One of those core areas is immigration, where some states are enacting laws that basically outlaw the practice of core tenets of the Christian faith. Think of Alabama. Here, the Catholic Church is suing – alongside some key Protestant denominations – on the grounds that the law violates religious freedom. On this issue, the Obama administration is on their side, and the Department of Justice has opened a lawsuit against Alabama. But here, as noted by Michael Sean Winters, Catholic candidate New Gingrich is on record saying that he would stop this lawsuit. Gingrich, true to form, is calling out the Obama administration for being anti-Catholic on the issues of religious freedom. Gingrich needs to look in the mirror. If Obama is anti-Catholic, then so is he. Religious freedom is a universal principle, not something to be applied selectively based on ideology.

And then there is the military. It is a well-established position of the Catholic Church that armed forces should recognize the right to conscientious objection – not just as a general principle, but for particular military encounters. Here is how the USCCB puts it in Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: “Our Church honors the commitment and sacrifice of those who serve in our nation’s armed forces, and also recognizes the moral right to conscientious objection to war in general, a particular war, or a military procedure”. Not recognizing this right is an attack on conscience, and implicitly an attack on religious freedom. This is especially pertinent for the United States military, which is engaged in so many foreign adventures of doubtful and dubious value. And yet which president or presidential candidate has the courage to stand up for this principle? No, religious freedom is an important issue, and it goes far far beyond healthcare.

With this in mind, I read a rather disturbing report in the New York Times yesterday about the condition of workers in Apple suppliers in China. Reseachers have documented a litany of abuse including poor safety conditions sometimes leading to injury and death, excessive overtime, workers being forced to stand all day and crammed into crowded dorms at night, improper disposal of toxic waste, the use of underage workers, the use of poisonous chemicals, workers being forced to work multiple shifts in a row, workers treated harshly by managers and docked pay for minor infractions..the list goes on.

Let us remember how seriously the Church regards this form of injustice – Gaudium Et Spes lists “disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons” as among the most grave infamies. And it was precisely the treatment of workers in the 19th century that gave rise to modern Catholic social teaching, in the passionate demands for justice coming from Pope Leo XIII.

Of course, Apple likes to talk about how highly it takes its social responsibility. But the evidence shows otherwise. At a time when Apple pulls in $13 billion in quarterly earnings, it deliberately tries to twist the screws of its suppliers. As the article notes:

Apple typically asks suppliers to specify how much every part costs, how many workers are needed and the size of their salaries. Executives want to know every financial detail. Afterward, Apple calculates how much it will pay for a part. Most suppliers are allowed only the slimmest of profits. So suppliers often try to cut corners, replace expensive chemicals with less costly alternatives, or push their employees to work faster and longer, according to people at those companies.

With these conditions, is it any surprise that abuses occur? The relationship is symbiotic. The supplier needs the enormous amount of business that Apple will provide, and goes to great lengths to deliver. And Apple, despite the rhetoric, knows that few suppliers have the expertise it needs to deliver high-quality goods very quickly, so is not in a hurry to end a profitable relationship.

Let us remember the rights of workers in Catholic social teaching. The right to decent wages. The right to a safe and healthy working environment. The right to adequate rest. The right to social benefits. The right to form and join unions. The right to profit-sharing and joint ownership of the company.

In China, many of these benefits are denied by the state. But that is no reason for Apple to play along. In fact, it puts a greater onus on Apple to treat its workers with the dignity they deserve.

But let’s be clear about why it is wrong. I have little interest in American constitutionalism, but I have a major interest in Catholic social teaching. And in this domain, the decision was wrong because it was a violation of subsidiarity. Specifically, instead of simply furnishing help, the federal government stepped over the line and usurped the power of a lower level authority in the social order. By providing too much “subsidium”, the government suffocated the legitimate autonomy of religious institutions offering health care coverage. As Pius XI put it, the role of the state is to “furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them”.

Part of the problem is the way that left-wing liberalism has developed in the United States, insofar as it seeks to curb the autonomy of religious entities once they step onto the public square. The closest comparison to the Obama decision would be the French government decision to ban certain religious garb in public schools, notably the headscarf frequently worn by Muslim women. In both cases, it is a violation of the autonomy of the religious entity, which does not lose this autonomy when it enters the public square. And this principle is far bigger than any fights over the merits of providing contraceptives (or wearing scarves in France). It would apply equally if the federal or state government attempted to interfere in the way Catholic schools, hospitals, or charitable institutions deal with undocumented workers and their families – a live issue in the United States today.

Another example would be the provision of social welfare in countries with a strong Christian Democratic tradition, such as Germany and the Netherlands. Here, the welfare system is funded by the state, but managed by subsidiary mediating institutions – including religious bodies – in a fully autonomous manner. This model of a publicly financed and privately governed welfare arrangement stems directly from the principle of subsidiarity. But such a model seems inconceivable in the United States.

But let’s be clear about something else too. From this same perspective of Catholic social teaching, positions like those of Robert George also don’t hold any water. George is almost gloating over Obama’s betrayal of the Catholics who supported him. But George and those like him tend to misapply the principle of subsidiarity themselves. Rather than too much help, they would have the government provide too little. Sticking to the health care arena, these people opposed the Affordable Care Act based on what Pope Paul VI referred to an unbridled liberalism that “exalts individual freedom by withdrawing from it every limitation” and which is based on “an erroneous affirmation of the autonomy of the individual in his activity, his motivation and the exercise of his liberty”. This is the basic right-wing liberalism in the United States that is mis-named “conservatism”. Specifically, these anti-Obama Catholics on the right opposed attempts to provide near-universal healthcare by means of strict regulation of insurance companies, an individual mandate, and subsidies for the poor. The individual mandate, as an “attack on autonomy”, continues to draw the most ire.

But this approach is fully in line with Catholic social teaching. It gels with our collective obligation as a society to provide healthcare to everybody through solidarity. It is also warranted through subsidiarity. As Pius XI put it, “the right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces” and needs a directing force. John XXIII stated clearly that “intervention of public authorities that encourages, stimulates, regulates, supplements and complements is based on the principle of subsidiarity”.

If the market cannot provide, the state must step in to fix the problems (directly through solidarity, indirectly through subsidiarity). And indeed, John Paul II noted that “there are many human needs which find no place on the market. It is a strict duty of justice and truth not to allow fundamental human needs to remain unsatisfied, and not to allow those burdened by such needs to perish.” It is hard to think of a better example than health care. John Paul also notes that the free market must be “controlled by the forces of society and by the State, so as to guarantee that the basic needs of the whole of society are satisfied”. Health care is such a basic need. The fact that the United States, alone among the wealthy countries, does not provide it to all is a major source of scandal.

One way to look at subsidiarity is that it seeks to balance the scales between different groups, by providing just the right amount of help from above (neither too much nor too little) to achieve a harmonious social order. This is certainly what Pius XI had in mind. Paul VI put well when he said that “when two parties are in very unequal positions, their mutual consent alone does not guarantee a fair contract; the rule of free consent remains subservient to the demands of the natural law”. In such a case, the state must step in to correct any imbalances. In the United States, there is a huge imbalance between people and insurance companies, especially those on the individual market. The Affordable Care Act seeks to correct this unbalanced relationship by forbidding insurance companies from denying coverage at whim, calling for state-level exchanges to help level the playing field between insurers and insurees, and making sure the poor are not excluded from health care because they cannot afford it.

In other words, through the Affordable Care Act, societies of a superior order are adopting “attitudes of help (“subsidium”) — therefore of support, promotion, development — with respect to lower-order societies” (as the Compendium puts it). And while the Obama administration’s decision on conscience protections goes too far, critics of Obama from the Catholic right would not go far enough. Both are unbalanced under Catholic social teaching.

And here’s the sad thing – our fellow Catholics New Gingrich and Rick Santorum seem to be in on the game, despite the clear Church teaching on the innate dignity of every human person (regardless of race) and the core unity of the human race (regardless of race). The Church teaches quite clearly that racism is an intrinsically evil act.

Our friends at Faith in Public Life have published an open letter to Gingrich and Santorum by 40 prominent Catholics leaders and theologians. Here is the letter:

“As Catholic leaders who recognize that the moral scandals of racism and poverty remain a blemish on the American soul, we challenge our fellow Catholics Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum to stop perpetuating ugly racial stereotypes on the campaign trail. Mr. Gingrich has frequently attacked President Obama as a “food stamp president” and claimed that African Americans are content to collect welfare benefits rather than pursue employment. Campaigning in Iowa, Mr. Santorum remarked: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” Labeling our nation’s first African-American president with a title that evokes the past myth of “welfare queens” and inflaming other racist caricatures is irresponsible, immoral and unworthy of political leaders.

Some presidential candidates now courting “values voters” seem to have forgotten that defending human life and dignity does not stop with protecting the unborn. We remind Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Santorum that Catholic bishops describe racism as an “intrinsic evil” and consistently defend vital government programs such as food stamps and unemployment benefits that help struggling Americans. At a time when nearly 1 in 6 Americans live in poverty, charities and the free market alone can’t address the urgent needs of our most vulnerable neighbors. And while jobseekers outnumber job openings 4-to-1, suggesting that the unemployed would rather collect benefits than work is misleading and insulting.

As the South Carolina primary approaches, we urge Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Santorum and all presidential candidates to reject the politics of racial division, refrain from offensive rhetoric and unite behind an agenda that promotes racial and economic justice.”

Well said.

The traditional focus of Catholic social teaching has always been justice . But Benedict takes this one step further to focus on caritas. Developing an argument be made in Deus Caritas Est, he  claims that while charity (love) can never lack justice, it also goes beyond justice  – “because to love is to give, to offer what is mine to the other; but it can never lack justice..I cannot give what is mine to the other without first giving him what pertains to him in justice”. In other words, “charity demands justice, but also transcends justice and completes it in the logic of giving and forgiving”.

I believe this is quite a radical insight.

For sure, economic life certainly needs contracts and laws to enforce justice – in the famous words of Pope Pius XI, economic life must be “governed by a true and effective directing principle”. It also, as Benedict notes, needs redistribution governed by politics. As he says, “grave imbalances are produced when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution”. It is probably fair to say that these were the traditional concerns of Catholic social teaching.

But Benedict takes this further, and argues that our economic relationships need to be based on the spirit of gift and fraternal reciprocity. This cannot simply be delegated to the state. No, the market itself must operate on the logic of unconditional gift and always be infused by a spirit of gratuitousness. In the traditional understanding of the market, we give to acquire something in return. And with the state, we give out of a sense of duty. Benedict believes that economic life must step beyond this, by being open to “forms of economic activity marked by quotas of gratuitousness and communion”. We must go beyond the “exclusively binary model of market-plus-state” which is “corrosive of society”. As he puts it, “human relationships of friendship, solidarity and reciprocity can also be conducted within economic activity, and not only outside it or after it”.

Benedict is asking for nothing less than a “profoundly new way of understanding business enterprise”. He points his finger at a key problem – business that is “almost exclusively answerable to their investors, thereby limiting their social value”. He criticizes the emergence in recent years of “a new cosmopolitan class of managers..who are often answerable only to the shareholders generally consisting of anonymous funds which de facto determine their remuneration”. He condemns the “speculative use of financial resources” that seeks only short-term profits at the expense of the long-term sustainability of the enterprise.

Last summer, I attended a fascinating conference on ethics and business in Vatican City. One of the keynote presenters was Professor Andy Zelleke of Harvard University. Professor Zelleke argued that so much had gone wrong with the American business model in the 1980s, with the rise of “agency theory”, the notion that business must focus exclusively on maximizing shareholder value. The problem in business is a cultural problem, he claimed, where performance is measured solely by financial value of the firm and where self-interest reigns supreme. During this period, business lost track of its broader obligations to society. We saw the rise of a very aggressive corporate culture – leveraged buy-outs, hostile takeovers, shady financial engineering, a massive rise in compensation at the top.

And here’s where Bain Capital fits it. Bain Capital was at the cutting edge of this “shareholder value” revolution. This private equity fund proved highly aggressive in pursuing short-term profit, never caring too much about long-term gain – the idea was to get in, restructure, get out. Sometimes the best way to increase your return was through leverage – saddling the company with debt that would eventually suffocate it, long after you left. Sometimes it meant firing lots of workers. Of course, this was not always the case, but the point remains – workers were treated as mere instruments, as a means to an end, which was shareholder profits.

This is the core of Caritas in Veritate. Benedict sees our economic woes as due to a corporate culture closed off from the spirit of fraternal reciprocity. To allow for a spirit of gift to develop, we need greater social responsibility on the part of business. Profit cannot be the main criterion. As the pope said recently, “there is no justice where profit is the number one criterion”. And if no justice, no caritas. At its core, the market must be based on trust and solidarity, which means the goal of any business must be broader than profit and shareholder value. As Benedict says directly: “business management cannot concern itself only with the interests of the proprietors, but must also assume responsibility for all the other stakeholders who contribute to the life of the business”. By this he means workers,suppliers, consumers, the natural environment, and broader society. Indeed, he calls for new forms of business that break down the walls between “profit” and “no-profits” entities. We must start seeing profit as a means to a greater end – a more humane market and society.

Of course, Benedict is not writing in a vacuum. He is writing in the midst of the greatest economic recession in sixty years, with many parallels with the Great Depression – a collapse in global demand brought about by the activities of a dominant financial sector in pursuit of short-term gain.

The cultural developments since the 1980s, championed by the Reaganistas, led to an unbalanced and dysfunctional corporate structure, and ultimately to crisis and economic ruin. They violated the principle of solidarity by focusing only on shareholder value. They violated the principle of subsidiarity by becoming disproportionately large, wealthy, and politically influential. They violated the common good, contributing not only to rising inequality but to an unstable economic structure that almost toppled the global economy. According the Benedict, the answer is not merely to restore balance and seek justice by regulation and redistribution, even if these are indispensable elements. Benedict believes we should go further than this and change the very culture of business itself, which touches every aspect of economic life.

This is a remarkable vision. An audacious vision. But this is what we are called to aspire to. For while the Church certainly believes in the business economy, it stands completely against the type of business economy epitomized by Bain Capital and championed by Mitt Romney.

Any evidence, Mary Ann? Of course, many defenders of Romney tout his conversion to the pro-life cause. And indeed, conversion is great. We love it! But in his only real post-conversion chance to prove himself – on his health care law – Romney fell flat. In fact, if you compare the Romney and Obama health care plans, if you go down the list, you will see clearly that the only real difference is that Romney covered abortion and Obama did not. And as my friend Michael Sean Winters has pointed out, Romney also gave Planned Parenthood a seat on a health care advisory board.

By Glendon’s twisted standard, if Romney is a “great success” for the pro-life movement, then Obama must be a real “pro-life hero”. And yet even a brainwashed true believer like me would never say something so stupid!

But I admit to grudging respect for Santorum. He is well-intentioned, and sincerely believes what he says – a vast improvement over the corporate ghoul that is currently the Republican front-runner. But I fear that he is just as influenced by the flawed theology of much of American evangelicalism than he is by his own church.

Faced with such a litany of deviation, our friends on the right would normally dub him a “dissident Catholic”, a “cafeteria Catholic”, or a “Catholyc”. But of course, we know that is not going to happen – because it’s not really Catholic teachings they care most about,  is it?

1. Taxes should be more regressive (as all Republican candidates plans imply, at a time of record inequality).

2. Austerity works (the confidence fairy is a myth).

3. Export growth models are sustainable (one country’s exports are another countries imports).

4. Fannie and Freddie did it (the private sector was caught red handed, but let go).

5. Cutting social security benefits is a priority (still stuck in the 1980s, pundits?)

6. Inflation is just around the corner (living in a liquidity trap).

7. The Medicare eligibility age should be raised (government costs fall a little, overall costs rise a lot).

8. Competition between Medicare and private health insurance will reform the health care system and reduce costs (sorry, doesn’t work that way) .

9. Federal spending should be capped at 21 percent of GDP (this is just weird).

10. Balancing the budget should involve equal parts tax hikes and government spending cuts (people don’t understand multipliers) – actually I would rephrase this as people think it should be more spending cuts and less tax hikes.

Anything missing from this list? I can think of a few:

11. Large profitable banks are necessary for a strong economy.

12. Stronger regulation of the financial sector kills jobs.

13. Inequality is a natural market outcome and we shouldn’t worry about it.

14. Cutting taxes boosts growth; cutting spending boosts growth.

15. What’s holding back job creation is regulatory uncertainty.

16. A balanced budget amendment is a good idea.

17. Cutting unemployment benefits will force people to find a job.

18. Putting a price on carbon will kill the economy.

19. Cutting discretionary spending while leaving military spending untouched is good policy.

20. And to end on a weird note – we need to restore the gold standard!

“They talk about income inequality. I’m for income inequality. I think some people should make more than other people, because some people work harder and have better ideas and take more risk, and they should be rewarded for it. I have no problem with income inequality. President Obama is for income equality. That’s socialism. It’s worse yet, it’s Marxism.”

Let’s unpack this a little. What Obama has supported is a return to top marginal tax rates to those under the Clinton years, and really only for the top income earners at that – a small positive step in the face of three decades of sustained upward redistribution of income in the United States. That’s it. For this crime, Santorum dubs Obama a socialist/marxist. And yet, Pope Benedict XVI has made a far stronger case for redistribution than Obama. By implication, that also makes him an even bigger socialist/marxist.

Consider his recent World Day of Peace remarks, where he links peace with distributive justice:

“In order to be true peacemakers, we must educate ourselves in compassion, solidarity, working together, fraternity, in being active within the community and concerned to raise awareness about national and international issues and the importance of seeking adequate mechanisms for the redistribution of wealth, the promotion of growth, cooperation for development and conflict resolution.”

Or go back to his masterful social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate:

“Profit is useful if it serves as a means towards an end that provides a sense both of how to produce it and how to make good use of it. Once profit becomes the exclusive goal… it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty…

The world’s wealth is growing in absolute terms, but inequalities are on the increase. In rich countries, new sectors of society are succumbing to poverty and new forms of poverty are emerging. In poorer areas some groups enjoy a sort of “superdevelopment” of a wasteful and consumerist kind which forms an unacceptable contrast with the ongoing situations of dehumanizing deprivation. “The scandal of glaring inequalities” continues …

The dignity of the individual and the demands of justice require, particularly today, that economic choices do not cause disparities in wealth to increase in an excessive and morally unacceptable manner, and that we continue to prioritize the goal of access to steady employment for everyone … Through the systemic increase of social inequality, both within a single country and between the populations of different countries (i.e. the massive increase in relative poverty), not only does social cohesion suffer, thereby placing democracy at risk, but so too does the economy, through the progressive erosion of “social capital”: the network of relationships of trust, dependability, and respect for rules, all of which are indispensable for any form of civil coexistence.

Lowering the level of protection accorded to the rights of workers, or abandoning mechanisms of wealth redistribution in order to increase the country’s international competitiveness, hinder the achievement of lasting development …

The processes of globalization, suitably understood and directed, open up the unprecedented possibility of large-scale redistribution of wealth on a world-wide scale; if badly directed, however, they can lead to an increase in poverty and inequality, and could even trigger a global crisis. It is necessary to correct the malfunctions, some of them serious, that cause new divisions between peoples and within peoples, and also to ensure that the redistribution of wealth does not come about through the redistribution or increase of poverty: a real danger if the present situation were to be badly managed.”

And if you think this guy is bad, how about some of his predecessors? Just a quick sampling:

Pope Paul VI:

“There is a need to establish a greater justice in the sharing of goods, both within national communities and on the international level.”

Pope John XXIII:

“The economic prosperity of a nation is not so much its total assets in terms of wealth and property, as the equitable division and distribution of this wealth.”

Pius XI:

“The riches that economic-social developments constantly increase ought to be so distributed among individual persons and classes that the common advantage of all … By this law of social justice, one class is forbidden to exclude the other from sharing in the benefits … To each, therefore, must be given his own share of goods, and the distribution of created goods, which, as every discerning person knows, is laboring today under the gravest evils due to the huge disparity between the few exceedingly rich and the unnumbered propertyless, must be effectively called back to and brought into conformity with the norms of the common good, that is, social justice.”

Clearly something is very wrong here. Something is wrong with a culture that tacitly approves of massive hedonistic consumption of narcotics, without heed to the cost. Something is wrong with a culture that worships the cult of firearms and violence, without heed to the cost. And clearly something is wrong with a culture that – as the US bishops have stressed - shows disdain for immigrants and refuses to recognize their value and dignity. In the US-Mexico relationship, these issues are all interrelated and feed upon each other.

This interconnected injustice is clearly an example of social sin, defined as “every sin committed against the justice due in relations between individuals, between the individual and the community, and also between the community and the individual”. It is an example of the “structures of sin” in action – “obstacles and conditioning that go well beyond the actions and brief life span of the individual and interfere also in the process of the development of peoples”. It’s time that we started connecting the dots.

“When you come before us and tell us that we shall disturb your business interests, we reply that you have disturbed our business interests by your action. We say to you that you have made too limited in its application the definition of a businessman. The man who is employed for wages is as much a businessman as his employer. The attorney in a country town is as much a businessman as the corporation counsel in a great metropolis. The merchant at the crossroads store is as much a businessman as the merchant of New York. The farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day, begins in the spring and toils all summer, and by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of this country creates wealth, is as much a businessman as the man who goes upon the Board of Trade and bets upon the price of grain. The miners who go 1,000 feet into the earth or climb 2,000 feet upon the cliffs and bring forth from their hiding places the precious metals to be poured in the channels of trade are as much businessmen as the few financial magnates who in a backroom corner the money of the world.”

We come to speak for this broader class of businessmen….It is for these that we speak. We do not come as aggressors. Our war is not a war of conquest. We are fighting in the defense of our homes, our families, and posterity. We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned. We have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded. We have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came.

We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!”

***

“…this was a struggle between the idle holders of idle capital and the struggling masses who produce the wealth and pay the taxes of the country; and my friends, it is simply a question that we shall decide upon which side shall the Democratic Party fight. Upon the side of the idle holders of idle capital, or upon the side of the struggling masses? That is the question that the party must answer first; and then it must be answered by each individual hereafter. The sympathies of the Democratic Party, as described by the platform, are on the side of the struggling masses, who have ever been the foundation of the Democratic Party.

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.”

***

“If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

[In the modern context, replace "gold standard" with "austerity and low inflation"]