When, at the end of January, the Vatican Justice and Peace Commission advised debtor countries of the Third World that they were not always morally obliged to repay their international creditors, the announcement did not set off even a tiny ripple in the world’s money markets. But when Reagan blunders yet again or Thatcher slips back in the opinion polls the major stock markets react nervously. The Church is somehow excluded; it does not play any role in the making of economic decisions, though, today, these so deeply influence our personal lives. And Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes accepts at least one of the basic presuppositions of modern economics as a good one: progress ought to be made—albeit it ought to be made within the moral order and oriented to serve mankind. We can read subsections 64 and 65 as a criticism of the modern economic and social process, but at the same time they seem to approve fundamentally of what they criticise.

What the preachers, theologians and synods of 400 years ago had to say about economic practices seems to have had relevance. This is not to say that people did what they were told, but, even when they neglected Church warnings and prohibitions, at least they knew that they did so. Today economics is thought to be a science, a field reserved for experts only, an autonomous process clearly separated from the contents of the Christian tradition.