Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

economic realm; integration in the realm of marriage and family, in the realm of free time,
and not least in the religious realm. 23
SECTION THREE: THE ECONOMY
Preliminary Remarks
By economy we understand the totality of institutions and procedures for the planned, permanent,
and assured supplying of human needs with material goods and services, which render
possible their divinely appointed development for individuals and social groups. Christian
social teaching occupies itself with the economy, in which most people practice their profession,
in both an ontological and a deontological (normative) respect. Of the ontological disciplines
that concern themselves with the ontic states of affairs in the realm of the economy,
neither economic geography (production geography, trade geography, geography of communications,
etc.), which deals with the terrestrial and spatial restrictions on the economy; nor
economic statistics, which grasps and evaluates numerically the scope of production, consumption,
trade, commerce, and finance; nor economic history, which investigates the historical
change of economic forms and economic systems; nor economic psychology, which applies
the findings of psychology to certain phenomena of economic life (consumer psychology,
advertising psychology, etc.); nor theoretical economics, which, as pure theory, researches
the essential relations and connections of the economic process, belongs to the true
field of duties of Christian social teaching. Christian social teaching will indeed consult the
established findings of all these disciplines, but pushes into the foreground that question
which touches upon the concerns of the philosophy and also the theology of economics,
namely: What is the ultimate meaning of the economy as such?
Of the deontological (normative) disciplines, economic ethics as the science of the moral behavior
of economically active man belongs to Christian social teaching in the narrower sense,
whereas economic policy and economic pedagogy per se lie outside its realm. An attempt has
been made to juxtapose economy and morality in an unrelated way. „Economic progress,“
thought Werner Sombart, for example, has priority over „moral oughtness.“ All „moral impulses“
and all „feelings of justice“ have to come to terms with the progress of the economy.
The production capacity of the economy is decisive; then one can be „moral or whatever
else“-a thesis with fateful consequences. Even though economics and moral science, as Quadragesimo
anno teaches, „employs each its own principles in its own sphere,“ and even if the
Church does not pass judgment on so-called „economic laws,“ which only say something
about the relation of means and ends and thus indicate what human effort „can attain in the
economic field and by what means“, it is, nevertheless, an error to say that the economic and
moral orders are so distinct from and alien to each other that the former in no way depends on
the latter“ (Quadragesimo anno, 42). There is no abstract economy severed from man and his
conscience. All economic activity involves human decision and is thus subject to the moral
law. Christian ethics is certainly not the domain of economics, but is nevertheless its norm.
Three complexes of problems touch in a particular way upon the ontological and deontological
concerns of Christian social teaching: the material end of the economy, the order of the
economy, and the distribution process of the economy.
23 Cf Joseph Höffner, Die Entwicklungen im Schicksal und Lebensgefühl der Arbeiterschaft und der Wandel der
sozialpolitischen Leitbilder, in idem, Gesellschaftspolitik aus christlicher Weltverantwortung (Münster in
Westphalia, 1966), 273-289; idem, Die Verantwortung der Kirche für die Arbeitswelt (Cologne, 1983)
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