Challenge to the Church: Make Capitalism Moral

...An obvious place to start is with the speculation and useless finagling called "paper enterprise...

...If that sounds maudlin, just ask the Korean who owns the corner market or the Salvadoran who would give an arm for a green card...

...For the most part this liberalism has prevailed...

...From Spellman to two Johns In its heyday, liberalism was always informed as much by morality as by pragmatic politics...

...One way is through family ownership...

...Thus to criticize capitalism was to criticize America itself, and that was unthinkable...

...By the time Jadot returned to Rome in 1980, the revolution he had begun was largely complete: the American hierarchy was dominated by a different kind of men, with a different set of values...

...Government could break up monopolies, or assure the rights of labor unions, or itself put the unemployed to work...

...And there is no question that these people need help—from the government, from all of us who are better off...

...it promotes "inequality of income [while] there are poor, hungry and homeless people in our midst...

...The New York Times reported "a resounding consensus of support" for the first draft's sweeping indictment of the failure of the American economy to provide for the poor...

...She doesn't confront the government...

...Business needs the bishops What is most dispiriting about the bishops' exercise is that capitalism could use a healthy dose of moral guidance these days...

...The bishops observe that business "is a genuine Christian vocation when carried out as a form of stewardship...

...It is especially important to be reminded of what conditions like these imply for those of us who are better off...

...then, the greater number of Americans have conquered their situation by personal valor, at the price of efforts, perils, and heroic sacrifices...

...Though they never quite come out and say it, the bishops plainly feel uncomfortable with the idea of capitalism...

...These are also not the words of politicians or power brokers...

...The bishops say much about our economic life that is important and wise...

...But bishops can change, too, however belatedly...

...Some current church leaders seem to understand this...

...The laws today offer numerous inducements for family owners (of newspapers, for example) to "go public" or sell out to larger companies, thereby subjecting themselves to the bottom-line tyranny of the market...

...To today's bishops, however, it is "the system" itself that is at fault, and the actions people might take within that system are practically irrelevant...

...Not sure whether they even like it, they fall short on the moral guidance that will make that system really work...

...As such, they are presumed to be in a position of automatic moral superiority...

...They give managers more leeway to act upon the values to which the bishops rightly hold them...

...There was no such thing as welfare payments, no such thing as child labor laws, no such thing as subsidized medical care for the needy...

...To an Italian whose family had spent generations tied to a parcel of land that became less and less productive with each passing year, America offered a potential way out...

...But they also show an unhealthy ambivalence towards the central engine of the nation's economic health...

...Leave Eurosocialism in Europe The bishops' emphasis on the inherent injustice of "the system" causes them to take many a wrong turn, but three in particular stand out...

...But today's bishops identify with the same concerns she did...

...Noting that worker ownership has saved numerous companies from bankruptcy, the bishops ask, "Why should it not give added strength to new or growing enterprises...

...On one level, there is something admirable about the modern bishops' willingness to raise their voices in dissent...

...some of them run company towns...

...Yes, the poor are taken care of, but where in such societies are the opportunities to cut across classes and make one's way in the world...

...They could speak with passion and eloquence about the crying need for programs such as Medicare, which earlier they would have condemned as "communistic?' Because of the two Johns, the nature of the Catholic ministry in America changed too...

...To them, the old solutions are still the right solutions...

...These are men whose vision of America was formed in the 1960s, and it shows...

...Yet why, despite this laudable concern for the forgotten poor, does the pastoral leave one feeling so utterly cold...

...Even more important is the design of the institutions through which business is conducted...

...By their own predisposition, the bishops have opted out of the crucial moral questions surrounding our current economic troubles...

...But increasingly it becomes apparent that the Church's concerns were practical as well as moral...

...Yes, the unemployed don't starve, but that doesn't mean they don't go to their graves feeling just as empty and useless as any unemployed person in America...

...The shareholders could reward his well-doing with a lawsuit for wasting their assets—even if the company was still making a profit...

...The Council, which ended in 1965, was the Church's great consciousness raiser, an event whose effects are being felt to this day...

...Much of the inherent dog-eat-dog harshness of the system has been legislated away...

...These are among the most hotly debated policy questions in the country...

...Jadot changed all that...

...For much of this century, American Catholicism has had a strong nativist streak, most easily identified, alas, at its ugliest—Father Coughlin's radio diatribes, for example...

...now they were idealists and activists, usually products of the middle class, who wanted to help put in place what they saw as the social agenda of the Council and Kennedy...

...Do the bishops forget that most of the taxpayers providing that money are not in possession of "concentrations of wealth" but rather are working people who have things like mortgages to worry about...

...Indeed, 25 years from now, it may again be impossible...

...Why do we reward the land speculator—who reaps what he has not sown— as much as the individual who builds something useful, such as housing, upon that land (which the speculator makes more expensive...

...In the first place, the sentiment of personal dignity and responsibility and the spirit of enterprise are much developed in the American people...

...In these smug "I've-got-mine-pal" times, it is important to be reminded of the pains of unemployment, of the 35 million Americans (nearly half of them children) who are poor, of the misery that prevails in so much of the world...

...bishops, often themselves the sons of immigrants, were no less immune to that than their flocks...

...At the June meeting of the bishops' national conference, for example, Auxiliary Bishop Joseph M. Sullivan of Brooklyn said that American capitalism should be portrayed "as a good system that needs improvement...

...No longer did young men become priests to escape an immigrant's ghetto...

...Spellman rarely attacked a public figure, but he once conducted a well-publicized feud with Eleanor Roosevelt...

...Last year American individuals, businesses, and governments went deeper in debt than in any 12-month period in our history...

...Family owners, like worker owners, can tell those stock analysts to kiss off and so have more leeway for moral decisions regarding their customers, workers, and communities...

...Quite simply, the American bishops were loath to bite the hand that fed the Church...

...But two decades later, with basic industries in decline and Japanese and Korean products continuing to flood our markets, the nation faces fundamental questions about its ability to generate that wealth in the first place...

...Worker and coop owners are not beholden to absentee shareholders...

...Charles Murray is just another right-wing crank...

...He began insisting that new bishops have "pastoral" experience, and he began taking particular notice of the idealistic (and in many cases quite obscure) priests who scorned chancery work and who now populated the American Church...

...Paul archdiocese...

...A second area where the bishops' analysis causes them to go astray is in their perception of the poor...

...Right now the nation is sinking in debt...

...When the civil rights movement geared up, and later the antiwar movement, these young idealistic priests and nuns were right in the thick of things, marching, protesting, and, in general, questioning the inherent justice of "the system" in the new Catholic church, young men no longer became priests to escape an immigrant's ghetto...

...I lived in Europe long enough to see that what sounds good and caring on paper doesn't necessarily work out that way in the real world...

...But what of companies that are not worker owned...

...The bishops wring their hands over plant closings...

...Nowhere is Dorothy Day or Mother Theresa even mentioned, and rare indeed is the idea that we all bear some individual responsibility for the plight of the poor and the needy...

...Even if the company president thinks he ought to install scrubbers on his smokestacks or he ought to keep the plant in Hometown instead of moving it to Taiwan, he is not free to do so (unless required by law) if it will mean less return...

...In an earlier era, the Church saw unearned enrichment as a moral issue...

...Today the dominant institution of capitalism is the corporation owned by absentee shareholders...

...if such change isn't the primary mission of religion, then what is...

...How else could you run a school system...

...The bishops have also backed the Catholic-dominated sanctuary movement, which harbors illegal aliens from El Salvador...

...When Archbishop Ireland looked out at his flock of Catholic immigrants, what he saw was not so much economic injustice as opportunity...

...There is nothing of the elan one finds in admonitions such as: "Limits on . . . the accumulation of wealth are essential if we are to avoid what Pope Paul VI called 'the most evident form of moral underdevelopment,' namely avarice...

...These were people who scarcely ten years before had been among Joe McCarthy's most fervent supporters...

...Now they were just as solidly in the camp of the two Johns...

...Like the bishops, most people have come to equate capitalism with big, impersonal corporations and with out-andout greed, but that need not be the case...

...Strip away the bishops' anger over the plight of the poor and focus instead on their solutions, and the words fall flat on the page...

...By her acts of charity she puts a patina of virtue upon a corrupt system and helps to prop it up...

...It was simply the right thing to do...

...Garry Wills, in Bare Ruined Choirs, his influential book about Catholicism in the 1960s, makes much of the confluence of "the two Johns," and he is right to do so...

...O'Connor's positions, however, are still largely minority ones within the hierarchy, and, in fact, his actions during the election dismayed most of his fellow bishops...

...they have more freedom to forsake some degree of profit to make the workplace safer, or to keep a plant in operation...

...How else could you staff hospitals, if not by asking for money from those Catholics in your diocese who had "made it...

...Nor is it to suggest that every steelworker in this country would be distressed if his mill dumped some muck into the river...

...This is not to say that the bishops ignore enterprise altogether...

...Nonetheless, the bishops can be expected to hew to their major theses...

...Finally, there is the issue of individual charity...

...Corporate takeover wars, bizarre tax shelters, kinky speculation schemes, have reached epidemic proportions, draining botti capital and talent away from the creation of jobs and wealth...

...It is the sense of blue sky, the hope that by hard work or ingenuity you can cross class barriers, that is completely missing in Europe—and that is the blessing of the American economy...

...They don't develop the possibilities of enterprise tempered by moral guidance the way they develop, for instance, their impassioned defense of the welfare system...

...Local ownership generally tends to reconcile the needs of enterprise and community...

...It is worth noting that John Paul II has begun moving the pendulum in the other direction...

...You would think, therefore, that the country's moral and religious leaders would have been among the first to line up behind such noble sentiments...

...the geometric growth of the middle class was still a long way off...

...Two means to this end are worker ownership and consumer cooperatives, and the bishops—to their credit—advocate these...

...The divide between rich and poor was enormous...

...But there is also something more fundamental going on here...

...they often identified more strongly with other such men in different walks of life than with the poor...

...While the capitalists are getting rich, people are being employed, and the general prosperity for all is increasing...

...She doesn't instigate rebellion...

...The mere act of charging interest was called "usury," and the punishment was excommunication...

...One remedy is external regulation that enables a conscientious manager to justify his actions to the shareholders...

...It all seems so, well, unseemly—all these capitalists running around trying to make money...

...Roosevelt's 100 Days established the principle (and the fact) that government could intervene in the market, theretofore the most sacred of sacred cows...

...The onus instead is on government, and the proposals revolve around ideas like expansion of the U.S...

...It is an easy trap to fall into, for on the face of it, the Eurosocialist model sounds far more caring and humane than American-style capitalism...

...Out of the Council, there also came a new spirit of activism in the Church, particularly at the grass-roots level, and a renewed emphasis on the poor and the have-nots...

...Yes, there are bureaucracies aplenty, but the arteries of bureaucracy harden quickly and stifle the kind of economic creativity and ingenuity that is so valued in America...

...and it tolerates the existence of "sinful structures that institutionalize injustice?' These more recent quotes come, of course, from the first draft of the American bishops' pastoral letter on the economy, a product of four years of deliberation, which was first unveiled for public consumption within days of the 1984 presidential election...

...At the very least, such forms of ownership would eliminate the automatic alibi that faceless shareholders now provide and would make both owners and managers confront more directly their Christian duty to operate their enterprises in the best interests of the community as a whole...

...They call for a welfare plan that doesn't "stigmatize" those on welfare, and they argue, among other things, that "eligibility for public assistance should not depend on work requirements or work tests ." Yet, is it "moral" for people who are perfectly capable of working to get money from the state simply because they are not inclined to work...

...Furthermore, there is room in the United States for all kinds of energy...

...In real life, Francis Cardinal Spellman, the legendary bishop of New York for so many years, was never comfortable with the one saint in his midst, Dorothy Day, tolerating her Catholic Worker Movement but never encouraging her...

...A little moral guidance wouldn't be a bad thing right now...

...Their values became his values...

...Too often, they bring out the worst in us rather than the best...

...For the right-wing as well as the left—for Jack Kemp as well as Ted Kennedy—the idea that government can soften capitalism's punches has become the status quo...

...Even someone like Michael Novak, who has spent most of the 1980s arguing (unconvincingly, in my view) in favor of the inherent morality of the market, does not call for, say, the dissolution of the Food and Drug Administration...

...Some of them were, to be sure...

...Why was this...

...Finally, the American bishops needed the capitalists—or at least needed their money...

...To them Michael Harrington is still the teller of all truth...

...Their answer is the old answer: more money, more programs...

...in most European countries, the poor receive some form of "guaranteed national income!' Indeed, in most of Europe, "the system" does take care of everyone...

...The bishops worry about the unemployed...

...Joseph Nocera is a senior editor of Texas Monthly and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...not so much the exploitative nature of capitalism, as the obvious chance for his people to find a better life...

...They see that "entire families today are frequently driven off the land because their small farms cannot compete with large agribusinesses !' They see that "elderly people become homeless because they lack the resources to purchase the apartments they have lived in when the owner converts the buildings to condominiums!' From such evidence they conclude that much is wrong with American capitalism...

...It is to say, however, that the grass is not necessarily greener in Europe...

...And change they did...

...They see a system in which "women and men are thrown out of work as a result of plant closings or national policies they are too weak to change...

...Why do the tax laws, for example, shine as favorably upon people who trade stocks and commodities as upon the farmers and businesspeople who create the wealth so traded...

...they were activists who wanted to put in place the social agenda of Pope John and President Kennedy Then, in 1972, one of those events took place that are barely noticed at the time but years later seem fraught with significance...

...William Simon and others tell us that capitalism is a form of freedom...

...Although the letter is ostensibly a critique of the entire economy, they write that "our fundamental norm is this: will this decision or policy help the poor and deprived members of the human community...

...The radicalization of the Catholic Church in countries such as Holland, the "liberation theology" movement in South America, the outspokenness of Catholics everywhere on issues such as birth control and the ordination of women—all of these things can be traced in some way to the Council...

...In the pastoral letter, the bishops seem to be buying this argument...

...It wasn't long before he began suggesting to Rome that some of them might make good bishops...

...The liberal imagination in the post-war era has been fixed on capitalism's losers, as opposed to its Horatio Algers...

...The bishops are oblivious to the debate...

...The result is stagnant societies, with very little growth or new prosperity and a class system that is set in stone...

...A good question...

...Partly it was that most bishops saw what Archbishop Ireland had seen—that the blue-collar immigrant Catholic was better off in America, with its heartless capitalism and all, than he had been in Europe...

...The chief exemplar of the change is the archbishop of New York, John Cardinal O'Connor, widely regarded as a Church conservative, whose criticism of Geraldine Ferraro during the presidential election catapulted him into the headlines...

...I don't pretend to know the answers, but I do suggest that the answers are not as simple as the bishops would have us believe...

...The scene in the film True Confessions in which the ambitious young priest Robert DeNiro wheels and deals for his diocese while playing a round of golf at the country club is pretty close to the mark...

...it can work good or ill depending on the nature of the enterprise and the ground rules the society lays down...

...They quote Pope John Paul II's tough talk— "the needs of the poor take priority over the rich" —and then add their own two cents' worth: "No one can claim the name Christian and at the same time acquiesce in the hunger and homelessness that exists around the world and in our own country...

...The great capitalists of the day became known, not without reason, as the "robber barons...

...This is not to suggest that there aren't any greedy family businesses in America...

...They hold our economic life to a standard higher than the utility curves of the economic texts...

...Employment Service and "gradual consolidation of programs for specific groups into a unified program of assistance coordinated by the federal government ." After a while, you start wondering: is this spiritual counsel or a monograph from Brookings...

...when Bernard Baruch whispered to him over lunch that the end of the Depression was just around the corner, it became that much easier to ignore the plight of the downtrodden...

...her example contrasted so sharply with Spellman's that it shamed him...

...Labor there insures honorable life...

...If "the system" is the victimizer, then the poor must be the victims, right...

...the owner of a local restaurant cares more about the condition of Main Street than Roy Rogers does...

...Unapologetically, we took money from the rich—in the form of the progressive income tax—and gave to the poor...

...These are the words of religious leaders speaking to our conscience—shaming us —which is precisely what moral leadership is supposed to do...

...In addition to acting as ambassador to the country to which he is assigned, the apostolic delegate is an adviser to the Pope on Church matters in that country, including the matter of naming new bishops...

...But are all of the poor victims...

...Much, obviously, has changed in this country since the 1890s, though not all of that change has been what you might expect if all you had to go on was the word of American bishops, then and now...

...Fourteen percent of the federal budget goes to pay off creditors, from wealthy foreign investors to everyone who happens to own a certificate of deposit...

...Here, the bishops take to the moral high ground, mincing no words, softening no blows...

...In part the answer is that the document is just that, a document, full of cautious phrasing, bureaucratic-sounding proposals, and old, failed ideas...

...We're back in the Great Society and the Other America, fighting the War on Poverty with government programs and dollars...

...But as people like Dorothy Day and Gandhi saw, the system doesn't really change until people do...

...Bishops, moreover, were men at the top of their profession...

...It is driven by the sin of greed...

...The first is their obvious, if unstated, preference for an economical model along European lines—socalled Eurosocialism...

...Spellman had his Dorothy Day blind spot, but so do these modern bishops...

...But as the decades passed, that perception became less a factor as other, more complicated reasons took hold...

...How else could you build churches...

...We recommend the formation of local, state, and national coalitions to press for the design and implementation of job creation," and so on...

...These are not the words of bishops dazzled by millionaire golfing partners or asking, hat in hand, for contributions from potential patrons...

...Reading the pastoral is a little like stepping into a time machine...

...a second draft of the letter is scheduled to appear in October...

...This debt is a heavy burden on both enterprise and government...

...First came Pope John XXIII's Second Vatican Council, which played a very important role in the transformation of the American Church...

...The anachronism arises from the bishops' willful ignorance of anything—writings, studies, real life experience—that might discredit those old programs...

...Not coincidentally, she was the person associated with Franklin Roosevelt's government most hated by Wall Street, for even more than her husband, she was considered the traitor to her class...

...Nevertheless, to an Irishman facing another year of famine, America was not a place where the poor were exploited but a place where he might be able to fill his belly...

...Which is not to say that American capitalism doesn't pose some difficult moral issues...

...It's too bad...

...in Europe, plants almost never close, even if they are unprofitable, because European governments (except Thatcher's, of course) believe jobs take precedence over profitability...

...What they can't bring themselves to see is what John Ireland and men of his ilk saw: capitalism has this funny fringe benefit...

...the merger wars are just the beginning...

...There's also the question of interest...

...Of course, many of the poor have been victimized by forces beyond their control...

...But, curiously, not America's bishops, who could be found either sitting on the sidelines or running interference for the capitalists...

...Twenty-five years ago, that would have been impossible...

...Chevron borrowed $10 billion to buy Gulf Oil last year...

...in Europe, the unemployed are well taken care of, often collecting almost as much money on the dole as they did when they were working...

...Family and worker ownership don't eliminate the need for regulation...

...They make all the requisite nods in that direction, and, yes, they acknowledge, however grudgingly, that capitalism generally has worked out better than any other modern system...

...And why not...

...Or is it less moral because those programs have fostered a "culture of welfare...

...In the 1960s and early 1970s, there were additions to the agenda: worker safety and the environment, for instance...

...Surely it does—the issues of plant closings and having to leave one's home to find work are particularly difficult...

...We need, in short, moral leaven within the loaf of capitalism...

...America today is a far more humane place than it was 90 years ago, and this is especially true in regard to American capitalism...

...That is why Archbishop Ireland, and the other American bishops of his era, could accept an economic system that was, at bottom, not rooted in Christian virtues and ideals, notwithstanding all the blather to the contrary spewed forth by capitalist cheerleaders from George Gilder and Michael Novak all the way back to Adam Smith himself...

...As a group, the bishops have recently condemned the arms race, and, specifically, America's role in accelerating it...

...Proposals to consolidate programs and the like, by speaking to everyone, really speak to no one...

...Despite vocal dissent from conservative Catholic laymen, the bishops reaffirmed the central goals of the project during a national conference in June...

...Ah, yes, "the system" Remember the days when people talked about the system and how it was the root of all injustice...

...A system that seems less harsh—and more moral—on the surface, may, in fact, be just the opposite upon further inspection...

...Pope Paul VI named Jean Jadot, a career Vatican diplomat, to be apostolic delegate to the United States...

...How about, for example, the need for well-off Americans to give up entitlements such as Social Security when they're not needed, so that more is available for the poor...

...So sinful...

...The liberal instinct has always been to distrust the market, to impose limits on the lengths to which the capitalist could go in pursuit of profit...

...Today, only the most nuttily dogmatic libertarian would argue that the entire government apparatus erected since Roosevelt's time should be dismantled...

...This action is being taken in direct defiance of the Reagan administration...

...In so doing, it tends to sever the moral links between enterprise and community...

...The argument goes like this: Mother Theresa helps the most impoverished of India's poor, but she does nothing to address the underlying causes of their poverty...

...But the absentee-owned corporation eliminates freedom...

...The immigrant imperative has always been to become more American than the president...

...Unfortunately, they do not follow up with guidance on how to exercise that stewardship when Stewart Mott is not your major shareholder and you are meeting with the stock analysts in New York tomorrow...

...An exclusive focus on the poor was understandable in the early 1960s, when America was still king, and the only remaining task, it seemed, was to let the poor in on the seemingly bottomless bounty...

...In Seattle, Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen today withholds a percentage of his taxes equal to the percentage of the Pentagon budget, and for this he is applauded by most of his brethren bishops...

...I'll concede that may have been going too far...

...The bishops rise up in righteous indignation over the poor...

...We need to separate the wheat from the chaff...

...Dorothy Day was a true moral leader, preaching values by living them...

...Phillips, $4.5 billion to fend off raiders...

...The poor did what they could to get by, without expecting their government to help them...

...Is it really more "moral" to continue the kinds of programs that fueled the War on Poverty...

...The bishops lament the plight of so many Americans in the Northeast who have had to move south to find work at half the pay they used to make...

...in Europe, that rarely happens...

...That is why, historically, as the Jesuit historian John Courtney Murray has written, "the Church in America has accepted this thing which is the American economy!' Ninety years later, the American bishops look out upon their flock—by now fully 25 percent of the population and represented at every level of society—and at the economic system in which they operate and see things in a far more damning light...

...Pricking the consciences of your wealthiest parishioners was not exactly the way to buy the bricks and mortar you needed...

...And often, they were made bishop—to the great surprise (and, no doubt, chagrin) of the current members of the hierarchy...

...The bishops show an unhealthy ambivalence toward capitalism, the central engine of the nation's economy...

...In liberal Christian circles, there is a school of thought according to which a Mother Theresa is not a force for good in India...

...But they tend to reduce that need by internalizing community values into the enterprise itself...

...Fundamentally, the Europeans, like the American bishops, don't trust entrepreneurship and don't value the creation of wealth—they positively scorn it...

...No new jobs (except for lawyers) and no new oil, just a blizzard of paper...

...With the election of Franklin Roosevelt (and subsequently John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and yes, Richard Nixon), the unfettered American capitalism that existed at the turn of the century has been tamed in many ways...

...It is true that a night a week at the Salvation Army shelter is not going to eradicate poverty at its roots...

...They chastise us for materialism...

...That stubborn fact suggests something valid on which to build, as those bishops of 90 years ago implicitly understood, even if they didn't bother much about the need for moral guidance within the free enterprise system...

...Obsessed by 'the system' And now comes the bishops' critique of the economy, which—no surprise, given the modern history of the American hierarchy—is considerably less than glowing...

...Instead, Spellman reveled in the company of the men he considered his peers, some of whom were Catholic (Joe McCarthy, Joe Kennedy) and many of whom were not (Bernard Baruch, Robert Moses...

...The anachronism also arises because of the way the bishops have framed their inquiry...

...They are not disposed to share with others what they have gained by so much work ." The archbishop was John Ireland, head of the St...

...Today the ground rules are not very good...

...So greedy...

...And what sort of help actually helps them...

...Prior to Jadot's arrival, most new bishops came out of the chanceries of the most important American sees...

...In some ways Spellman's was easier to understand...

...being an industrialist is something you do if you can't get into the civil service...

...Hence the emphasis, again, like the bishops', is on the distribution of wealth rather than it's creation, and those Europeans who do have a good idea that will make them some money usually end up in America...

...Capitalism is morally neutral...

...The final version, which was to be released this spring, has been postponed a year because the bishops have been so swamped with comments and criticism...

...While the bishops do make the connection between individual behavior and the wellbeing of everyone else, they seem a lot more interested in programs...

...Another remedy is to make more room for decisions of conscience within the enterprise itself...

...We also erected a "safety net" for those who fell victim to the heartless vagaries of the market...

...The producer should take priority in the economic pecking order over the creditor or trader, and who better than the Church to propound the moral dimensions of that distinction...

...they were secretaries or advisers—cautious, conservative men whom their mentors had been grooming for years for positions of power...

...The bishops remember...

...It was the summer of 1894, and the America he spoke of so admiringly was a far tougher, far more cutthroat—and, in that sense, far less "Christian" —place than it is today...

...The bulk of Kennedy volunteers were Catholics, and their conversion to the "new" Catholicism was an amazing thing...

...In America, at the same time the Council was getting under way, John Kennedy was running for president...

...No danger of retreat to Cardinal Spellman's boosterism for greed in that modest dissent...

...They fall short on the moral guidance that will make the system work well...

...Making sure the hungry had enough to eat, or that the poor had shelter—there weren't many votes in that, not after the Depression at any rate...

...Such expatriate success stories were a staple of French journalism when I lived in France...

...The national bureaucracies are overloaded with the kinds of programs the American bishops seem to pine for: "improvement and expansion of job placement services on both the local and national level . . In an advanced industrial society like ours, all actors in society, including government, must actively and positively cooperate in forming national economic policies...

...Better to be grateful than to rock the boat...

...But it is at these moments that their prose seems its least enthusiastic, when the bishops seem merely to be going through the motions...

...it makes corporate managers absolutely beholden to the claims of shareholders for a maximum return on investment...

...So what's their excuse...