What type of failure?

When we look at the economic "collapse" of the previous year, and its continuing effects into this year, we need to ask: Was it only an economic failure?

A perspective that does not seem to be taken by anyone (not even those pesky conservative Catholic bloggers) is the moral failure that preceded the economic failure.

As one commenter on a recent Facebook (c) has indicated, this collapse was caused by greed. Greed is a vice. As such the economic failure can be rooted as a failure of virtue.

In this sense if we want to provide a long term resolution to this economic collapse, it will not be throwing good tax-payers money after a partisan "wish-list" of an economic "stimulus," but rather a return to teaching the virtues necessary for people to participate in a democracy and a free-market economy.

The Church is committed to these political and economic forms, as made clear by the teaching of John Paul II in Centesimus Annus. This saintly Pope also recognized the inherent danger of these systems when they are divorced from the truth of man and society. When either a democracy or a free-market economy no longer serve the common good, but individual special interest they respectively become the dictators of an arbitrary relativism and spend themselves into destruction.

John Paul II teaches in the same letter that the participants in democracy and free-market economies must develop certain virtues. The virtues he lists are not religious in nature, but have clear rational connections to a properly functioning democracy and free-market economy. These virtues can be taught in a religiously pluralistic society like the United States. History testifies to this, since these virtues have been taught in the United States up until 1968 (what was the point of all those high school civics classes, but this?). Why we have chosen not to teach them after that is a complicated issue.

As such the Pope and our founding fathers of this great nation (John Adams and Thomas Jefferson especially) are of great agreement. What was true back in 1776 when we threw off the yoke of the monarch, is true today: The democractic form of government -- "government for the people, of the people and by the people" and free-market economics depend upong a "virtuous citizenary."

May God bless for being attentive to these words.