QUOTATION: Moral Relativism is a Threat to the Economy

A market economy enjoys real legitimacy if and only if it is set in the context of a vibrant moral culture that forms its people in the virtues of fairness, justice, respect for the integrity of the other, and religion. Indeed, what good are contracts—fundamental to the functioning of a market economy—if people are indifferent to justice? What good is private property if people don’t see that stealing is wicked? Won’t wealth destroy the rich man who doesn’t appreciate the value of generosity or fails to develop sensitivity to the suffering of the poor? Won’t the drive for profit lead to the destruction of nature unless people realize that the earth is a gift of a gracious God and is meant to be enjoyed by all? This is precisely why the moral relativism and indifferentism that holds sway in many parts of the West—fostered by the breakdown of the family and the attenuating of religious practice—poses such a threat to the economy.

--Bishop Robert Barron, Vibrant Paradoxes: The Both/And of Catholicism

QUOTATION: The Role of The Church in a Free-Market Democracy

Democracy and the free economy are not machines that can run by themselves. It takes a certain kind of people, possessed of certain virtues, to run self-governing polities and market economies so that they do not self-destruct. The task of the moral-cultural sector is to form these habits of heart and mind in people, and the primary public task of the Church is form that moral-cultural sector.  Thus the Church is not in the business of proposing technical solutions to questions of governance or economic activity; it is not within the Church's competence to decide whether bicameral legislatures are superior to unicameral legislatures, or whether parliamentary systems are preferable to presidential systems, or where the top marginal tax rate should be set. The Church is in the business of forming the culture that can form the kind of people who can craft political, economic, and social policy against the horizon of transcendant moral truths, truths that can be known by human reason.  

--George Weigel, "The Free and Virtuous Society", in Against the Grain: Christianity and Democracy, War and Peace, 2008

QUOTATION: Crony Capitalism

There is less difference than many suppose between the ideal, Socialist system, in which the big businesses are run by the State, and the present Capitalist system, in which the State is run by the big businesses.

--G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, Oct. 27, 1928.

QUOTATION: Economics

The basic problem of the economic world is a spiritual one. Tell me what you believe about a man and I will tell you your economics.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen