Writing in (1988) California Management Review 124, Manuel Velasquez and Gerald Cavanagh focuses on the  1986, book-length,  “letter” by the Catholic Bishops of the US on moral issues, particularly social justice, posed by the economy. It outlines the drafting process for the letter, which began as an explicit balancing of earlier criticism of Marxism with a similar assessment of Capitalism, but evolved into a more pragmatic consideration of the US economy in practice.

One of the factors of the first draft that attracted criticism was the inclusion in the letter of specific policy proposals, with the National Review considering that their inclusion led to the bishops “inflicting severe wounds on the credibility of their Church [and] squandering their spiritual capital”; and conservatives criticising this part of the letter as being outside the competence of the bishops – being economic rather than theological. Velasquez and Cavanagh point out that part of the impact of the letter was a redefining of some issues as “moral issues – and therefore as issues on which the Church has a right to speak – topics (such as employment, world trade, farm policy, poverty and collaboration) that were being discussed in public forums largely as economic issues”.

The Bishops may have attempted this redefinition, but an obvious reaction is to ask whether they made it stick. My own work on the contribution of the Lord Bishop of Sodor and Man to debates in the Manx Tynwald found that the areas of special expertise that the Bishop was seen as contributing were on technical issues of the Anglican Church, and as a spiritual guide on “moral issues”. These were defined fairly narrowly, and other members of Tynwald were quite keen to keep the Bishop within bounds. Another query is whether these categorisations are mutually exclusive – can an issue not be both a moral one and an economic one? One where the voice of the Bishops may reflect a particular specialism, but one which needs to be read, even by adherents, alongside those of economists?