Papal Economics

Maciej Zieba’s PAPAL ECONOMICS: The Catholic Church on Democratic Capitalism, from Rerum Novarum to Caritas in Veritate is a careful, informative study of Catholic social teaching as embodied in papal encyclicals. Though the book does briefly trace the history of Papal statements on democracy and capitalism, Zieba focuses on John Paul II< particularly Centesimus Annus (1991).

Zieba doesn’t read back later statements into the tradition. Since the late nineteenth century, Popes have condemned socialism, but it took time for Popes to reconcile themselves to democratic forms of government and market systems. He also recognizes that even the Popes most favorable to democratic capitalism are not uncritical advocates. Following a Novakian scheme, he focuses on three themes in John Paul’s work: political community, economic life, and the “primacy of culture.”

One of the most important themes to emerge from the book is that the encyclical tradition isn’t an effort to articulate a model of political economy or to sketch a “third way” between socialism and capitalism. John Paul expressed a “pluralistic” view in his statement that “the Church has no models to present” because models of social reform have to emerge “through the efforts of all those who responsibly confront concrete problems in all their social, economic, political, and cultural aspects” (63). The Church’s aim, he insisted, is not to add another ideology to the public square; the task is one of “imbuing human realities with the Gospel” (63).