Archbishop Chaput to Businessmen - Most Bishops Don't Know Much About Economics

Update Full Text of Bishop's Economic Speech located here (absent Q and A)

I have posted on Archbishop Chaput Talk on Catholics, Obama, and politics here at Denver Archbishop Talks Obama and The Catholic Political Vocation (Full Text) and Archbishop Chaput Warns Against Worship of Obama .

He also talked to Businessmen and I am looking for a transcript or vid of that. There is a summary here Archbishop Chaput Tells Business Leaders to "Light the Marketplace"

Also see from two people that were there Friar Rick’s Weblog and Chaput in Toronto and from Salt and Light the post More Valuable than Every Great Empire.

Friar Rick notes something that gave me a laugh

There were a couple of “interesting” questions… one of them being about how the Obama stimulus package was going to to bring, get this, socialism, to the United States. What are the bishops going to do about this? Archbishop Chaput was agile in responding that he and most bishops don’t know much about economics and should stay out of it.

Now I sort of agree and disagree with this. I expect Chaput was put in a difficult spot here too. Even if he is Catholic Archbishop is still an American and no doubt being critical of your President on foreign soil(even one you opposed) still feels bad. Also it is a political hot potato. he is on sure ground on abortion but on the multiplier effect of the stimulus not so much

Still it is a tad refreshing. One gets a sense that many Bishops statements on the economy is done by some committee and they just vote yes on it.

The attitude Bishops and the Church should have I thought was laid well by Pope Benedict.

In fact a good overview is at Against the Grain at Pope Benedict's Critique of Capitalism . In that post the Holy Father says:

A morality that believes itself able to dispense with the technical knowledge of economic laws is not morality but moralism. As such it is the antithesis of morality. A scientific approach that believes itself capable of managing without an ethos misunderstands the reality of man. Therefore it is not scientific. Today we need a maximum of specialized economic understanding, but also a maximum of ethos so that specialized economic understanding may enter the service of the right goals.

So the Church talks about the economics and must. I think Chaput would agree with that but also seems to be saying that many of the the Bishops themselves well they are not experts in what the Pope is talking about above and perhaps they should engage various thought on this subject