OK, the Marx in question is not Karl (or Groucho for that matter), but the archbishop of Munich and Freising, Reinhard Marx. According to John Allen, he had some choice words for the American right. Asked about the peculiar inclination of American neo-conservatives to reflexively oppose government involvement in the marekt, he noted that while the Church supported “freedom, democracy, and pluralism,” that position “has nothing to do with reducing Christianity to religious ideology propping up the market economy.” Somebody tell Michael Novak.
He also makes a point close to my heart: “[Capitalism] doesn’t conserve social and cultural situations as it found them, it changes them and often distorts them by introducing new paradigms and clichés.” Indeed, what the neo-cons claim as conservative dogma is really a reflection of radical individualism, a bastard child of the enlightenment, and condemned by the Church alongside radical collectivism as the “twin rocks of shipwreck“. As many will no doubt note, the Church does not condemn the free market per se. That is true. But the market must be underpinned by caritas, by solidarity, by respect for each and every person. A reflexive stance against “big government” in favor of “individual freedom” strays from these values. What is really a means to an end becomes a rigid ideology. And I believe it is this rigid ideology that turns archbishop Marx against the American neo-conservative position.
Marx also praises the social market. He claimed that “it’s part of the solution to the problem” and that what saved Germany during the recent global economic crisis is “a welfare state that works: insurance for the unemployed, benefits for those laid off, support for those with odd jobs, public health care.” This is the foundation of social democracy and indeed, christian democracy. This kind of statement would not be news to Catholics in any country outside the United States, but as American Catholics have drifted ever further from their roots toward the dominant individualist ethic, toward the dominant Protestant culture, this divergence is bound to happen.
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