Anthony Annett is a Gabelli Fellow at Fordham's Gabelli School of Business.
Economist Anthony Annett has delivered a book that should be required reading not only for those of us who have long been interested in Catholic social doctrine, but for anyone who is serious about bringing their Catholic faith to bear on decisions relating to public life. Cathonomics: How Catholic Tradition Can Create a More Just Economy should especially find its way onto the required reading list at every Catholic business school.
As Annett relates, after the mountains of evidence of financial wrongdoings that led to the 2008 economic meltdown, economist Luigi Zingales asked, pointedly "whether business schools incubated criminals." The approach to economics Annett advocates in this book would keep such an incubation from happening in the first place.
Full disclosure: Back when I lived in Washington, Annett and I were both parishioners at St. Matthew's Cathedral and we became friends. He also knows I would never agree to review a book I was not prepared to criticize.
The opening chapters will be familiar to regular readers of NCR. Annett surveys the great encyclicals that form the building blocks of Catholic social teaching, but first he looks to the roots of Catholic social doctrine in both the Scriptures and the intellectual traditions of the church. This is a step that too many advocates of Catholic social teaching neglect. Catholic social doctrine did not drop out of the sky in 1891 when Pope Leo XIII issued Rerum Novarum. It is rooted in notions of justice drawn from the Hebrew Scriptures, Aristotle's conceptualization of the common good, the Gospel's concern for the poor, and the great theological synthesis of Aristotelian ethics and Catholic doctrine achieved by St. Thomas Aquinas. Annett brings all these threads together masterfully.
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