Pope Benedict Xvi's "caritas in Veritate": A Challenge to Business Ethics

Pope Benedict XVI's "Caritas in Veritate": A Challenge to Business Ethics

INTRODUCTION

As a Jesuit priest, I have had the honor of several different kinds of ministries. I have served in Latin America, where the issues of economic development became a major focus of my work. I then studied and taught economics, particularly around issues of poverty both domestic and international. And, finally, I have worked in advocacy, seeking to affect both governmental and private corporate policies regarding poverty and justice. In each of these contexts, I and others have encountered a frustrating limitation: the inability of the Church and business to dialogue well together regarding the ethical implications of business activity and economic justice, in other words, business ethics broadly understood.

The Roman Catholic Church's thought on economic justice is officially articulated in its Catholic Social Teaching. In particular, since Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum in 1891, a series of papal encyclicals and more local documents have tried to articulate the Church's concerns regarding the experience of ordinary people in the developing capitalist and socialist economies. Especially since the Second Vatican Council's emphasis on dialogue with the wider world, the Church has tried to speak beyond church membership to "all people of good will" about its concerns.

The business community's self understanding has been articulated by economic theory describing business activity as governed by technical autonomous forces guided by the market. While businesspeople may often engage with religious thinking on a personal moral level, many, if not most, business practitioners and theoreticians do not feel the Church engages them or understands them on their own ground within the rules that they play by as business people.

Meaningful conversation is quite difficult across these two different paradigms and mindsets. To be sure, there are instances of such conversation. There are various kinds of regular meetings of businesspeople who share particular religious traditions as well as more formal events, such as the series of exchanges between Catholic bishops and a wide variety of people that led to the pastoral letter Economic Justice for All in 1986. While there is mutual respect between many in the Church and in business, too often each has seen ourselves either as separate realms with little to do with each other; or each see ourselves in conflict, with the values and actions of each being criticized as unrealistic at best and evil at worst.

Benedict XVI in his June 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate, which translates into English as Love in Truth, joins that conversation, and sees it as important both for business and for the church. "Reason always stands in need of