A Business Ethic of Joy

Pope Francis’ critics will say he is not a deep or systematic theologian. In a way, they are right; he
is like his namessake, St Francis of Assisi, in that he is not so much a fundamental or dogmatic
theologian as much as his l a source of theology in his own life. Our job in learning from him is
similar to Bonaventure’s task of theologizing about him. As a young priest, Jorge Bergoglio was
a teacher, and his pedagogical style is modeling. For example, his visit to Lampedusa, his first
official visit as Pope outside of Rome, where he denounced the system that led to the drowning of
migrants, and called on Christians to ask God for the gift of tears over injustice while wearing the
purple vestments of penance. Some have said that the journey itself was an encyclical.

Francis’ critics also allege that he is not an economist. This is in an attempt to take the sting out of
his remarks on capitalism, which have led to some business people threatening to cut funding to
the Church. And, again, in a way, these critics are right. Francis is not calling for a merely
institutional change to the economy. He has called for a conversion, a new spirituality that
humanizes the processes of the economy. Francis’ own spirituality is related to this: this Pope who
wore the helmet of the unemployed workers of Alcoa and chanted “work, work, work!” with them,
unsurprisingly, has a devotion to St. Joseph the Worker, famously putting prayers under a statue
of St. Joseph sleeping. And he wants an economy dedicated to the protection and support of
workers like St. Joseph. It is true that Francis has not given many specific economic prescriptions,
due perhaps as much to of his self-professed “allergy” to economics as in deference to his pastoral
role as Supreme Pontiff. But another Jesuit has provided concrete counsel: Bernard J.F. Lonergan,
best known for his work on epistemology and theology but whose first interest was actually in
economics, and who, like many of Francis’ critics, felt that the Church’s calls for economic justice
needed to be buttressed by solid, scientific economic theory. But his prescriptions did not just call
for specific policies to be enacted: Lonergan’s economic theory depended on conversion, making
it eminently relevant to Pope Francis. This presentation is not so much about comparing the
economic thought of Lonergan and Francis, since both are simply giving expression to Catholic
social thought. Instead, it will consider how the concrete actions of Francis show us how we
actualize what Lonergan calls for.

There are a lot of similarities between Lonergan and Francis. Both are Jesuits with birthdays on
December 17, and both have only one lung. More importantly, both were shaped by their
experiences during an economic depression. Lonergan was a young student during the Great
Depression and it was during this time that he began to study the workings of the economy to
understand what had caused it. The Depression also affected Bergoglio’s father, who moved from
Italy to Argentina seeking work only for the Depression to strike and mark work scarce. Bergoglio,
meanwhile, became Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998, at the same time the Argentina
depression began which would boil over into riots and social chaos in December of 2001, the same
year he became a cardinal, during which time he said Mass in the slums and denounced what he
called “the imperialism of money”. Finally, both were both influenced by while at the same time
distancing themselves from another theological-economic praxis. Bergoglio was influenced by
the Argentinian “theology of the people”, which drew inspiration from liberation theology while
distancing itself from the Marxist elements of the latter. Lonergan, on the other hand, wrote in
reaction to Major C.H. Douglas’ Social Credit economic theory.
Social Credit theory is obscure today, but it had a wide following in Lonergan’s day and may have
a new relevance in the near future. Like liberation theology, it saw itself as an incarnation of
Christian principles in history and in the economy, both as originally conceived by Major Douglas
and its implementation in my home province of Alberta by the Social Credit government of
Premier “Bible Bill” Aberhart. In Lonergan’s home province of Quebec, Social Credit policy was
combined with Catholic theology by the Pilgrims of St. Michael. Although Social Credit has faded
into obscurity in the West, the Pilgrims are growing in popularity in the global South and are being
endorsed by bishops in places like Africa and South America--including Argentina. Since these
“margins” about which Francis is always talking, will likely be the centres of Christendom in the
coming days, “source churches” in the expression of Francis’ mentor Alberto Methol Ferre,
Douglas Social Credit may have a resurgence and Lonergan’s response to it will attain a new
relevance.

The financial analysis and proposals of Douglas Social Credit changed and developed over the
course of his life, to summarize: Douglas saw the main problem with the economy being the fact
that wages that are generated will always fall short of prices in a technological society because of
the lag between the beginning of production and the time final goods hit the market. When
production begins, money must be spent on technical and capital goods production, and these costs
will be reflected in the price of final goods, but by the time these consumer goods are available,
this money will have been repaid to investors and creditors and thus unavailable to consumers,
who thus lack the purchasing power to obtain these goods, causing poverty in the midst of plenty.
Douglas’ most famous solution was that the government should issue fresh, debt-free purchasing
power to every citizen in the form of a National Dividend, which in Alberta took the form of a $25
“Prosperity Certificate” given to each citizen by the government.

Lonergan was concerned that this would lead to inflation, but wanted to understand how and why
and, more importantly, come up with a better solution for the problem of poverty in the midst of
plenty. He thus distinguished what he called a surplus expansion of the economy, which is when
there is a stage of technological development, from a basic expansion, which is when there is a
surge of available consumptible goods. During the surplus expansion, producers will be making
considerable profits because of the surge in investment in the new technologies, but at this point
the new goods have not hit the markets yet. If people begin to spend these profits during the surplus
expansion, it will lead to inflation because too much money will be chasing too few goods, which
will lead to higher prices which will hurt the poor. During a surplus expansion, therefore, people
should be saving; Lonergan’s maxim is “thrift and enterprise”. But once the basic expansion
occurred and a surge of consumable goods hit the markets, that is the time for business owners to
increase wages to their employees so that they can afford these goods, even though they will see
their own profits going down during this phase of the economy. The precept for the basic expansion
is “benevolence and enterprise”. In other words, in order to help St. Joseph the Worker, business
people must follow the policy of St Joseph the Holy Forefather in the Book of Genesis: save during
times of abundance and distribute during times of scarcity. Lonergan acknowledged that “This is
a harsh doctrine bidding producers to be content with decreasing profits and consumers to offset
a rising market by curtailing consumption. But any other doctrine is illusory”. Both producers and
consumers must deny themselves for the economy to work. Lonergan’s economic research was
not published during his lifetime, but his published works like Method in Theology show its
influence. Method speaks frequently about how moral, intellectual, and conversion is the basis of
true progress. And this is where Francis is so essential in his constant calls for pastoral conversion
and ecological conversion and his concrete recommendations for both.

What Lonergan’s business ethic calls for is a kind of spiritual poverty on the part of both labour
and capital in the interests of alleviating material poverty. Francis’ new Apostolic Exhortation,
Gaudete et Exsultate, speaks of a “spiritual poverty” equivalent to what Ignatius Loyola called a
“holy indifference” to material wealth, and notes that, in Luke’s version of the Sermon on the
Mount, Jesus does not say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”, but simply “blessed are the poor”. “In
this way,” the Holy Father writes, Jesus “invites us to live a plain and austere life.” Francis’ own
austerity models for producers and consumers a personal commitment to austerity for them to
imitate, an external poverty which allows them the willingness to relinquish for the sake of the
poor. Indeed, much of Francis’ pontificate can be seen as the development of a new kind of
spirituality for solidarity in history. For example, Laudato Si’s counsel to curtail our use of air
conditioning to help the environment met with a hostile reaction from many people who missed
the fact that this suggestion has a kind of kinship with the more severe practices of mortification
in the Church’s history, like the cord that Ignatius Loyola would tie under his knee as a corporal
penance. Similarly, the Pope’s denunciation of how we throw out food is also an admonition to
consume less. These small, “external” practices have the effect of effecting an internal conversion.
Many have noted how technology has a kind of automatic effect on us of making us more selfish
or willful, and these ascetic practices recommended by the Pope serve to offset that effect.

Lonergan recognized that as technology progressed, it was important that we master what he
called “the technique of collaboration” in order to make technology and the market serve people
rather than vice versa. For this reason he recommended cooperatives, which not only meant
more people would be involved in running the economy and following the business ethic he
recommended, but also so that more leisure time would be available as workers could
intelligently control their hours of work and their profits. Francis’ own commendation of
cooperatives also relates to his new form of spirituality: he has not only recommended ascetic
practices away from social sins, but has recommended a Christian ideal for us to move
towards. Not only has he praised the Focolare cooperatives, he has, ever since he was
Archbishop, pushed for the canonization of an Argentinian businessman named Enrique Shaw,
not to mention famously adding “care for our common home” to the works of mercy. A society
which followed Lonergan’s maxims of thrift and benevolence in a cooperative and democratic
spirit would not be addicted to the overproduction and overconsumption that has caused the
environmental abuse that Pope Francis cries out against, but this can only be achieved through
the conversion that Francis models for us and recommends for us in small, meaningful, concrete
gestures. This is where the Jesuit shape of Lonergan and Francis is so important: they both
understand that our affectivity, almost our aesthetic sensibilities, must be shaped by Christ for us
to be the contemplatives in action that the Church needs. Even the quaintest aspects of Francis’
pontificate are important here. He has, for example, recommended a five-finger prayer for our
family and friends, leaders and teachers, government and authority, weak or sick, and lastly for
ourselves. This has a simplicity which is childlike, but I think of what Lonergan once wrote:
"One Hail Mary can be more helpful than two big books, and fifteen minutes of prayerful
reflection than many a long lecture, and most lectures are very long.” So I will finish this lecture
before it gets any longer with an admonition to pray as Pope Francis calls us to.