Customer Reviews

The Church and the Land

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This little book is made up of several dozen short essays on various aspects of economic life, written from an unabashedly distributist viewpoint. This viewpoint, which encompasses the notions of (a) the importance of wide-spread private ownership, (b) the shortcomings of the wage slave system, (c) the inadequacies of socialism and capitalism, (d) the ideal of peasant proprietership, is set forthin tiny bite-size pieces.
The result is a shotgun-like treatment rather than an organized step-by-step layout of distributist principles. In that regard, it's a little bit like the jumbled and excited words of a man describing his lover -- jumping from one highlight to another, with much repetition and without a lot of apparent organization.
The reader may be put off by the fact that most of the "contemporary examples" were drawn from England in the 1920s -- the time and place of the writing. But that is not a showstopper, in my opinion. While there are some important differences between that setting and the situation in which we find ourselves today, the similarities are more striking than the dis-similarities.
If you lean toward distributism, you will read these pages and shout: "Yes! Yes!" If you are not, you will at least begin to understand distributism, and perhaps be less confident in the capacity of modern conservatism or modern liberalism to come up with adequate answers to today's social and economic questions.

There are a couple books that might show the seeking Catholic what the Church is teaching in the area of Political Economy, more particularly in the area of the implementation of Catholic Social Teaching.

Economics as if God Matters:
Over a Century of Papal Teaching
Rupert J. Ederer

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In this revised and expanded edition of Economics as if God Matters, Rupert J. Ederer brings forward to the present his classic assessment of how papal social teachings address economic questions from the end of the 19th century. Noting how "economic order reflects economic philosophies, which, in turn, mirror the basic philosophies" and even theologies, Ederer explores the papal perspective on economics and its place in human affairs. Through the study of social encyclicals issued since 1891, Ederer illustrates the "organic development of doctrine" on economic matters through his detection of a series of common principles.

Ederer considers in each of his chapters key encyclicals, from which he abstracts an economic philosophy that seeks to balance Church teaching with evolving 20th-century economic systems. His survey thus encompasses close readings of Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891), Pius XI's Quadragesimo Anno (1931), John XXIII's Mater et Magistra (1961), Paul VI's Populorum Progressio (1967), John Paul II's Laborem Exercens (1981), Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), Centesimus Annus (1991), and Benedict XVI's Caritas in Veritate (2009).
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Pope Pius XII on the Economic Order
Rupert J. Ederer

Both of the above should be purchased from University Press of America.

And for an overview see
Ethics and the National Economy
Heinrich Pesch

The truest vein of Economic thought in the Catholic Church, that of the social encyclicals, comes from Pesch.