time finding allies within the Catholic tradition. They are easily

able to quote from many non-Catholic writers, men who have no

connection to or understanding of the Catholic social tradition, such

as Ludwig von Mises, Israel Kirzner, and Murray Rothbard, but when

tradition, they find themselves at a loss. There is, of course, a reason

for this: capitalism is not a Catholic theory and finds no basis in

Catholic thought. But in their search for justifications of their economic

system, Catholic capitalists often seize upon one small group of

scholastics from the University of Salamanca, claiming their support

for their supposedly thoroughly Catholic theory.

It is a fact that these scholastics existed; that much is certain. Little

more is available. Most of their work has never been translated into

English from its original late medieval Latin, and consequently most of

the capitalists who quote from them are forced to do so second or third

hand. John Sharpe notes that most capitalists quoting from the Spanish

opinions of those Scholastics. Sharpe alleges that Chafuen “at least in

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some instances” “omits the context surrounding his citations from the

able to isolate several quotations from these scholastics demonstrating

their stark disagreement with capitalist theory, a few of which we will

examine now.

First, it is central to capitalist theory that price ought to be completely

uncontrolled, and that undercutting other merchants by slashing

prices is perfectly just. St. Bernardine, however, whom capitalists

toward other participants in the market to sell at a lower price than is

anti-capitalist audacity to declare that “the just price of major commodities

of these eminent medieval thinkers; those interested in this data

are encouraged to read Sharpe’s excellent article. So perhaps the quotations

that Catholic capitalists like to throw out are not the entire

story.

While neither of these men were Spaniards, they were both part

of the medieval school of so-called capitalists that Catholic capitalists

claim laid the foundations of current libertarian economic theory.

They are eminent medieval philosophers and theologians who are often

quoted in defense of capitalism yet were clearly against, simply

from these simple and brief facts, certain pivotal aspects of the capitalist

milieu. While these brief quotations are not dispositive on the

opinions of the medieval thinkers on capitalism, they certainly tell us

something about the selective quoting of capitalists on this subject,

and that perhaps the thinkers whom they claim as support would not

be so unilaterally in favor of capitalism as capitalists would have us

believe. Searching for support in Catholic philosophy is admirable; but

if support is not there, it is better to admit it than to twist the words

of saints into one’s own favor.

Furthermore, the summit of all scholastic theology, St. Thomas

Aquinas, could himself never be called a capitalist. While he certainly

supported the institution of private property (which distributists also,

opposed the sort of free-for-all Darwinian marketplace that

capitalists advocate. In the first place, St. Thomas’s theories on exchange

presuppose a theory of the just price, which contradicts the

capitalist notion that a thing has no worth aside from what someone

is willing to pay for it. St. Thomas teaches that “to sell a thing for

more than its worth, or to buy it for less than its worth, is in itself

price may be affected by the circumstance of the buyer or the seller,

Catholics cannot derive some theory that the just price of a given thing

is entirely dependent upon relative circumstances from the teachings

of St. Thomas Aquinas, which means that capitalism cannot claim him

as a progenitor.

Furthermore, St. Thomas argues that the exchange of money for

money, which capitalists claim is a perfectly legitimate exercise, is actually

“may intend the moderate gain which he seeks to acquire by trading

for the upkeep of his household, or for the assistance of the needy: or

again, a man may take to trade for some public advantage. . . and seek

type of exchange, of money for money, is not only not virtuous, but

vision of monetary exchange? While there may indeed be some isolated

medieval thinkers who supported certain aspects of capitalist thought,

it was both far from general and far from capitalist.

Even aside, however, from the very significant doubts about the

proto-capitalism of these eminent Catholic men, when capitalists invoke

them against the economic teaching of the Church the only Catholic

the thought of a few of her thinkers, even if they did happen to do their

thinking in the most Catholic country in the world during its golden

age. The Church is bound by the teaching of Christ, which is passed

down from the Apostles and enunciated by the authoritative teachings

Salamanca. No one argues that these men were brilliant and

how brilliant or holy they might have been. Our Lord entrusted the

deposit of faith to the Church, not to philosophers and theologians;

when the two are in conflict, we must always hear the Church, or we

Why did the Church allow this debate to fester, then? Why did she

not condemn the teachings of these scholastics so long ago, if capitalism

was truly as harmful a theory as distributists seem to think it to be?

While there were systems in existence that were beginning to take

on certain characteristics of capitalism, there was nowhere any system

which could truly be called capitalist, and condemning capitalism was

therefore entirely unnecessary. Why did the Church not condemn liberalism

in the sixteenth century, when its very first proponents were

appearing? Because no liberal society existed in the sixteenth century;

in fact, no really liberal society existed until the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries, which was exactly when the Church did begin

to condemn it. The holy Roman pontiffs are divinely protected from

error, but they are not granted prescience; they cannot pre-emptively

condemn things before they become a real danger.

Furthermore, in the sixteenth century there were bigger fish to fry.

hundred years, the biggest threat to the Catholic faith was Protestantism,

not an obscure economic theory that may or may not have

been held by some scholastics in Spain and that the rulers of Spain

a widely expansive new world, stretching from the north pole

to the south, full of unconverted pagans, and claimed it for the most

powerful Catholic country in the world. Millions of Indians had never

heard the Name of Christ, and “there is no other name under heaven

herself wholeheartedly to their conversion, most spectacularly with the

threatened by one of the most virulent heresies the world had ever seen,

and with two entire continents of people who had never even heard the

Name of Christ, the Church is expected to condemn an economic theory

that almost nobody had ever heard of and which it is not even

certain that anybody held? Of course she did not; she focused herself

on what was most important, and withheld her condemnation until it

became necessary—and did not fail to deliver that condemnation as

soon as those ideas became prominent.

The Church has historically always condemned heresies reactively,

not preemptively. We find in the Gospels no condemnation of Arianism;

that waited until Arianism had actually arisen, in the fourth

century. We find no proclamation of Our Lady as the Mother of God

in the Gospels; that waited until this doctrine was denied, in the fifth

century. The entire deposit of faith is contained in the Church by the

death of the last Apostle; that does not, however, mean that every doctrine

in that deposit must be immediately proclaimed and the contrary

such doctrine is brought into question. St. John tells us that “there

are also many other things which Jesus did; which, if they were written

every one, the world itself, I think, would not be able to contain

proclaiming all of these doctrines and condemning the contraries, she

would certainly have no time for her primary function, the shepherding

of the souls of the flock of Christ. So she does what is necessary, and

the rest of her time she prays, and fasts, and teaches the faithful what

Christ has passed down through the Apostles. Her condemnations are

no less forceful for being issued when needed; and her anathemas apply

to all no matter when they were pronounced.