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"The Church and the Moral Framework of the Economy" --Prof. Arkes in The Catholic Thing
By The James Wilson Institute •
Posted on Jul 26 2025
Prof. Arkes wrote an article for The Catholic Thing entitled, "Revisiting Catholic Social Teaching," wherein he applied the principles of papal teaching to socialism. As a follow up article, Prof. Arkes expounds upon papal teaching in regards to capitalism in his piece, "The Church and the Moral Framework of the Economy." Whether you look to the Pope or to a economic theorist, Prof. Arkes captures the important point that a free market economy can and ought to be found within a rational and moral framework.
"One of the things that seems to come as a surprise to people is that the classical economists were far closer to Leo XIII, Pius XI, and John Paul II in their understanding of the moral framework of political economy – closer than most economists are today, and closer even than those Catholics who have been lured into a Leftist version of 'social justice.'"
"Whether prostitution and pornography would be available would not depend on whether people were willing to demand and supply these services. But to say that, is to say essentially what John Paul II said in Centesimus Annus. He saw all the good things that an economy of freedom and private property could do in lifting the material conditions of life. But he could not cast his approval over a capitalism, he said, that was 'not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality.'
"Yet that is exactly how the matter was seen by classical economists, and even by our so-called laissez-faire judges at the end of the 19th century. Those judges saw a moral ground for that freedom of people to make a living, and therefore they saw rightful moral restraints that would bear on that freedom along with any other freedom."
Read the whole piece here.
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