Economics and salvation.

NO DOUBT you will have heard that, shortly after the November election, the U.S. Catholic bishops will be coming out with a pastoral letter on the U.S. economy. And you may have heard also that "a group of powerful Catholic industrialists, headed by William Simon, the former Secretary of the Treasury" (in the words of Marjorie Hyer of the Washington Post), is planning a parallel letter on the same topic, to be released a few months later. I hasten to submit a few observations on the subject before we are all pastoraled out.

First, we should welcome the bishops, or any other group in whom moral authority has been vested, into the ranks of economic commentators. Economic cannot be divorced from morals, and it is precisely those economists who have tried to pretend that economics is an exact science, and one that can only be understood by specialists and experts, who have been most likely to lead us astray. Those who say that bishops "aren't qualified" miss an important point. Anything that shifts the focus of discussion away from the "professionals" is potentially a healthy development.

Perhaps I should say right off that I have no "inside knowledge" as to the contents of the letter. But I gather that the bishops will address the economy under four broad headings: job creation; income distribution and welfare; planning and the role of government; trade and international development.

Thinking about this the other day I found myself wondering: Are the bishops going to tell us how to get to Heaven? Probably not, but still it is an interesting question and one that might well be on the mind of a bishop. Admittedly the whole subject is tricky, but here is how I might argue it.

Roughly speaking, we have two types of economic system, capitalism and socialism, the former permitting decentralized ownership and decision-making within the confines of private property; the latter (in its extreme form) centralizing decision-making within the hands of government planners and reducing the citizenry to the status of obedient servants. (They are not always obedient, of course, and then they may have to be sent to the Gulag.)

It is worth noting that the socialist model is structurally similar to the Roman Catholic Church in several respects. The Church, after all, has its "central planner," the Pope, and he has his Curia and subordinate hierarchy of bishops and priests (corresponding to "the Party"). So the Church is somewhat like a command economy--with the crucial difference, of course, that church membership is voluntary. By contrast, they have to put barbed wire around fully socialist countries, to stop people from running away.

Oddly enough, many American clergymen these days seem to want the U.S. economy to more closely resemble the Catholic Church--that is, to want more power concentrated in the hands of government. At the same time some seem to want the Catholic Church to be more like the U.S. economy--that is, to allow bishops, priests, and congregations more freedom to be more "diverse," more independent of the Vatican.

In any event, I think we can take it as a given, in the realm of political economy, that capitalism has proved to be materially far more successful than socialism. This seems to have been one of the great unreported lessons of the 1970s. South Korea, once with an economy one-fifth the size of North Korea's, is now ten times more prosperous than its neighbor. Moreover, theory bears out practice. There are good reasons, unrefuted by socialists, why centrally planned economies cannot do what they are supposed to do.

Now we come to what is perhaps the interesting question in all this: From a bishop's point of view, is material prosperity desirable? Is it conducive to spiritual salvation? If the answer is yes, then the bishops should come out for capitalism. If no, then they have a good argument for socialism. Curiously, however, this is the one argument for socialism that clergymen never seem to make (although there are hints of it in papal encyclicals in which "consumerism" is deplored).

THE EPISCOPAL case for socialism could be cast in these terms: It is materially so hopeless for those afflicted by it that spiritual hope may well rush in to fill the material void. Gulag slaves with not material prospects sometimes do have one secret possession: a Bible. There is a religious revival in the Soviet Union. I know that this is very controversial. The power possessed by Gulag guards (and by Party members) is not at all conducive to their salvation. The ultimate spiritual calculus can only be guessed at by mere mortals.

But my point is that our bishops do not seem to be thinking along these lines at all. In considering such mundane matters as income distribution, welfare, international trade, and central planning, they seem to be surrendering to the materialist temptation. But let me stress the words "seem to be." The pastoral letter is not yet written, and for all I know the bishops may well point out that to stress the distribution of income is to open the door to envy; to think of welfare as the solution to poverty is to encourage still more broken homes and ghetto crime; to encourage the creation of jobs in the government sector is to threaten the loss of jobs in the private sector; and to support almost any level of central planning is to invite a degree of state coercion that is antithetical to Christianity. We are not entitled to assume that such important considerations will simply elude the Catholic bishops.