Harvard Also Has Christian Antisemitism

The school owns a ‘nondenominational’ church, which bashes Israel from its pulpit.

By Ira Stoll. Mr. Stoll writes at TheEditors.com. He was a Harvard employee, 2019-23. Excerpts:

"‘As queer and trans people, political radicals, abolitionists and anti-Zionists, imagination is our calling,” a Harvard Divinity School student pronounced on campus. She denounced Israel’s “state violence, settler colonialism, fermented trauma and religious nationalism.”"

"It was a sermon at morning prayers inside Harvard’s Memorial Church."

"The Harvard Corp. selects and employs its minister. The church website, with audio and transcripts of sermons, has a Harvard.edu address."

"When it comes to Israel and the Jews, as the Divinity School student’s speech indicates, Harvard’s main campus church has been heavy on critique and light on compassion."

"On Nov. 26, 2023, Mr. Potts told his congregation: “We know what hell looks like. It looks like Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. It looks like Gaza today.”" (the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, a Divinity School professor and Memorial Church minister)

"On April 28, 2024, in a Sunday sermon, Mr. Potts praised the anti-Israel occupiers of Harvard Yard" 

Capitalism and the Jews, by Jerry Z. Muller

Steven Menashi reviews Jerry Z. Muller's book Capitalism and the Jews. 

"the persecution or exclusion of Jews is a strong sign that the moral case for capitalism is under attack" (excerpt from the review which is below). But first some data:

Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom ranking for selected countries.

Israel 34
Bahrain 68
Jordan 93
Oman 95
Saudi Arabia 98
Egypt 151
Pakistan 152
Lebanon 164
Iran 169
Afghanistan Not ranked
Iraq Not ranked
Libya Not ranked
Syria Not ranked
Yemen Not ranked

"Early in the Christian era, the church fathers found themselves compelled to explain the persistence of the Jews. Continued Jewish fidelity to the Mosaic law challenged the Christian teaching that the law had been fulfilled and abolished through the Christian faith. The famous solution devised by Augustine was that the Jews had survived, in exile and abjection, as witnesses to the historical authenticity of Old Testament prophecy and the error of failing to see its fulfillment in Jesus Christ. It must therefore have embarrassed those who held this view when, in modern times, Jews came to rank among the most prosperous people in the liberal capitalist West.

It makes sense that partisans of the Augustinian teaching found it necessary to question the methods of Jewish merchants and financiers and the influence of commerce generally. At the same time, the apostles of what would come to be known as liberal capitalism had good reason to see the Jews as fulfilling a providential, one might even say a chosen, mission. Through the ingenuity of the Jews, wrote Montesquieu in 1748 in The Spirit of the Laws, “commerce was able to avoid violence and maintain itself everywhere.” Capitalism, even in its nascent form, “broke through the barbarism of Europe.”

According to Jerry Z. Muller, professor of history at Catholic University, capitalism has been the most important force in shaping the fate of the Jews in the modern world. In 2002 he published The Mind and the Market, a study of the idea of capitalism in Western thought. “Jews,” he wrote, “served as a kind of metaphorical embodiment of capitalism.” In his new book, Capitalism and the Jews, Muller focuses squarely on the relation between them in four interlocking essays that explore, respectively, Western thinking about Jews and capitalism, the Jews’ own responses to capitalism, Jewish involvement in Communist movements¹, and the rise of ethnic nationalism that came about as a response to capitalism’s relentless march in the 19th century and onward.

To be sure, capitalism has affected the course of the entire modern world, not only that of the Jews, but “Jews have had a special relationship with capitalism,” Muller explains, “for they have been particularly good at it.” Among Jews, economic success has been a source of both pride and embarrassment. Among their neighbors, it has prompted both affection and abhorrence.

_____________

Muller gives the impression of a long and deep dispute, but while anti-Semitic anticapitalists and philo-Semitic capitalists each placed a different gloss on the social values of modern capitalism, all seemed to acknowledge that the Jews carried those values wherever they went. Anti-Semites denounced Jews as rootless cosmopolitans whose commercial activities undermined traditional ways of life, while capitalists praised Jews for fostering the creative destruction and social dynamism characteristic of free markets. Anti-Semites condemned Jewish merchants for promoting self-interested egoism at the expense of Christian fellowship.

For their part, capitalists welcomed Jews for promoting liberal individualism and rights of private property against clerical establishments and state regimentation of moral norms. To the anti-Semites, Jewish commercial influence undercut the passion and vitality of human life in favor of soulless economic calculation. To the capitalists, the Jews illustrated how commerce could counteract socially destructive prejudices and passions by promoting gentle manners and civil intercourse.

German anti-Semites called Jews Luftmenschen, “people of the air,” who lacked a firm grounding in agriculture and industry and produced nothing of material value. Capitalist thinkers correspondingly credited Jews with creating financial innovations—-letters of exchange, the stock market, and the strategic use of public debt—that promoted rationalism and efficiency in economic life.

Muller insists that historical circumstance, rather than any quality inherent in Judaism, explains the capitalist inclinations of Western Jewry. Yet he later calls his own judgment into question. In his first chapter, Muller discounts the argument of Werner Sombart, the anti-Semitic German sociologist (1863-1941), that the Jewish faith inclined its adherents to capitalism because it was given to abstraction and promoted a legal-contractual conception of their relationship with God.

In his next chapter, however, Muller explains the Jews’ facility for commerce by making reference to their “religious intellectualism.” Judaism “was a religion oriented to continuous contact with texts,” writes Muller, which “cultivated the habit of finding commonalities and distinctions in arguments, and of thinking in abstractions.” He observes that Talmudic law is “replete with debates about economic matters, including contracts, torts, and prices,” and even cites a passage from the Babylonian Talmud to demonstrate that “the rabbis had an acute appreciation of the benefits of the division of labor.”

Again in his first chapter, Muller condemns an anti-Semitic lecture delivered in 1930 by John Maynard Keynes in which the economist blamed the Jews for polluting capitalism by promoting deferred gratification, the focus on means over ends, which led people to discount the quality and enjoyment of life in favor of future profit. Yet in the following chapter, Muller explains that the Jews’ high valuation of educational study “reflected a long time horizon, in which the economic payoff would be deferred for years.”

Perhaps, notwithstanding the hostility with which anti-Semites formulated the Jewish connection to capitalism, their arguments cannot be so easily dismissed. For at the very least, Judaism did provide fertile ground for the cultivation of modern commercial life. As a religion of laws governing worldly conduct, Judaism does not have the innate suspicion of commercial activity that is among the originating concepts of the Christian tradition, with its Gospel account of Jesus’ rage at the money changers working on the grounds of the Temple. Theologically, Christianity has always emphasized spiritual preparation for the afterlife rather than earthly endeavors.

_____________

Yet Christianity is also a product of Judaism and echoes Judaism’s teachings even when it seeks to supplant them. In denouncing deferred gratification as the attempt “to secure a spurious and delusive immortality,” Keynes averred that “it is not an accident that the race which did the most to bring the promise of immortality into the heart and essence of our religions has also done the most for the principle of compound interest and particularly loves this most purposive of human institutions.” Keynes’s caricature notwithstanding, he was on to something. For Judaism did originate the promise of immortality—“I will make you a great nation and I will bless you,” God tells Abram in Genesis 12, guaranteeing him descendants as numerous as the stars—and that promise remains at the heart of Judaism’s daughter religions, including Christianity.

Sombart portrayed the triumph of capitalism as the replacement of a concrete, particularist Christian community with an abstract, universalistic society. But Judaism has always stood above all for the maintenance of a concrete, particularist community—the Jewish people. Christianity had to spread Jewish values as a universal faith before they could find expression in modern liberal capitalism.

Christianity did not purport to apply such values to the government of society. “My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus tells his followers. So Christians had to borrow from Jewish law. The early church incorporated the Hebrew Scriptures into the Christian Gospels, though it was not at all obvious that the Old Testament should have been permitted to survive the New. In the early modern period, the Hebrew Bible again informed Christian views of society, as in the English jurist John Selden’s The Law of Nature and of Nations According to the Hebrews (1640). Christians also depended on Jews themselves, serving as a kind of shabbos goy in reverse, to engage in those commercial activities that were socially beneficial but religiously forbidden to them. In the 12th century, the church resolved to prevent the evil of Christian usury by allowing Jews to engage in moneylending and other financial activities—which made the Jews of Europe contemptible, but also indispensable, to Christian society.

Gradually, their skills in commerce were acquired by the surrounding Christian communities. So it may be said that capitalism, to some extent, Judaized Christian life. Karl Marx made the point most vividly in his essay “On the Question of the Jews,” which denounced the “Jewish spirit” of capitalism but also argued that capitalist society turned everyone into Jews. Under capitalism, he wrote, “money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian peoples. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews.”

Of course, Muller is right to argue that the Jews embraced commerce in part as a result of their treatment by the Christian West. Always under the threat of expropriation or expulsion, it made little sense for Jews to acquire land or other immovable goods; one could more easily relocate wealth gained from trade or finance. Politically dispossessed, Jews employed financial influence. As sojourners, Paul Johnson has written, “they had no share in or emotional commitment to society as a whole and so could watch its old traditions, methods and institutions being demolished without a pang.” That made them natural innovators and capitalist entrepreneurs.

_____________

By and large, Jews embraced these roles. With impressive historical detail, Muller refutes the notion, common to leftists eager to enlist the faith in the cause of collectivism, that Jews have been generally hostile to capitalism. While Jews have been prominent ideological spokesmen for socialist and Communist movements, those movements have enjoyed little support among the Jewish rank and file. The chief rabbi of Moscow in the early 20th century, Jacob Mazeh, is said to have told Leon Trotsky, né Lev Bronstein, “The Trotskys make the revolutions, and the Bronsteins pay for it.”

Indeed, the fate of the Jews has long been tied to the fate of capitalism. Jews of the early-modern period pleaded for political toleration on the grounds of the economic benefit it would bring—and thus the case for accepting the Jews was often mixed with the case for embracing commerce. In 1655 the Dutch rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel appealed to Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the newly formed English Commonwealth, to readmit the Jews to England. England stood to profit, he argued. “It is a thing confirmed, that merchandizing is, as it were, the proper profession of the Nation of the Jews,” wrote Ben Israel. “They do abundantly enrich the lands and countries of strangers, where they live, not only with what is requisite and necessary for the life of man; but also what may serve for ornament to his civil condition.” A century later, the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn argued that Jews should enjoy civil equality in Germany because the merchant “is a real benefactor to the state” and helps “to render the comforts of life more known, and more generally serviceable.” Another century on, Theodor Herzl predicted that Arabs would welcome Jewish settlement in Palestine because when the Jews brought “their intelligence, their financial acumen, and their means of enterprise to the country, no one can doubt that the well-being of the entire country would be the happy result.”

_____________

But the result has not always been so happy. Not every society wants commerce. Capitalism represents certain moral choices about the good life—-choices that more aristocratic, theocratic, nationalistic, or agrarian societies resolve differently. At the birth of modern capitalism, the Jews came to symbolize a moral system that actually did threaten the traditional social order.

In his last chapter, Muller tries to explain why the triumph of capitalism did not end anti-Jewish hatred but in fact intensified it. Whereas Jews once performed economic functions Gentiles would not, in the modern era they became competitors with Gentiles. Given their already formidable economic training, Jews were bound to outperform other groups and to provoke new resentments. Moreover, Muller suggests, the capitalist state weakened traditional ties and fostered new forms of identification with the political community of the nation, which excluded other ethnics such as Jews.

Again, this explanation seems at odds with an earlier part of the book, in which Muller observes that the Jews were most accepted where capitalism was most firmly established. “Both in Europe and America, a fundamentally positive view of commerce within the larger society tended to lead to a favorable or at least neutral disposition toward the Jews,” he writes. “Here we find the greatest difference between continental European societies, on the one hand, and British and American society on the other.”

Muller points to the influence of Lockean liberalism in the U.S. Anglo-American society inherited a natural-rights tradition according to which capitalism produces not only a rich but also a good society. In this view, capitalism complements religious teaching; it shows due respect to the rights of liberty and property with which individuals “are endowed by their Creator”; and it calls forth distinctive virtues such as honesty, diligence, sobriety, and thrift. Capitalism thus understood forms a political community in which all are welcome who play by the rules. Continental Europe, by contrast, developed a more nationalist tradition in which the law expresses the spirit of a people. Capitalism, it follows, may be a useful means of organizing economic affairs, but it must express, and be constrained by, the national ethos. It is no surprise that ethnic and religious minorities present greater difficulties for such a society.

In this way, then, the fate of Western Jewry has been bound up with the moral case for capitalism and the bourgeois society. The case is a strong one: modern capitalism has produced greater individual liberty, peaceful coexistence, social mobility, and material prosperity than history had previously known. But because capitalism has so thoroughly eclipsed its alternatives, the moral argument on which it rests is often invisible. Muller quotes the Nobel laureate Simon Kuznets as saying, “Given the kind of human capital that the Jews represent, the majority in any country, if it wished to maximize long-term economic returns, should have not only permitted the Jewish minority the utmost freedom, but in fact should have subsidized any improvement in the economic and social performance of promising individual Jews.” Yet not every society is interested in maximizing long-term economic returns. Indeed, the persecution or exclusion of Jews is a strong sign that the moral case for capitalism is under attack.

Capitalism and the Jews have enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship, albeit a rocky one. “In the long run,” writes Muller, “capitalism was good for the Jews. And the Jews were good for capitalism.” It was a relationship largely thrust upon them; as agents of modernity, the Jews were a chosen—not a choosing—people. As in society at large, there was a cost to embracing capitalism because it treats religion as a private matter, divorced from nationality and political rule.

In a sense, then, capitalism also Christianized Judaism. It did so by severing religious belief and worship from the national identity of the Jews and from the laws that are intended to govern their social conduct. Peaceful trading for profit falls somewhat short of the prophetic vision of a restored Jerusalem under divine sovereignty. “In that day,” the book of Zechariah tells us, “there shall be no more traders in the House of the Lord.” Of course, the House of the Lord has yet to be rebuilt, and until it is, Jews must still reside among the nations."

Capitalism and Religious Freedom

From Cafe Hayek.

"from page 478 of Will & Ariel Durant’s 1961 volume, The Age of Reason Begins:

The merchant rulers of the city [Amsterdam] allowed considerable religious freedom, for only in this way could trade be encouraged with peoples of diverse faiths.

DBx: All the many people who assert that free markets, commerce, and capitalism are built on, or generally encourage, invidious discrimination simply don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re ignorant of history and of economics."

Get the Facts Straight on Yeshiva Education

Hasidic Jewish students should be compared with other English-language learners, and graduates earn substantial incomes

Letter to WSJ.

"The perspective of yeshiva parents like Sheva Tauby (“The Campaign Against Our Yeshivas,” Houses of Worship, Sept. 16) was sorely lacking in the New York Times cover story to which she replies. The Times highlighted about a dozen Hasidic primary schools that fared much worse than public schools on state exams. But the relevant comparison is to other students who come from homes where English isn’t the primary language.

Once we compare apples to apples, the yeshiva results no longer appear exceptional. On the 2019 state English Language Arts exam, there were 155 New York City public schools in which fewer than 1% of English Language Learning (ELL) students performed at grade level. In more than 95% of New York City public schools, at least two-thirds of ELL students failed to perform at grade level.

More important: Are yeshiva graduates prepared to earn a living? The Times cited high poverty rates in Hasidic communities, but the rates are distorted by larger family sizes and a younger median age. Household income provides a more accurate picture of the ability of Hasidic Jews to find decent jobs, and on that measure they outperform the general public. More specific data is needed, but a 2021 study found a median Haredi household income of $102,000.

As Ms. Tauby notes, the yeshiva system produces communities with a high degree of social capital and low rates of crime and other social ills. The Times should investigate how it manages to do that. The public-school system might learn something.

Jason Bedrick

Research fellow, Heritage Foundation

Phoenix"

Jesus a Socialist? That’s a Myth

The early church was egalitarian, but it wasn’t committed to an economic system

By Alexander William Salter. 

"The idea that the teachings of Jesus are akin to socialism has been spreading around the internet for years in the form of memes, chain emails and Facebook posts. Some elected officials have a history of supporting the idea: The Rev. Raphael Warnock, a U.S. senator from Georgia, contended years ago that “the early church was a socialist church.” He’s not alone in holding this misguided belief.

A much-cited passage from the Acts of the Apostles, the first work of church history, has strong socialist overtones. Christian socialists use this passage to argue socialism was a historical reality for the followers of Christ. If they’re right, that has huge implications for a country that remains majority Christian. Fortunately, they’re wrong.

Acts 4:32-35 gives believers a picture of a highly egalitarian church. Among the believers, “no one claimed private ownership of any possessions.” Those who had property sold it and brought it to the church. The proceeds were “distributed to each as any had need.” This sounds almost like the classic Marx line—“from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”—but read a little further.

Acts 5 contains a harrowing account of two church members, Ananias and Sapphira, who sold their property but lied about the price. Confronted in their deceit by St. Peter, they suddenly perish. The passage states they were not punished merely for holding back their wealth. “Were not the proceeds at your disposal?” St. Peter asks, indicating the property and its fruits were theirs. The real lesson is the imperative of absolute truth before God. For those who have received the Holy Spirit, falsehood is perilous.

Later, Acts tells of St. Paul’s missionary journeys, during which he worked as a tentmaker to support his ministry. While not motivated by private profit, Paul nevertheless made recourse to the marketplace. Also, we know from his letters he solicited financial support for the Jerusalem church throughout his travels. Early Christians wouldn’t have been able to donate without producing and trading. There’s scant biblical evidence for a wholesale condemnation of ownership and commerce.

Ultimately claims of early church socialism miss the mark because they conflate two kinds of communities: organizations and orders. Organizations are consciously crafted to achieve the goals of their members. Orders are spontaneous and emergent, arising out of the interactions between organizations. Businesses, educational institutions, charities and communes are organizations. But economic systems like socialism and capitalism are orders.

Calling the church an organization in no way diminishes its divinity. It simply means one can think about the church, in part, as an intentional community with its own canons and customs. This matters greatly for interpreting early church history.

Whether discussing a 21st-century business corporation or a first-century religious society, who gets what is determined by purposefully designed rules. Those rules can be meritocratic (bonuses and stock options) or egalitarian (relief for widows and orphans). They can be consensual (committees, voting) or hierarchical (executives, commands). But they aren’t socialistic. Neither are they capitalistic. Those terms refer to orders, not organizations.

Markets didn’t allocate resources inside the church, but that’s true of any organization. In fact, the whole point of organizations, for-profit or not, is to avoid markets. They’re temporary shelters against the fickle forces of supply and demand. If we call “socialism” all attempts to suppress the market allocation of resources, then even the most profit-hungry firm you can think of is socialist. Zoom in close enough and all organizations look like central planners.

It’s foolish to apply the categories of economic systems to the church. Socialism regiments society, an unplanned give-and-take among countless organizations, according to an all-encompassing economic blueprint. That isn’t the church’s mission. Reconciling all of creation to God in Christ is. While the church has a strong communitarian ethos, it isn’t committed to a specific set of economic institutions. Exploring the church’s internal constitution can be fascinating, and the generosity of the earliest Christians should serve as an example for us. But this has no relevance to the merits of single-payer healthcare or nationalizing railroads.

Knowing whether an economic system comports with Christianity requires careful study of the church’s social teachings, but church history matters too. Historical memory and interpretation are powerful forces for shaping contemporary beliefs. A socialist can be a good Christian, but the narrative of early church socialism is a myth.

Mr. Salter is an economics professor at Texas Tech University, a research fellow at TTU’s Free Market Institute, and a senior fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research."

Pope Francis Has Forgotten the Church’s Own Grand Libertarian Legacy

By Jeffrey A. Tucker of FEE. Excerpts:

"Well, it’s a pretty big deal when the Pope attacks libertarianism by name. It’s even more interesting when my Spanish-language publisher believes that the Pope, in an academic paper, was attacking language used by me in particular, by implication but without citation.

In a choice passage, the Pope says that libertarianism “deceptively proposes a ‘beautiful life’.” The 2nd edition of my book Beautiful Anarchy (Una Bella Anarquia: Como Crear Tu Propia Civilizacion en La Era Digital) just came out in Spanish (the Pope’s native language), with solid sales. It’s not a stretch that my book has been targeted, but you decide (you can download the English version here). 

When the Church anathematized views in the Middle Ages, the Popes were careful specifically to cite the works in question, so that there would be no confusion about the views being condemned (see the Catechism of the Council of Trent, for example). Not so any longer. We are left to guess the identity of the interlocutor, and the Pope is thus free to mischaracterize.

Moreover, I only wish that the Pope’s criticism had some substantive content to grapple with. Libertarians are always up for a good challenge. Sadly, the statement mostly amounts to caricature.

Here is the full context of what Pope Francis said:

    Finally, I cannot but speak of the serious risks associated with the invasion, at high levels of culture and education in both universities and in schools, of positions of libertarian individualism. A common feature of this fallacious paradigm is that it minimizes the common good, that is, “living well”, a “good life” in the community framework, and exalts the selfish ideal that deceptively proposes a “beautiful life”.

    If individualism affirms that it is only the individual who gives value to things and interpersonal relationships, and so it is only the individual who decides what is good and what is bad, then libertarianism, today in fashion, preaches that to establish freedom and individual responsibility, it is necessary to resort to the idea of “self-causation”. Thus libertarian individualism denies the validity of the common good because on the one hand it supposes that the very idea of “common” implies the constriction of at least some individuals, and the other that the notion of “good” deprives freedom of its essence.

    The radicalization of individualism in libertarian and therefore anti-social terms leads to the conclusion that everyone has the “right” to expand as far as his power allows, even at the expense of the exclusion and marginalization of the most vulnerable majority. Bonds would have to be cut inasmuch as they would limit freedom. By mistakenly matching the concept of “bond” to that of “constraint”, one ends up confusing what may condition freedom – the constraints – with the essence of created freedom, that is, bonds or relations, family and interpersonal, with the excluded and marginalized, with the common good, and finally with God.

Wow, this Sounds Grim

An ideology that asserts these things would indeed be terrible. It’s hard to imagine that such an ideology could ever become “fashionable” at all. But of course the Pope only gets away with claiming such things because he defines libertarianism in a way that makes it incredibly easy to attack – which is a solid indicator that the opposed position has been mis-rendered.

And sure enough, what the Pope claims libertarians believe is not only untrue; in some respects, it is actually the opposite of what libertarians believe.

Let me offer my own definition of libertarianism. It is the political theory that freedom and peace serve the common good better than violence and state control, thus suggesting a normative rule: societies and individuals must be left unmolested in their associations and commercial dealings so long as they are not threatening others.

I’m almost certain that most thinkers in the liberal tradition would be happy with that definition.

Is that view strange or exotic, dangerous or radical, to the point that the rise of such thoughts really do constitute a dangerous invasion of culture?

I don’t think so. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, wrote essentially this in the Summa Theologica (2;96:2):

    Wherefore human laws do not forbid all vices, from which the virtuous abstain, but only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained: thus human law prohibits murder, theft and such like.

Libertarianism is not an arcane, peculiar, oddball view of politics.

The Summa was written in the 13th century. His stand for limiting the state, and his championing of human freedom (however inconsistently), marked the beginning of a new era in philosophy, law, and theology. It pointed the way out of the feudal period and toward the emergence of the modern world. The ideas now called “libertarian” were essential building blocks of the political developments that took place over the following 600 years.

Libertarianism is not an arcane, peculiar, oddball view of politics; it is a distillation of the wisdom of a mighty tradition encompassing the experiences of many cultures and the highest thought of the most serious thinkers from the late Middle Ages to the present.

"the term “libertarianism” was a postwar usage that was made necessary because the term liberalism seemed to have been corrupted. That generation made a judgement to bail from the word liberalism if only to distinguish what they believed from what the partisans of state power believed.
Dean Russell in 1955 was among the first to suggest the replacement, a new synonym:

    Many of us call ourselves “liberals.” And it is true that the word “liberal” once described persons who respected the individual and feared the use of mass compulsions. But the leftists have now corrupted that once-proud term to identify themselves and their program of more government ownership of property and more controls over persons. As a result, those of us who believe in freedom must explain that when we call ourselves liberals, we mean liberals in the uncorrupted classical sense. At best, this is awkward and subject to misunderstanding. Here is a suggestion: Let those of us who love liberty trade-mark and reserve for our own use the good and honorable word “libertarian.”"

"when we are talking about libertarianism we are talking about the successor and the living embodiment of liberalism in the classical tradition. Understood in this way, it doesn’t seem so bizarre."
"Catholicism’s role in modern history has been to serve as a benefactor of the liberal cause. From the time of St. Thomas and his successors, the Catholic Church began a long move from its Constantinian tendencies in the first millennium, gradually dispensing with the aspiration to unify Church and state and toward an embrace of the emergent liberal tradition. It occurred first in the realms of banking, when the Church served as a defender of the Medici banking cause against the reactionary forces that tried to stop the dawn of modern commercial life. It liberalized its rule against usury, for example, and defended the rights of property and commercial trade between nations.
The end of slavery was perhaps the greatest triumph of liberalism before the 20th century, and here the Catholic Church had been a force for human rights and justice long before others caught on.

The writings of Bartolomé de las Casas from 1547, for example, continue to inspire with their moral passion against the atrocities against human rights perpetrated by many states. None of the ancient philosophers dared imagine a world of universal equality for all persons, but the Catholic Church did, based on the conviction that all individuals are made in the image and likeness of God and are thereby deserving of certain rights.

The late scholastic tradition of Catholic social thought, centered in Spain, has been frequently credited with giving birth to economic science itself. This was because these scholars were not only moral idealists; they were imminently practical men who sought to understand how the real world works, all in the interests of understanding how people can have better lives. They gradually discovered that the interests of the individual person and the common good were not in conflict but could both be realized through liberalization of all spheres of society."

"the long ethos of Catholicism has been toward favoring exactly what the Pope just denounced: the view that a presumption for liberty over coercion should be the prevailing norm in political life.
It is for this reason that the Catholic Church positioned itself against socialism at the very dawn of idea in the modern world. In 1878, forty years before the Bolshevik Revolution, Pope Leo XIII wrote in Quod Apostolici Muneris that the socialists were plotting to “leave nothing untouched or whole which by both human and divine laws has been wisely decreed for the health and beauty of life.”

Above all, he wrote, the socialists were wrong to “assail the right of property sanctioned by natural law; and by a scheme of horrible wickedness, while they seem desirous of caring for the needs and satisfying the desires of all men, they strive to seize and hold in common whatever has been acquired either by title of lawful inheritance, or by labor of brain and hands, or by thrift in one's mode of life.”"

"Catholicism “holds that the right of property and of ownership, which springs from nature itself, must not be touched and stands inviolate. For she knows that stealing and robbery were forbidden in so special a manner by God, the Author and Defender of right, that He would not allow man even to desire what belonged to another, and that thieves and despoilers, no less than adulterers and idolaters, are shut out from the Kingdom of Heaven.”"
"Vatican II further affirmed that seeking a better life through liberty is at the very core of the human experience. This aspiration requires certain institutional conditions, such as the right of private property. The inspirational and beautiful document Gaudium et Spes (1965), traditionally seen as a masterpiece of exposition that sums up the spirit of the Council, said the following:

    Private property or some ownership of external goods confers on everyone a sphere wholly necessary for the autonomy of the person and the family, and it should be regarded as an extension of human freedom. Lastly, since it adds incentives for carrying on one's function and charge, it constitutes one of the conditions for civil liberties."

"The seeking of the good of all does not require the violation of individual rights and interests.
This concern over the "common destination" of goods seems to be at the core Pope Francis’s concern is the idea that libertarianism pushes the rights and interests of individuals against the common good. This is a frustrating point to make because it has been the major project of the liberal tradition (from the Scottish Enlightenment to the present) to argue that these are not inconsistent, that one need not be set against the other. The seeking of the good of all does not require the violation of individual rights and interests, and the assertion of individual rights and interests need not conflict with the good of all.

Consider the words of the man who is widely considered the leading libertarian genius of the 20th century, Ludwig von Mises. In his 1927 book Liberalism, he argued that only liberalism seeks the good of all, as opposed to the interests of one special interest or another.

    With the advent of liberalism came the demand for the abolition of all special privileges. The society of caste and status had to make way for a new order in which there were to be only citizens with equal rights. What was under attack was no longer only the particular privileges of the different castes, but the very existence of all privileges. Liberalism tore down the barriers of rank and status and liberated man from the restrictions with which the old order had surrounded him…."

"The liberals maintained that with the elimination of all the artificial distinctions of caste and status, the abolition of all privileges, and the establishment of equality before the law, nothing else stands in the way of the peaceful cooperation of all members of society, because then their rightly understood, long-run interests coincide."

"It is a fact of human life that every single individual is different. You could say that it was designed to be that way. The great discovery of liberalism was to observe that it is possible for individuals to pursue their interests in a way that does not sever community attachments but rather strengthens them. That this is true is ever more obvious in our times. Technology has made it so. Curated lives have coincided with ever more community connection across groups and nations."
"It is the great burden of the liberal tradition to forever explain that the path toward community runs through the pursuit of individual interests in voluntary cooperation with others."
"To be sure, liberalism cannot and does not promise the salvation of souls; that is the domain of the great religions. Liberalism does not seek to displace the role of religion in society. It only seeks to provide the best possible conditions for the flourishing of human society in a material sense through the building of freedom as the essential framework for the good of all.

As Mises says, liberalism  “promises nothing that exceeds what can be accomplished in society and through society. It seeks to give men only one thing, the peaceful, undisturbed development of material well-being for all, in order thereby to shield them from the external causes of pain and suffering as far as it lies within the power of social institutions to do so at all. To diminish suffering, to increase happiness: that is its aim.”"