Catholic Teaching and the Elections

Micahael Greaney, Director of Research, Center for Economic and Social Justice and Contributing Editor for Economics and Finance, Inside the Vatican magazine, has written an analysis of the candidates from a Catholic perspective, published in Inside the Vatican.


please read the rest here!

and visit Michael's blog and the CESJ website

http://just3rdway.blogspot.com/
http://www.cesj.org/
 

CATHOLIC TEACHING AND THE ELECTIONS
BY MICHAEL D. GREANEY
The economy remains a central political issue, and a central issue of social justice for Catholic teaching, both in Europe and America. How should a Catholic assess what the US presidential candidates are saying about the economy?




The 2012 presidential election has brought America’s economic crisis into sharp focus. Despite ephemeral gains in the stock market and manipulation of unemployment statistics, the economy continues to stagnate. Growth is limited, by and large, to the financial services industry that shifts around existing wealth, and government, which produces nothing. Ordinary people, unable to gain an adequate and secure income by their own efforts, are increasingly dependent on the State for meeting their daily needs.

As we have seen in the controversy stirred up over the contraception mandate, dependency on government leaves people susceptible to “Welfare Blackmail” and other offenses against human dignity imposed by a progressively authoritarian State. This is the “yoke little better than that of slavery itself” that the propertyless condition imposes on workers and their families, condemned by both Leo XIII (Rerum Novarum, § 3) and Pius XI (Quadragesimo Anno, § 59).