Our economy supports and encourages an increasingly childless workforce and fungible bonds, tenuous relationships to place and community, a dessicated “culture,” centralization and monopoly and crony capitalism, and a debased utilitarian calculation of value and success.
For starters, then, it would be refreshing to see the same energy and devotion exhibited by so many conservative Catholics on issues related to life, religious liberty and gay marriage, to issues related to a proper ordering of the economy. The first thing that one will be told in response is that these latter issues involve a great deal of prudence, and so don’t demand the same kind of energy and exertions as the former, which (in the case of abortion) is intrinsically evil. But I would rejoin that Catholics don’t properly think and act as Catholics if we treat these spheres as if they were autonomous and unrelated; indeed, it seems to me that basic economic arrangements that privilege individual autonomy, materialism, mobility at the expense of community, and an “amoral” market significantly and inescapably contribute to our comprehensively “disposable society” (using Pope Francis’s description of, among other things, our abortion regime
Source: ethikapolitika.org
