THE BISHOP OF BRENTWOOD,MIGRANTS, THE MARKET AND THE PURSUIT OF GAIN

Employers who attempt to pay what others describe as a living wage may well undermine the opportunities available for migrants to experience economic flourishing. A market economy where profit is the prime motivation is an important contributor to the common good: this is clear in Catholic social teaching.     

CATHOLICISM AND CAPITALISM1

Catholic social teaching can be used to help Christians understand the appropriate role of the state in economic life. There is an intrinsic opposition to socialism but also to many of the manifestations of ‘capitalism’. An application of Catholic social teaching to economic problems should lead to a redefinition of the role of the state in many areas of life. That redefinition certainly would favour more autonomy for individuals, families and communities acting independently of the state.     

SUGGESTIONS ON REBUILDING CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING ON ECONOMICS

A question hangs over the authoritative status of what has come to be called Catholic Social Teaching. The recent publication of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church gives added point to this question. This paper sketches the elements that should inform a genuinely authoritative Catholic teaching on this subject, based on the foundational principles of Catholic moral theology. The most recent encyclical in this area, Benedict XVI's Caritas in Veritate , is analysed.     

ETHICS AND THE MARKET ECONOMY: INSIGHTS FROM CATHOLIC MORAL THEOLOGY

The ethical dimension of market solutions to problems is often neglected by their proponents. This article examines the market from the standpoint of orthodox Roman Catholic moral theology. It illustrates how Catholic theologians have contributed to thinking about the market, draws attention to Catholicism's positive assessment of entrepreneurship, and outlines paths for future Catholic reflection on the market.     

Work in Roman Catholic Thought

This essay examines the idea of work in the Catholic social tradition. Following introductory comments about the Christian vision of work found in the writings of St. Paul and other early Christian authors, the essay provides seven claims as a summary of how work is treated in modern Catholic social teaching. Based on those summary claims, a vision of what good work in the Catholic tradition looks like is then developed. Finally, the phenomenon of the “gig economy” is presented as a contemporary threat to the meaning of good work.     

Karol Wojtyła’s Katolicka Etyka Społeczna as Precursor and Hermeneutic Key to Pope John Paul II’s Economic Teaching

The highly anticipated publication of Karol Wojtyła’s Katolicka etyka społeczna (KES) in 2018 provides a novel and important basis for understanding the economic thinking of Pope John Paul II. The text is comprised of Wojtyła’s extensive lecture notes from the 1950s on the topic of Catholic social teaching and spans almost 500 pages. KES illustrates the future pope’s deep concern for economic justice as a young priest and his ambivalence towards capitalism, which persisted throughout his papacy. Given the size of KES, this article selectively focuses on Wojtyła’s treatment of topics of continuing relevance: the right of the Church to pronounce on economic matters; private property and the “social mortgage” on it; inequality, the just distribution of resources, and the “option for the poor”; the moral assessment of capitalism and Marxism; the dignity of labor and workers’ rights; and the role of conflict in promoting the common good. I contend that KES is consonant with the later papal teaching of John Paul II on economic justice and that it provides a hermeneutic key to understanding it. Furthermore, I argue that the “radicalism” of Karol Wojtyła on matters of economic justice in KES coheres with papal social teaching from Pope Paul VI through that of Pope Francis.     

The eventization of faith as a marketing strategy: World Youth Day as an innovative response of the Catholic Church to pluralization

• The declared objective of World Youth Day (WYD), a Catholic Church event staged in a major world city every 2–3 years, is to evangelize youth – including those on the fringes of, and outside, the Church. The 20th WYD, which was held in Cologne, Germany in 2005, was the subject of a project conducted by a research consortium funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The preliminary hypothesis that WYD combines elements of traditionalistic festivals and modernistic events and that this combination yields a new event form – the “hybrid event” – was confirmed.
• This paper presents some of the findings gained from an ethnographic investigation of the organization of WYD that was informed by an action-theory perspective in the tradition of Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann's sociology of knowledge. From this perspective, which focuses on the goals, strategies, and personal relevancies of the organizing team (German) WYD can be unequivocally reconstructed as a Catholic Church marketing event. The “product” – the Catholic faith, uniquely personified by the Pope – is presented by an elite organizing team in an atmosphere of fun and mystery that especially appeals to young people. Hence, the Catholic Church succeeds in shedding its sometimes fuddy-duddy image and in bringing young people to perceive it as a vibrant, modern religious institution. This should prove to be a competitive advantage in an age of religious pluralism.

Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Catholic Social Thought and Human Rights

As the dominant moral vocabulary of modernity, the language of human rights establishes significant points of contact between the religious and the secular. Yet, the human rights movement increasingly finds itself in a contested relationship with religious ideas and communities. Even as it draws on the inherited moral resources of religion, the human rights movement, at least in its dominant institutional and intellectual expressions, presents itself as a totalizing moral theory that challenges countervailing theological accounts of human rights. This article considers the distinctive account of human rights that has emerged within Catholic social teaching. Particular attention is given to the process by which Catholic thinking about human rights has embraced political liberalism while also bounding liberalism within a particularistic theologically‐informed account of the human person.     

The True Meaning of ‘Social Justice’: A Catholic View of Hayek

Hayek's well‐known dismissal of the concept of ‘social justice’ is examined and questioned. While basically agreeing with Hayek's critique, the author argues that we should not entirely reject this concept, although it is often used in a vague and emotional way – ‘social justice talk’. Drawing on the tradition of classical liberalism and Catholic social teaching, he makes the case for the true meaning of social justice, which applies to the basic legal and institutional framework of a society rather than the distributional outcomes of market processes.     

Are Catholic primary schools more effective than public primary schools?

This paper assesses the causal effects of Catholic primary schooling on student outcomes such as test scores, grade retention, and behavior. Catholic school students have substantially better average outcomes than do public school students throughout the primary years, but we present evidence that selection bias is entirely responsible for these advantages. Estimates based on several empirical strategies, including an approach developed by Altonji et al. (2005a) to use selection on observables to assess the bias arising from selection on unobservables, imply that Catholic schools do not appreciably boost test scores. All of the empirical strategies point to sizeable negative effects of Catholic schooling on mathematics achievement. Similarly, we find very little evidence that Catholic schooling improves behavioral and other non-cognitive outcomes once we account for selection on unobservables.     

The Wage Effects of Being Raised in the Catholic Religion: Does Religion Matter?

This paper provides new empirical evidence about the existence of a Catholic wage premium. A simple allocation-of-time model provides two explanations for the observation that those persons raised in the Catholic religion earn more than their non-Catholic counterparts. The Catholic religion may add to a person's stock of human capital and/or it may act as a signal of desirable labor market characteristics such as discipline, honesty, trustworthiness, and high motivation.     

The Throwaway Culture in the Economy of Exclusion: Pope Francis and Economists on Waste

An essential part of Pope Francis’s critique of the “economy of exclusion” is the concept of the “throwaway culture,” which is an attitude and a reality that goes beyond mere exclusion. Francis is building on critiques of consumerism (what John Paul II called “economism”) that noted both the environmental impacts of unnecessary waste and the social and human impact of reducing humans to mere consumers—the idea that happiness is shopping. Francis adds to this a concern for the people on the margins of society who are treated as disposable and for the consequences of climate change, both of which are connected to the throwaway attitude. This article looks at Francis’s views within the tradition of Catholic social thought and at how economists, especially Adam Smith, who provided the foundation for modern economics, looked at waste and consumerism.     

The brand positioning and image of a religious organisation: an empirical analysis

• Brand positioning and image development are important topics for any religious organisation wishing to provide an effective service to the public. It follows that in a world with increasing religious options, the position strategy decision and the brand position statement are essential aspects of a fully responsive religious organisation. To investigate these issues the author presents the findings of a study that compared the brand position of a Catholic shrine in Portugal, i.e. the sanctuary of Fátima, with the image of the shrine as perceived by its pilgrims. The paper also attempts to offer a definition of religious marketing and explores some possible antecedents of effective brand positioning within this particular field.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Catholic Social Thought and New Institutional Economics: An Assessment of Their Affinities and Areas of Potential Convergence

The potential link between Catholic social teaching (CST) and the theoretical developments associated with new institutional economics (NIE) are explored. The emphasis is on the contributions of two Nobel Prize winners in economics—Douglass C. North and Elinor Ostrom—and on the work of political scientist Vincent Ostrom. By adjusting the neoclassical presumptions dominating modern economic theory to include culture, ideas, and religious beliefs in the analysis of economic behavior, the economic and social theorizing developed by these scholars advances a framework that has significant affinities with CST’s foundational critique of economic concepts and theories and with its normative position regarding the nature and functioning of social and economic systems.     

The HR/IR Teaching Conference

This article summarizes and analyzes the 1996 Innovative Teaching in Human Resources and Industrial Relations (HR/IR) Conference. It deals with the (1) origins, content, and format of the conference; (2) key trends, ideas, and themes that emerged from the conference; and (3) implications from the analysis for the next HR/IR teaching conference (scheduled for June 1999). Special attention is paid to the different disciplinary approaches to teaching HR/IR, newer nontraditional methods for teaching HR/IR, and practitioner influence on HR/IR teaching and research. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Location of Decision Rights in Catholic Religious Orders

Organizational incentives are an important part of applied economics. Do even organizations like religious orders make the same trade‐offs and substitutions as predicted by economics for firms? It is argued here that religious orders face the problem of controlling the actions of their branch offices to assure the continued value and uniqueness of their trademark. We use the distinction between specific and general knowledge to analyze the optimal colocation of decision rights within the specific knowledge framework of a religious order. Assuming that knowledge is valuable in decision making, then the colocation of the decision authority with the particular knowledge that is beneficial to those decisions is preferable. With a sample of 114 local communities of 20 religious orders of the Roman Catholic Church, we empirically test whether the ratio of search/experience goods, of credence goods and the monitoring costs of the headquarter can explain the colocation of decision rights and authority within an order. Our findings give support for the hypothesis that religious orders at present make the same trade‐offs and substitutions as predicted by economics. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A guided tour of TSMod 4.03

We review the time series econometrics package TSMod. The new features in TSMod 4.03, released in April 2004, are described and its potential for teaching is analysed. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An investigation of the giving behavior of loyal,lapsed, and non‐givers to a religious organization

• This paper provides a comparative study of the giving behavior of current donors (CDs), lapsed donors (LDs), and non‐donors (NDs) in a Catholic diocese in New England. Focus groups were conducted and surveys were administered to Catholics to compare the attitudes and behaviors of lapsed and active donors as well as those who had not given to a recent diocesan annual campaign. The results show significant differences between the groups. Active donors indicate a much greater level of satisfaction with the church, are more aware of its programs, and feel they are more recognized for their gifts than do lapsed or NDs. These findings suggest that relationship fundraising, and creating trust, are critical to forging and maintaining valued donor relationships. The program implemented by the diocese as a result of the study is described.
• Marketing for religious organizations
• Lapsed donors
• Nonprofit marketing
• Marketing for churches

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Scilab as an econometric programming system

This article reviews Scilab, a free MATLAB‐like programming system. Scilab can be used for data analysis and applied numerical work in both research and teaching. Scilab is an interesting alternative to some commercial programming environments. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

IDENTITARIAN MOVEMENTS IN THE TOURISTIC CITY: The Marketing of Hate in Verona

Verona is known as the touristic city of Romeo and Juliet, but its position as a strategic node in the rising identitarian movement goes unnoticed to the thousands of tourists visiting the city every day. This article articulates the historical centre of Verona as a public space in which far-right and populist right groups seek to construct an exclusionary territorial identity that draws on white supremacy, northern pride and Catholic fundamentalism, which manifest themselves in practices of bordering and territorialization. I argue that the city's perfectly preserved heritage and its assumed authenticity are not only utilized to construct the ideal protagonists of city life, but also that such territorial themes of defending the ‘native homeland’ and its traditions are marketed to the outside world by constructing a ‘model’ city for a growing transnational movement. In this study, which is based on ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and in-depth interviews, I investigate the mechanisms through which certain historical centres are showcased to build an identitarian network through everyday practices of boundary-drawing and the marketing of a territorial anti-modernist nostalgia.