From a review of Centesimus Annus by George Weigel over at Crisis Magazine:
What else did Centesimus Annus teach that remains urgent and relevant today?
John Paul taught that what the Church proposes is not simply the free society, but the free and virtuous society. It takes a certain kind of people, possessed of certain virtues, to make free politics and free economics work toward genuine human flourishing. Democracy and the market are not machines that can run by themselves, so a vibrant public moral-cultural life is essential to disciplining both the market and democratic politics. In fact, in the Catholic vision of the tripartite free and virtuous society — democratic polity, free economy, vibrant moral-cultural sector — it’s the latter that’s most important over the long haul. The habits of heart and mind of a people are the best defense against their allowing their political and economic liberties to become self-destructive…
I was thinking of any way I could say that better, but I couldn’t – so there’s the quote. It really says it all. Details to be fleshed out, to be sure, but the most important thing is that morality rules all. Power and wealth without morality is destructive – including, ultimately, destructive of itself. If there is not a transcendent concept of right and wrong – of things which simply must or must not be done, regardless of what we might prefer at the moment – then anything we do will go wrong. There is no escaping this – and the moral collapse we’ve had, as well as the economic collapse hard upon it, reveals this truth.
By various means we rejected all morality – We thought we could have it all. We thought we could have unending power, ever expanding wealth and endless good times without engaging in hard work, without keeping our word (to spouses, family members, friends and fellow citizens), without a thought for the destruction going on all around us. We watched with indifference as our society became a moral sewer of welfare, pornography, rampant greed and callous disregard for life…the mess we’re in now (both in terms of our collapsed economy and our disgusting politics) is the natural result of what we’ve done.
All of our senses and all of our experiences are calling us back to right conduct. We can’t be free and we can’t be prosperous unless we are, in the main, good people. Whatever expedient you seek to fix the economic and political problems we have, we’ll never get anywhere until we start acting morally.
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