We're okay; we're not okay

I like to bring up old stuff. Like this amusing bit of Cafeteria Catholicism in a post from last week by Gerald of the Cafeteria is Closed. Gerald takes a swing at social justice and whiffs, his main point being that he and other like-minded Catholics aren’t terribly interested in the topic because things are honky dory and there isn’t that much economic injustice in developed countries anyway:

Obviously, capitalism as we have it today is the best economic system around, providing more people than ever before with good lives. Real questions really only arise in details. I think that is why, in the West, this [the Church’s social teaching] is not a big draw to a lot of people.

I was reminded of Gerald’s post this morning when I heard a story on NPR about how mortgage defaults have hit a five-year high despite the economy being relatively robust. At one point in the story someone states that a few years ago brokers were selling as many mortgages as possible not really caring if prospects actually had the ability to pay the loans back. Great.

I didn’t really understand the mortgage market until recently, but learning about it helped me to understand the Church’s teaching and also begin to see how messed up our economic system is. As Wendell Berry says, “an economy firmly founded upon the seven deadly sins and the breaking of all ten of the Ten Commandments.” You take something as personal and significant as a home and then take the loan for that home and ratchet it up all these levels of abstraction until you have a Wall Street broker who is part of a huge investment bank who trades packages of bundled loans trying to spin pennies out of them which eventually add up to billions of dollars for the bank. Do you think this broker spends a lot of time thinking about Sam and Julie and the house on Dogwood Lane where they live with their four kids, their sheltie, and their pet goldfish, or about the struggles of their daily lives? Or are these mere data points which help him to judge risk appropriately and make more money?

I do commend Gerald, at least, for making the effort to read the Compendium of Social Doctrine. I pray that more Catholics will do the same.