Setting the Record Straight By: Msgr. George Higgins

William McGurn, the Wall Street Journal's chief editorial writer, wrote an op-ed column for his paper Dec. 22 titled “A Gospel of Freedom.'' Datelined Rome, the column is based on a recent conference on “Globalization, Economy and the Family'' held at the Vatican under the joint auspices of the Acton Institute of Grand Rapids, Mich., and the Pontifical Institute for the Family.

Since McGurn refers frequently, but in general terms, to Pope John Paul II, the casual reader could mistakenly get the impression that the pope actually took part in the conference. So readers will want to take McGurn's unidentified references to John Paul II with a measure of caution. McGurn, paraphrasing the pope without any citations, says in summary that John Paul II “posits a right to ‘economic freedom’ and sees an open, global economy as a necessary condition of a larger, freely chosen civilization of solidarity.”

That’s all right as far as it goes, but it doesn’t begin to put the pope’s teaching about economic freedom and about market ethics in full context.

Since the pope’s 1991 encyclical “Centesimus Annus” is the favorite social encyclical of periodicals like the Wall Street Journal and many of its contributors, I am disappointed, but not greatly surprised, that McGurn’s column did not reference this document. Had he done so, he would have been required to inform readers that John Paul II, while citing the advantages of a free market, emphatically states that economic freedom is only one element of human freedom. McGurn also would have been required to report that in the pope’s view there are morally grounded limits to the market’s workings. To round out McGurn’s one-sided appeal to papal authority, let me quote from John Paul II in sufficient detail to set the record straight. In Paragraphs 40 and 40.1 of “Centesimus Annus,” the pope writes:

“It is the task of the state to provide for the defense and preservation of common goods such as the natural and human environments which cannot be safeguarded simply by market forces. Just as in the time of primitive capitalism the state had the duty of defending the basic rights of workers, so now, with the new capitalism, the state and all of society have the duty of defending those collective goods which, among others, constitute the essential framework for the legitimate pursuit of personal goals on the part of each individual.”

The pope says that while market mechanisms offer secure advantages, those mechanisms carry the risk of an “idolatry” of the market, an idolatry which ignores the existence of goods which by their nature are not and cannot be mere commodities. John Paul II’s warning against making an idol of the market is echoed in a recent book by Thomas Frank, “One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism and the End of Economic Democracy” (Doubleday).

Frank argues that American leaders in the ‘90s came to believe that markets were a popular system, a far more democratic form of organization than democratically elected governments. He further argues that this momentous shift in American culture -- in which business values vanquished the traditional democratic tenets of political equality and economic justice -- forms the central premise of what he terms “market populism.” He doesn’t refer to the writings of John Paul II, but Frank’s critique of unlimited consumerism -- despite some exaggerated rhetoric here and there -- and his criticism of the market more closely parallel the teachings of Pope John Paul II than does McGurn’s freewheeling column about the virtues of economic freedom. Or so it seems to me.

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Setting the Record Straight

By Msgr. George G. Higgins

The Yardstick

January 15, 2001