A lot of Catholic Social Teaching is not explicitly anti-capitalist. You look at the writings of Pope Leo XIII and John Paul II on labor and economics and they want to center people while noting ills of both capitalism and socialism.

That’s what I heard from President Joe.

Catholic Social Teaching builds these ideas of economics and labor from certain doctrines of human freedom and sin which seek to balance individual free will with the realities of a world that does not promote harmony between individual and Divine and individual and each other.

It’s important to name this because it’s distinct from the tradition of Liberation Theology that, at least in Latin America, also builds from Catholicism but is explicitly anti-capitalist. For them, capitalism causes alienation between self, community, God which is sin.

For the Liberationists, liberation comes with the slow, communal process of building a new world, a new system, a new economic order. And many in the Catholic hierarchy explicitly denounced or censured this more radical theological vision.

Naming this distinctions is important to me because President Joe makes sense to me. He wants to create systems that better promote human flourishing but believes those can be done within capitalism even as both capitalism and socialism are flawed.

You saw him say as much on the debate stage when challenging Bernie and you heard the overtones of this during his inauguration speech. President Joe is very Catholic, it seems to clear to me and this is why.

I don’t agree with his interpretation of economics/labor in the same way I disagree with Rerum novarum (1891) & Centesimus annus (1991)—am I allowed to disagree with encyclicals? lol. I’m more drawn to liberationist anti-capitalist theology. But it’s important to situate Joe.

Even though part of my training has been on the intersections of Religion and economics I’m not Catholic nor a Catholic scholar. So I’d be curious to hear what other folks think about this: @mjcressler @TiaPhD @erin_bartram @KristyNabhan [insert other brilliant people here]