seize them; houses, and take them; You cheat owners of their houses, people of their inheritance” (Micah 2:1–2).

Four points stand out from these passages of scripture. First, God protects and prioritizes the poor—especially the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner—promising to rain down punishment on those who oppress them and deny them their rights. This point is a matter of communal justice and societal obligation, not simply personal charity.

Second, worship and fasting are empty gestures, with no efficacy, if the poor are simultaneously mistreated. As Groody puts it, without concern for the poor, the prophets maintain that people are spiritually dead.⁷ This is a strong rebuke even to those people today who say that the Church should focus on “saving souls” rather than social justice.

Third, the prophets evince a certain corruption that comes with the zealous pursuit of wealth, believing that greed and self-interest lie behind injustice. As John Donohue has noted, the prophets were writing at a time of rising material prosperity, and the disordered desire for ostentatious wealth lay behind the mistreatment of the poor.⁸ This is a theme that will echo strongly among the Christian Church fathers, as we will see.

Fourth, injustice is seen as not only a moral failure, individual or communal, but as a plague that could destroy society from within. Once again, Hudson is insightful, arguing that the prophets were reacting not only to increasing prosperity but to greater power of creditors over debtors and “market forces” over land tenure rights.⁹ Thus the social order became increasingly unstable. It is no accident that the prophets equate wealth worship with idol worship and a turn away from God, who protects his people from destruction.

Before leaving the Hebrew Scriptures, we need to consider one further element: the biblical injunction to care for the earth as well as the poor. As we will see in later chapters, this is central to the vision of Pope Francis. His most important text to date, Laudato Si’ (which will be explored further in coming chapters) develops this idea in great detail. The starting point is the understanding that everything God created is good and therefore is worthy of respect and protection. God has bequeathed the earth to humankind, but we are not its owners. Instead, we are stewards of God, charged with caring for creation, making sure the needs of all are met and that the earth is fruitful and bountiful for all generations to come.

This simple idea has nonetheless proven controversial. Why? Because the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, states that God gave humanity “dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the tame animals, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that crawl on the earth” (Genesis 1:26). Pope Francis explains that dominion does not mean domination, and it certainly does not mean destruction. He also argues that this passage has been abused by Christians to justify an appalling disrespect for creation and for all living things. Instead, the proper biblical mandate is to “till it and keep it.” If human beings till too much and keep too little, the natural harmony and sense of interrelationship between person and creation is disrupted. As noted earlier, the earth is on loan from God and the condition of that loan is that w...