Can economic policy ever be based
on Christian principles?
by Nora Hamerman
On March 4, 1988, {EIR} published most of
{Sollicitudo Rei Socialis,} the papal encyclical marking
the second decade of Paul VI's {Populorum Progressio,}
which proclaimed that ``Development is the name for peace.''
A week later, we printed Lyndon LaRouche's reply to John
Paul II. While expressing his deep regard for the pope's
identity as a ``true missionary,'' who is of one mind with
him ``respecting the results of statesmanship to be
achieved,'' namely the overcoming of a great ``moral
evil'' in the world, LaRouche warned that the employment
by political leadership of the encyclical's imprecision on
certain issues could be ``fatal to the very cause which
the encyclical upholds.''
Specifically, LaRouche pointed to Chapter VI, which
begins, ``The Church does not have {technical solutions} to
the problem of underdevelopment as such, as Pope Paul VI
already affirmed in his encyclical. For the Church does
not propose economic and political systems or programs,
nor does she show preference for one or the other,
provided that human dignity is properly respected and
promoted, and provided she herself is allowed the room she
needs to exercise her ministry in the world.''
``For me,'' the American economist and statesman
declared, ``there is no separation of morality from
technical means. Although I know that there is allowable
variety in the form of sovereign states and their
institutions, I also know that there are certain
intelligible principles which separate good from evil
forms of economic and political systems.'' He added, ``I
recognize that a significant contributing cause for the
lack of adequate precision on these matters, is the
condition of the Catholic Church in the United States,
especially the influence of relevant wealthy families
which refuse to tolerate from the pulpit any teaching
which affronts their zeal for the radically
anti-Augustinian dogmas of the British East India
Company's Adam Smith.''
The report we present below bears out LaRouche's
warning in the context of a world which has worsened
dramatically in the five years since 1988. Even though the
Soviet state has fortunately crumbled in the East, yet the
center of oligarchical evil there, identified by LaRouche
in the ``{nomenklatura} and its attached gnostic state
church,'' has not vanished. In the West, ``the evil of
oligarchical usurers' power'' has persisted and grown
cancerously. These evils, manipulating the peoples of the
Balkans, threaten to engulf the world in a new war at any
moment. Lyndon LaRouche, the one figure who possesses the
``technical means'' to combat these satanic forces, has
been confined to prison for four years, for being far too
effective as a vocal opponent of the oligarchy.
The Roman Catholic Church is strategically pivotal in
the midst of the world economic maelstrom. For a century
it has been the largest institution in the world to stand
up for the identity of morality and economics. Throughout
that time, it has unflinchingly upheld the principle of
the sacredness of human life. Moreover, its prominent
presence in Ibero-America and eastern Europe makes it a
potential rallying-point for those seeking freedom from
the twin evils of liberal capitalism and communism.
For that very reason, the western oligarchy has
``employed that imprecision'' against which LaRouche
warned in 1988, to demand the right to interpret Catholic
social doctrine to the world. The most alarming sign of
their success was seen last October in Santo Domingo,
Dominican Republic, when the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Angelo Sodano,
told the press that Mexico's President Carlos Salinas is
part of ``a new and important generation of politicians
concerned with the progress of their people.'' Sodano went
on to say that while Ibero-America's situation is
difficult, some countries are making economic progress, and
that ``one example of this is the very low inflation rates
they have achieved in their economies.'' Sodano's sympathy
for the flea market economic model widely known outside
the United States as neo-liberalism, was echoed in the
final document issued by the Fourth General Conference of
the Latin American Bishops (CELAM), meeting in Santo
Domingo to celebrate the Columbus quincentenary.
Sodano was expressing, from the top of the Vatican
hierarchy, support for a faction which explicitly {denies}
the possibility of an economics based on Christian
principles, centered around American adventurer Michael
Novak. The report which follows exposes the pagan premises
of Novak and his sidekick Richard Neuhaus's fraudulent
attempt to prove that Catholic social doctrine is the same
as Novak's ``democratic capitalism.'' We present two case
studies of the crushing poverty which neo-liberal policies
have brought to Mexico and Argentina, and show that
ameliorative actions proposed in the name of a
``solidarity'' remote from that of the papal encyclicals,
will not relieve this suffering, but will foment bloody
uprisings.
Finally, we present a brief extract from LaRouche's
1991 book, {The Science of Christian Economy,} written in
prison. Ironically, in 1956, a French Dominican, Father
Bruckberger, wrote a book, {Image of America,} asserting
that the American System of Lincoln's adviser Henry Carey,
embodying Christian social doctrine in economic practice,
was the unique alternative to the British System of Adam
Smith and Karl Marx, but had been forgotten by America.
Little did he know that a living American in that
tradition, Lyndon LaRouche--then making his first economic
forecast--would be the best hope for re-uniting Christian
morality with economic practice in the apocalyptic 1990s.
