The death of Pope Francis highlights a concern of many Catholics, including myself. Can we believe in the free market consistently with our faith? If we accept the Peronist views of the late pontiff, we obviously cannot do so. But fortunately, there is a better option available to us.
Clearly, God wants us to have peace and prosperity, to live in a “free and prosperous commonwealth,” as Ludwig von Mises put it. But the science of praxeology teaches us, by irrefutable logic, that only the free market enables us to avoid economic chaos. It therefore follows that the free market is ordained by God. This line of reasoning is more than theoretical. The great nineteenth-century free market economist Frédéric Bastiat, who was a Catholic, argued in just this way. As Claudio Resani notes: “’[L]iberty…is an act of faith in God and in His works.’ This is how Frédéric Bastiat thought concludes The Law, his most famous work. Reading his various writings and pamphlets, we can very often notice a recurring mention of God, or at least of a Creator, and of the morality that today we call ‘Judeo-Christian’ As already introduced, The Law is a very important work by Bastiat, and here we find the profound definition of freedom mentioned above but, we also find other statements with a religious background. Turning to the collectivist theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his disciples, horrified, Bastiat comments with a touch of irony: ‘But, oh! sublime writers, deign to remember sometimes that this clay, this sand, this manure, of which you are disposing in so arbitrary a manner, are men, your equals, intelligent and free beings like yourselves, who have received from God, as you have, the faculty of seeing, of foreseeing, of thinking, and of judging for themselves!’ Bastiat was a natural law scholar. For him, every individual is endowed by his Creator with rights and faculties that no one can justly take away from him. This is the same case with another famous statement he wrote in The Law: ‘Nature, or rather God, has bestowed upon every one of us the right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property, since these are the three constituent or preserving elements of life;…’ This is what is expressed in The Law by Bastiat as far as philosophy is concerned. It is a philosophical thought enlightened by a deep Christian faith that sees each individual as the image and likeness of the Lord. As far as economic thought is concerned, Bastiat expresses substantially the same natural law, to explain it we use his own words taken from Economic Harmonies and from the first edition of Economic Sophisms: ‘…the thought that put harmony into the movement of the heavenly bodies was also able to insert it into the internal mechanisms of society….freedom and public interest can be reconciled with justice and peace; that all these great principles follow infinite parallel paths without conflicting with each other for all eternity;… [This] we know of the goodness and wisdom of God as shown in the sublime harmony of physical creation…’ He is convinced that the harmony that exists in the natural sciences is also present in society and in interpersonal relationships, as a marvelous work of God. Again, in the introduction to Economic Harmonies, he writes about the harmony of individual interests: ‘It [the harmony of interests] is religious, for it assures us that it is not only the celestial but the social mechanism that reveals the wisdom of God and declares His glory.’ Economic Harmonies, although less famous than The Law, is by far his most important work. Here economics, philosophy, and theology merge and give life to the best and complete expression of Bastiat’s thought. In one of the last pages he writes: ‘To impair man’s liberty is not only to hurt and degrade him; it is to change his nature; it is (in the measure and proportion in which such oppression is exercised) to render him incapable of improvement; it is to despoil him of his resemblance to the Creator; it is to dim and deaden in his noble nature that vital spark that glowed there from the beginning.’ The fulcrum of Bastiat’s philosophical and economic thought is precisely the idea of spontaneous order, of natural harmony placed by God in human relationships because of the intelligence and free will with which the Creator has provided individuals.”
You might object that even if this argument is right, it goes against the official teachings of the Church, as expressed in papal documents. Certainly it goes against what the Peronista Pope taught, but his encyclicals are not infallible doctrine. As Father James Sadowsky, S.J., who was a friend of Murray Rothbard, pointed out, Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) is the most authoritative papal encyclical written in the modern era on social justice, and it is favorable to the free market: “What I call the classical social doctrine is that which prevailed among Roman Catholic thinkers from the time of Rerum Novarum (1891) until the middle of the twentieth century. Rerum Novarum is the title of what is called an ‘encyclical,’ a papal letter addressed to the bishops, which articulates a pope’s position on some matter of importance to the Catholic Church. Though what is set forth in encyclicals possesses great authority, encyclicals do not, in and of themselves, possess the force of doctrine. In other words, positions can and do change with the passage of time. Yet more than any other single document, Rerum Novarum guided the thinking of Roman Catholics on socio-economic questions during the first half of our century. The encyclical was written in 1891. Leo XIII was striving to improve the living conditions of the worker, and quite properly so. Here is Pope Leo’s summary of the problem that he thought needed his attention: ‘After the trade guilds had been destroyed in the last century, and no protection was substituted in their place, and when public institutions and legislation had cast off traditional religious teaching, it gradually came about that the present age handed over the workers, each alone and defenseless, to the inhumanity of employers and the unbridled greed of competitors . . . and in addition the whole process of production as well as trade in every kind of goods has been brought almost entirely under the power of a few, so that a very few exceedingly rich men have laid a yoke almost of slavery on the unnumbered masses on non-owning workers.’ No socialist, no liberation theologian could have brought forth a stronger indictment. But if one is expecting the pope to propose the socialist remedy as his own, one is heading for a severe disappointment: ‘To cure this evil, the Socialists, exciting the envy of the poor toward the rich, contend that it is necessary to do away with private possession of goods and in its place to make the goods of individuals common to all, and that the men who preside over a municipality or who direct the entire State should act as administrators of these goods. They hold that, by such a transfer of private goods from private individuals to the community, they can cure the present evil through dividing wealth and benefits equally among the citizens. But their program is so unsuited for terminating the conflict that it actually injures the workers themselves. Moreover, it is highly unjust, because it violates the rights of lawful owners, perverts the functions of the State, and throws governments into utter confusion. If the worker cannot use his wages to buy property, which under socialism he could not do, his right to dispose of his wage as he sees fit is taken from him.’ In other words, socialism dooms the worker to remaining forever under the very wage system it deplores, ‘. . . inasmuch as the Socialists seek to transfer the goods of private persons to the community at large, they make the lot of all wage earners worse, because in abolishing the freedom to dispose of wages they take away from them by this very act the hope and the opportunity of increasing their property and of securing advantages for themselves.’ Even more important, a regime of private property is demanded by human nature itself. Unlike the animals, man must plan for the future. He can do so only if he is able to possess the fruit of his labors in a permanent and stable fashion. It is in the power of man, wrote Leo, ‘to choose the things which he considers best adapted to benefit him not only in the present but also in the future. Whence it follows that dominion not only over the fruits of the earth but also over the earth itself ought to rest in man, since he sees that things necessary for the future are furnished him out of the produce of the earth. The needs of every man are subject, as it were, to constant recurrences, so that, satisfied today, they make new demands tomorrow. Therefore nature necessarily gave man something stable and perpetually lasting on which he can count for continuous support. But nothing can give continuous support of this kind save the earth with its great abundance.’ The ownership of the earth by man in general means only that God did not assign any particular part of the earth to any one person, but left the limits of private possessions to be fixed by the industry of man and the institutions of peoples. To use the technical phrase, ownership in the original 
state was negatively rather than positively common: owned by no one but capable of being converted into property by anyone. How does one convert the unowned into property? By laboring on what till that moment has been unowned. By so doing ‘he appropriates that part of physical nature to himself which he has cultivated.’ He stamps his own image on the work of his hands in such wise that “no one in any way should be permitted to violate this right.” Moreover, those who would deny to the individual the ownership of the soil he cultivates, while conceding to him the produce that results from that activity, forget that the modifications man introduces into the soil are inseparable from it. A man cannot own one without owning the other.’ In sum, here is Leo’s indictment of socialism: ‘From all these conversations, it is perceived that the fundamental principle of Socialism which would make all possessions public property is to be utterly rejected because it injures the very ones it seeks to help, contravenes the natural rights of individuals persons, and throw the functions of the State and public peace into confusion. Let it be regarded, therefore, as established that in seeking help for the masses this principle before all is to be considered as basic, namely, that private ownership must be preserved inviolate.’ Running through the encyclical is the theme that man’s natural right of possessing and transmitting property by inheritance must remain intact and cannot be taken away by the State, ‘for man precedes the State,’ and, ‘the domestic household is antecedent as well in idea as in fact, to the gathering of men into a community.’ At most, the State could modify the use of private property, but it could never rightly take away the basic right to its ownership and ordinary exercise.”
Let’s do everything we can to promote the free market. That is the best way Catholics can adhere to the teachings of our Church.
