The rise of the Catholic Left is in many ways the overarching story of the Church Crisis Era. Despite his statement early on that the Church should not become a “pitiful NGO,” Pope Francis has reigned over an era where “Immanentize the Eschaton” (to quote the late William F. Buckley) might as well be on most episcopal crests. The desire to virtue-signal on issues like immigration is now often equated to fighting intrinsic evils like abortion or even the basic mandate to save souls.
One manifestation of this “seamless garment” cultural Marxism can be found in so-called “shareholder activist” groups: bodies which often have financial or fraternal ties to George Soros and sometimes use community organizer techniques perfected at the feet of Saul Alinsky. For Catholics, the one to keep an eye on is the “Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility.” Led by Rev. Seamus Finn, a priest of the rapidly shrinking Missionary Oblates of Mary, the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility is a collection of left-wing religious activists who harass companies into adopting woke positions in contravention to both the company’s fiduciary responsibilities and to common sense. Of course, this community activism is bathed in the soft, bourgeois heresy of the social gospel: an old tactic used by increasingly old activists.
The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility is comprised of 300 member organizations from across the religious Left. They file hundreds of politically charged shareholder resolutions at the annual board meetings of publicly traded companies. Lest you think the group is concerned with core religious teachings like pro-life activism or religious liberty, their own website informs us that the resolutions are much more likely to be in the area of “climate change, human rights, corporate governance, financial practices, and other social and environmental concerns.”
In other words, this is a liberal baby boomer organization pushing socialism as its own man-made creed.
A recent example of such activism reared its ugly head recently as a front group for the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility filed a shareholder resolution with the American Outdoor Brands Corporation, more famously known by its prior name “Smith and Wesson.” The resolution would force the firearms manufacturer to “adopt a comprehensive policy articulating our company’s commitment to respect human rights, and which includes a description of proposed due diligence processes to identify, assess, prevent and mitigate actual and potential adverse human rights impacts.”
The resolution then goes on to define “human rights” by an anti-gun United Nations standard. What manufacturing a legal product connected to a constitutional right has to do with human rights is anyone’s guess.
The United Nations “Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights,” on which the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility resolution is based, is interpreted by the draft to say that gun ownership is at the very least a near occasion of a human rights violation. Forcing the company to admit this is the case would expose it to unlimited litigation, something which one can only assume is an intentional tactic. The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility is misleading stockholders here and potentially endangering the 401(k), the IRA, and other retirement savings of ordinary Americans invested in this manufacturer.
What should Catholics think of tactics like this? The Church document which best lays out the way we should view business and corporate responsibility is the encyclical Centesimus Annus, one of the most well-known writings of Pope John Paul II’s reign. The document does an excellent job striking a balance between the good of business endeavors, and the equally important need for businesses to serve the common good of man.
Paragraph 42 of the document contrasts two types of capitalism. The “bad” capitalism is one in which “freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious.” We might call this the soulless capitalism of a large, multinational corporation which really has no concern for its workers, its customers, or those who get in the way of making a quick buck.
The “good” kind of capitalism is known as the “free economy” (the nonprofit organization I am president of, the Center for a Free Economy, is named after this section). Also called a “business economy” or a “market economy,” it is defined as “an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector.”
Is this really what the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility is striving toward? Are their resolutions about this or that left-wing cause celebre helping to further the human dignity-centric free economy the late pope is writing about in Centesimus Annus? When was the last time this group of deeply convicted religious consciences pushed a shareholder resolution expressing opposition to abortion, or euthanasia, or state discrimination based on a traditional religious creed? There is little doubt that these, and not gun politics, are the places where large multinational corporations are threatening “human freedom in its totality … the core of which is ethical and religious.”
To make a fairly obvious point, American Catholics have no business citing the United Nations, one of the most anti-Catholic, pro-abortion organizations in the world. Catholic shareholder activist groups should also be more honest with their fellow Catholics about the range of prudential judgments that can be brought to bear in such matters. There is no “Catholic” position on gun control, for example — Catholics of goodwill are free to believe a wide variety of thoughts on the subject. As Americans, we should recognize that adopting the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility’s principles will make us all poorer and less free, and that will hurt those with the lowest incomes worst of all.
There’s been a lot made about post-liberalism and a new skepticism to capitalism among faithful Catholics, and that’s all to the good. The Catholic Church should not be arm in arm with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But neither should it be peddling peripheral, worldly liberal hokum and passing it off as if it represents the priorities the Church has for businesses at the service of man’s God-imaged dignity.
The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility has been doing just that for nearly half a century. They would do well to remember a final admonition from Pope John Paul’s document: “There can be no genuine solution to the ‘social question’ apart from the Gospel.”
Ryan Ellis (@RyanLEllis) is president of the Center for a Free Economy.
