I admit being a Catholic libertarian seems paradoxical; perhaps even more so is the fact that I am a traditional, conservative Catholic, one who had strongly considered the priesthood as a vocation. In fact, I am nostalgic for the rich liturgy of the Latin Mass (I was an altar boy during the transition of the Mass. I can still remember Mom packing me breakfast when I went to Catholic primary school in Florida where my Dad was working at a local Air Force base; Mass was at the beginning of the school day, and there was a mandatory fasting requirement).
But isn't the Church hierarchical, authoritarian, elitist structure the antithesis of what a pro-liberty conservative is all about? Let me point out that, unlike the State, Church membership and attendance are voluntary in nature. I remain morally responsible for my own actions; I do listen to what the Church teaches on faith and morals, but I have free will and act in accordance with my conscience. Am I frustrated by bureaucratic inertia and incompetence in the hierarchy? Of course. The sex abuse scandals were/are inexcusable. And one of the criticisms I have about the Church post-Vatican II is that it has not been resilient against a sexually permissive, hedonistic culture and seems to be overly accommodating to remain "relevant" to young people.
As I have written in my signature blog, I initially entered college at 16 with the idea of becoming a priest, not a diocesan one like my favorite maternal uncle; I also had the notion of being an educator, in particular a high school math teacher, so I considered a teaching order like the Jesuits or the Oblates (a couple of Oblate priests were teaching in the philosophy department). I did get interviewed by a Jesuit, but I don't recall any follow-up from them. (Keep in mind Pope Francis, a Jesuit, used to teach high school chemistry.) But I had become disenchanted by the post-Vatican II Church which seemed to be obsessed with becoming relevant (gone were the universal Latin Mass and elaborate rituals, the more stringent dietary practices (fasting before Mass, fish on Fridays, etc.); in its place, a more socially conscious mission, a more relevant, inclusive liturgy, etc.)
Ironically my very politically conservative (anti-Communist) uncle thought the liturgical reforms were a good thing, and he didn't like the financial drain of parochial schools. Although like most of his third-generation Franco-Americans, he was bilingual (and was fully fluent in Latin: I think his seminary lectures and exams were in Latin; he holds a licentiate which is analogous to a Master's degree in theology), he didn't want to be typecast and assigned to a dying French parish in the Fall River diocese. He didn't have any interest in advancing in the church hierarchy. He never wanted to go beyond his vocation as a pastor and for the bishop to decentralize authority in accordance with the principle of Subsidiarity. A masterful administrator, he quickly rebuilt crumbling infrastructure in his pastoral assignments. But he had no interest in our ancestral homeland of Quebec and its native separatist movement. He was part of the melting pot; I and my brothers were part of the Roots generation (in fact, I had a mandatory lecture to attend my first semester at OLL, by then unknown author Alex Haley); my uncle curtly told me if I was interested in Quebec, I should move there. (There is an interesting anecdote; at some time, a genealogy had been done tracing my mother's family over the last few centuries from Canada to Normandy which my uncle kept in a lock box in the rectory. Someone subsequently robbed the rectory and took the lock box. The lock box was never recovered, but my uncle never lost sleep over it. I can only imagine what the thief thought when he realized what he had had sentimental value only to my family.)
My uncle was/is a role model of sorts; he holds strong views, but he is satisfied with making his point and moving on. He doesn't like to repeat himself. He has remarkable self-control and people skills He has a very distinctive way of saying Mass; he slowly enunciates every syllable during the consecration. His homilies are articulate and based fully on the context of the day's readings. (This is in stark contrast to other homilies I've gone through, probably crowned in past post fragments by a UT campus mass where the priest actually build a homily/sermon over Olivia Newton-John's "Have You Never Been Mellow".) My uncle seems to be the exception, not the rule. I think when I started attending the Newman Association at UH in the early 80's, whatever attraction I had for a Church vocation had withered away. A couple of incidents stand out: (1) I noticed one Sunday that someone had scribbled out in ink "sexist" references in the Nicene Creed (e.g., "for us MEN and our salvation"). This was in a Church that venerates Mary, Jesus' mother, above all other saints, and has enumerated several women as saints during the history of the Church; (2) we normally assigned one man and one woman readers for the readings before the Gospel. One Sunday I was contacted to replace a reader literally in the last 5 minutes before Mass. It turns out to have been the female reader who was a no-show. All hell broke loose after Mass as the feminists fumed over 2 male readers. (Let me also point out we had similarly had 2 female readers on other occasions.) The poor coordinator had been stuck with trying to find a substitute at the last minute; I had not sought the gig; I agreed to do it as an act of service. I was privately fuming over these hypocritical "Christians" putting their political ideology over Christianity.
Am I putting my own ideology over the Church? No, I don't think so. As Thomas Aquinas says:
Now human law is framed for a number of human beings, the majority of whom are not perfect in virtue. Wherefore human laws do not forbid all vices, from which the virtuous abstain, but only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained: thus human law prohibits murder, theft and such like. (ST II-I Q. 96)
Jesus focused on personal, not collective salvation. He goes out of the way to distinguish the earthly and heavenly kingdom; multiple passages stress His mandate was heavenly, not earthly (e.g., Satan offered him earthly power; the people wanted to make Him king). He refuses to intervene in a dispute of brothers over inheritance. Nor can His mission be simply reduced to class-based; He does not condemn wealth, just an obsession with it. He has wealthy benefactors; He alludes to the harsh judgments of others accusing Him of associating with tax collectors, calling Him a glutton and drunkard, a hypocrite who changes the Scripture (e.g., work on the Sabbath) to suit His own purposes). The parable of the 3 servants also is relevant; notice that Jesus doesn't focus on unequal distribution of investments or outcomes by the servants or the disparity in wealth among master and servants; in fact, he redistributes the investment of the servant who buried his. Now I'm not going to go into a theological discussion of the parable here, of what we do with the gift of life God has given us. But clearly we are expected to make industrious use of what we are given. Jesus doesn't simply praise the servant who earned the most but He condemns the one who has yielded nothing. I go further than many who interpret this parable: I see good in the production of goods and services that are more affordable to the poor, i.e., improving their standard of living. No, Jesus is not simply a humanitarian; He rebukes Judas, who argues that the woman anointing Him with expensive oil should have instead given the money exchanged for the oil to the poor. (I have written a companion piece here on whether Jesus was a "progressive".)
I became increasingly alienated by a Church which seemed to confound faith with a sociopolitical agenda. In one case I've cited in other blog posts, I was attending Catholic school in my grandfather/uncle's home parish, and the class had "adopted" a black family in DC; we would help out on groceries, clothes, etc., but the item that sticks out most is the wish list included the father's brand of cigarettes: were we really supposed to aid and abet a man's self-destructive habits? I also had a sense that what we were doing was morally hazardous and counterproductive. It's one thing to help someone who is in a temporary bind, to invest in a fishing pole, so he can catch his dinner; it's another thing to foster a dependency on the State or charity, which I find morally corrosive.
So what has Pope Francis said or written that has resulted in a backlash by the libertarian community, including myself?
Finally, I cannot but speak of the serious risks associated with the invasion, at high levels of culture and education in both universities and in schools, of positions of libertarian individualism. A common feature of this fallacious paradigm is that it minimizes the common good, that is, “living well”, a “good life” in the community framework, and exalts the selfish ideal that deceptively proposes a “beautiful life”. If individualism affirms that it is only the individual who gives value to things and interpersonal relationships, and so it is only the individual who decides what is good and what is bad, then libertarianism, today in fashion, preaches that to establish freedom and individual responsibility, it is necessary to resort to the idea of “self-causation”. Thus libertarian individualism denies the validity of the common good because on the one hand it supposes that the very idea of “common” implies the constriction of at least some individuals, and the other that the notion of “good” deprives freedom of its essence.Pope Francis has created a bogeyman that doesn't exist. I can honestly say that during my four degree programs and subsequent 5 years as a full-time professor , I never knowingly met a libertarian professor or even read texts like Bastiat's "The Law" or Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" in course work (I do recall passing references to minarchism in a social philosophy course, but assigned class readings mostly focused on things like the works of Marx and Engels). I can maybe count on one hand the academic programs I would classify as free market (e.g., George Mason, Texas Tech, etc.), and I suspect that those campuses are dominated by "progressives" as well. The Austrian School of Economics is largely out of the mainstream. Most of my self-education on classical liberalism, exposure to Ayn Rand's novels, blogs at Cafe Hayek, etc., has occurred over the past 15 years or so. I was always a fiscal conservative and a believer in the principle of Subsidiarity with a skepticism to Big Government. This skepticism did not develop from my professors' political agenda; in fact, I rarely discussed my political views with my colleagues who mostly were "progressive", even in business schools.
The radicalization of individualism in libertarian and therefore anti-social terms leads to the conclusion that everyone has the “right” to expand as far as his power allows, even at the expense of the exclusion and marginalization of the most vulnerable majority. Bonds would have to be cut inasmuch as they would limit freedom. By mistakenly matching the concept of “bond” to that of “constraint”, one ends up confusing what may condition freedom – the constraints – with the essence of created freedom, that is, bonds or relations, family and interpersonal, with the excluded and marginalized, with the common good, and finally with God.
One small example: I remember being shell-shocked over the big chunk of state income tax being taken out of my paycheck at UWM. (I had been working in Texas, which had no state income tax.) So I had mentioned it in passing at a business school cocktail party, and the well-to-do woman I was speaking to looked astonished, saying, "Well, where do you think we get all the money for our fabulous state parks?" (on a side note: I never visited one of those expensive parks I was paying for during my 3 years in Wisconsin). I had a tenured feminist professor next door who was obsessed with compensation and was paranoid over what I was making; I never discuss compensation, but she was accusing me of a "cover-up" (and eventually told me she found out because of open records laws and must have satisfied herself she was making more than me); she also took up the cause of getting more equitable pay for administration secretaries. These examples are anecdotal in nature, but I had opinions about curricula departing from Western Civilization and focusing on "diversity" courses and related progressive claptrap. I always felt that it would be politically suicidal to offer opinions departing from mainstream progressivism. It's not just secular universities; pro-abort politicians like Cuomo and Obama have given commencement addresses at the most prominent Catholic university in the US, Notre Dame. The incidents of variances with orthodox Catholicism are so prevalent at Catholic universities, there was this recent satirical post on Facebook:
Although I haven't been in academia for several years, I see the few classical liberal professors like Don Boudreaux constantly being attacked, e.g., for arguing against minimum wage hikes, something that even passes in red states. So I first challenge the Pope to demonstrate where this insidious foothold in academia he's referring to. We just came from a 2016 Presidential campaign with two of the most widely disliked candidates in recent American history, and the LP candidate (who I voted for) got 3% of the national vote. Not one federal legislator is LP, and the number of pro-liberty legislators in Congress I can count on one hand. So, as Bill Clinton might say, this view of a creeping libertarianism in academia is the biggest fairy tale I've ever heard. Pope Francis has decided to create a disingenuous straw man. There are plenty of signs the opposite is true: polls show that millennials are far more favorably inclined to socialism and socialist politicians than older Americans. In fact, socialist Bernie Sanders mounted a strong campaign that nearly upset Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination last year, heavily backed by young voters. Where has Pope Francis been on this ideological creep, despite the Church's unambiguous rejection of this economic doctrine?
For all three popes who have come into contact with modern Socialism, Pius IX, Leo XIII, and Pius X, have formally condemned it, both as a general doctrine and with regard to specific points.Not to mention the modern tragedy of Venezuela, where state-operated hospital lack basic resources and medicines and where hungry people are killing dogs, cats, pigeons, even flamingos for food.
In the US, we have record numbers of people on the SNAP (food stamp) program; some 70% of the federal budget is spent on entitlement programs like Medicaid and senior citizen benefits. Almost half of lower-income Americans pay no federal income tax. Even poorer households generally have access to refrigerators, plumbing, electricity, cell phones and televisions.
Yet Pope Francis sees this insidious creep of "selfishness". He seems to parody here the beliefs of some libertarians, Ayn Rand, in particular, who disliked the vulgar popular characterization of the concept and wanted to establish the construct as a virtue. Take, for instance, of airline instructions for parents to first protect themselves (e.g., with oxygen masks), so they are then able to care for their small children; who is going to look after small children if the parents are unconscious or dead and there needs to be an evacuation?
The Great Commandment includes to love others as yourself: not more than yourself but as equals as children of God. If you don't even love yourself, in what way can you love others? You recognize that others have the same unalienable rights as yourself, i.e., life, liberty and property. One can choose a livelihood for which your talents, experience and effort are best rewarded; this is not merely self-serving, but a fair exchange which reflects the net value you provide for his enterprise. The market provides competition because others have an interest in arbitrage up to the market value for one's contribution to the enterprise (not to mention creating one's own enterprise). No doubt I could make a living as a restaurant employee (my first college work-study job included washing dishes and mopping floors) or driving a taxi (I've driven cars for decades with hardly any accidents or tickets), but I have specialized knowledge and skills (e.g, computer programming and administration). Yes, perhaps I could mow my own lawn or change my car's oil, but others may do the same faster, cheaper and better than the allocation of my own time and effort.
There is nothing antagonistic to a Christian perspective from the free market. I would submit that the market exists for the benefit of the consumer. The consumer benefits from competition--lower prices, greater selection, innovation, etc. Restrictions on supply (e.g., product regulations, price caps, quotas, origin, discriminatory taxes, etc.) inflate prices with a disparate impact on the lower income, i.e., a decreased standard of living. The fact that the Invisible Hand provides a greater prosperity for all acting in their own economic interests in a nation of 320M people than a remote centralized elite without a full knowledge of prices and dynamic resource allocation is hardly a divorce from the common good. Furthermore, selfishness is intrinsic to any form of government, with its own self-serving bureaucracy, with corrupting power and economic interests.
But more to the point, the Pope is stereotyping libertarians; I will let Randians or objectivists speak for themselves. From a piece entitled "Pope Francis Attacks Objectivism in All but Name":
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy offers this definition: “Libertarianism is a political philosophy that affirms the rights of individuals to liberty, to acquire, keep, and exchange their holdings, and considers the protection of individual rights the primary role for the state.”
Libertarianism is a political position. It does not assert or entail the idea that the libertarian, to be free, must be independent of God. It does not assert that “only the individual gives value to things.” If you are a libertarian, you may believe in God, live in a commune, work for the common good. Yet, Pope Francis attacks libertarianism on those grounds. He does not mention “the rights of individuals to liberty, to acquire, keep, and exchange their holdings…” or the primary role of the state being “the protection of individual rights…”
Ayn Rand was bitterly, resolutely, opposed to an advocacy of libertarianism that cut loose from the foundation of Objectivism, hoping to soar higher with an appeal to individual liberty unburdened by premises about reason (versus faith), selfishness (versus altruism), and individualism (versus collectivism). She argued that without defending those foundational arguments for liberty, Mill, Adam Smith, and every other libertarian had fallen before the claims of altruism, sacrifice, community, the public interest, the common good, brotherhood...The great Walter Block notes:
A word about the baleful Randian influence on libertarianism. Many present libertarians, of my generation, came into this philosophy through the writings of this author (for the generation after that, in my assessment, it was due to Ron Paul.) That is good. The more libertarians the better. However, Miss Rand rejected religion, entirely, all of it, as “irrational.” What is bad is that many older libertarians are infected with this intellectual virus. Many, then, would not be as kind in their assessment of the Catholic church as I have been. Although I too came into the movement under her influence, I have managed to jettison this baleful influence of hers.One of my persistent criticisms of Pope Francis has been his lack of due diligence in analyzing libertarianism, which I would find offensive in any fellow academic. To this day I remember being rebuked by my philosophy professors on two early occasions: (1) undue reliance on secondary vs. primary sources; (2) "don't make Donceel look like an idiot". So I have to admit here that Pope Francis' scholarship on this point has been frankly lazy ass. (A recent Facebook commenter pointed out that Pope Benedict and predecessors have hardly been pro-market, which is true, but it's the distinctive nature and extent of Francis' discussion.) I have meticulously credited others in published research: I recall in one case the editor came back to me saying he would publish my paper, but only if I reduced the number of references from almost 500 to half. I had a sense of guilt in terms of deciding who to drop, but you do what you need to do to get published. There is no comparable scholarship in what the Pope wrote above; if he had handed that in to me as one of my students, I would have given him a failing grade. He has provided no meticulously defined context of this alleged libertarian creep in academia, and he's really talking about a minority perspective within the libertarian movement, one which he caricatures vs. responding to in a Thomistic fashion on its merits.
I and others will find inspiration for a proto-libertarian perspective in the writings of Thomas Aquinas (as mentioned above) and the Spanish scholastics, as Murray Rothbard and others have discussed. My post is not comprehensive in scope, and I'll summarize a selective reading list of others who have commented on the Pope's critique (in addition to those cited above), including prominent Catholic libertarians like Jeffrey Tucker, Tom Woods, Thomas DiLorenzo, and others. (This list is not exhaustive; do your own due diligence, but it is a reasonable sample.)
- Breitbart.com, "Pope Francis Warns Against ‘Invasion’ of Libertarianism". The piece that ignited the firestorm.
- Sarah Scherer, "A Catholic Libertarian’s Epic Response to the Pope’s Comments on Libertarianism". Scherer takes issue with Francis' caricature of Randian constructs.
- Jeffrey Tucker, "Pope Francis Has Forgotten the Church’s Own Grand Libertarian Legacy". Tucker points out the Church's liberal history, including its stand against slavery and state-based discrimination, the stand against socialism et al.
- Tom Woods, "The Pope and Libertarians: My Response". Woods, a Catholic convert, has written a well-known book on the free market and the Church; he has a daily podcast with multiple episodes on Pope Francis (listed here). He basically refutes Francis' anti-libertarian cliches. [I had a falling out with Woods, who loves Ron Paul, on Facebook; Woods marked Paul's birthday with a snide attack on Mitt Romney, which I found uncivil and unnecessary.]
- Andrew Napolitano, "Pope Francis Doesn't Understand Economics: Judge Andrew Napolitano". Technically speaking, not on the current kerfuffle but underscores the freedom, free choice of Jesus' teachings.
- Thomas DiLorenzo, "The Fascist Pope". Yup. One of my favorite economists (on my flagship blogroll) points out that Francis is an apologist for the State, which has often used the concept of the common good to subjugate individual rights, including Hitler and Mussolini.
- The Libertarian Catholic. "What Pope Francis Gets Horribly Wrong About Libertarianism".
