The Formation of the Lay Commission

When he wrote prospective members in March 1984, Chairman William Simon told them that the Lay Commission “will be entirely non-partisan and will in no way serve as a platform for narrow interests.” Simon’s assurances did not touch on the fact that the new group was well funded, and that the staff and office space came entirely from conservative foundations and wealthy donors. Its official sponsoring organization was the American Catholic Committee, a small conservative group, but the John M. Olin Foundation provided the most substantial support. Its executive vice president at the time was Michael Joyce, a former social studies teacher from a Cleveland family of Democrats. A textbook company employed Joyce in the 1970s before leading neoconservative Irving Kristol hired him, first at the Institute of Educational Affairs and then at the Olin Foundation. He was the conservative equivalent of a union organizer: strategic and practical. He described his work style as “the style of the toddler and adolescent: fight, fight, fight—rest [then] get up, fight, fight, fight. . . . No one ever accused me of being pleasant. I made a difference.” After hatching his plan for the Lay Commission with Simon, Joyce went on to serve as its executive assistant.^{Footnote 8}

Simon was himself a prominent member of the conservative Republican establishment. In his two best-selling books, A Time For Truth (1978) and A Time for Action (1980), the former treasury secretary in the Ford administration explained that the nation’s problems were caused by a combination of excessive government regulation and spending (“enormous, rudderless”) and a general lack of purpose (“We have lost the compass bearings of religious faith and patriotic affirmation”). Simon was a free-market enthusiast. “When men are left free by the state to engage in productive action guided by self-interest above all they do create the most efficient and powerful production system that is possible to their society,” he wrote. Like Joyce, Simon was not an intellectual or scholar. In fact, he ridiculed “Impecunious Ph.D.’s who destroyed the economy,” while people like him were the “Ph.D.-less financiers who fought to save the economy.” After his service in the federal government ended, Simon became treasurer and then president of the U.S. Olympic Committee. He headed up the Executive Advisory Council, a small group that planned Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign. He resumed working on Wall Street as well. Along with a partner, Simon carried out one of the first high-profile leveraged buyouts when, in 1982, they paid $80.5 million—almost all of it borrowed—to buy Gibson Greetings, a card maker.^{Footnote 9}

The task of researching and writing Toward the Future fell to the Lay Commission’s vice chairman, Michael Novak. It was a job that well suited him. Having authored a sharp rebuttal to the bishops’ 1982 pastoral on war and peace (Joyce and Simon were co-signers of Novak’s document), he was already meeting with theologians about Catholic approaches to the economy when Joyce wrote him to help form the Lay Commission. Novak was a former seminarian and academic, the author of more than two dozen books of fiction, theology, history, and social criticism, and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. The grandchild of Slovakian immigrants in the coal-mining region of western Pennsylvania, Novak left the seminary shortly before ordination and enrolled at Harvard University, where he received a master’s degree in history and philosophy of religion. Energized by Vatican II and the New Left, Novak was a self-described socialist who was active in ecumenism and the anti–Vietnam War movement.^{Footnote 10}

Over the course of the 1970s, he turned toward conservatism. It is not entirely clear what motivated this remarkable shift. “Nothing spectacular happened,” Novak insisted. The process was one of “observations of human affairs and more intense reflection on economic matters.” He noted that his commitment to socialism was shaped by “a nostalgia for the medieval village” and he appreciated the left’s “ideal of community . . . its revulsion against democratic capitalism’s lack of community.” Novak began to doubt that socialism could realize this ideal (in his 2013 memoir, he wrote that it was “parasitical”). As his hope in a democratic socialism faded, he came to appreciate capitalism, however flawed. “I discovered I believe in sin,” Novak revealed in a Washington Post essay in 1976 entitled “A Closet Capitalist Confesses.” He would not, however, accept a coarse and heartless capitalism. It would be the kind of capitalism that was “modified and made intelligent and public-spirited, because it makes the world free for sinners.”^{Footnote 11}

In his most influential book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982), Novak explained that the form he had in mind—“democratic capitalism”—was compatible with both Christianity and American values. It depended on three elements. The first was the predominately market system of competition and profit making. The second was a democratic polity that provided, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed about America in the 1830s, a balance of liberty and equality. Novak described the exceptional nature of America—its expansiveness, absence of a calcified class structure, and limited government—as allowing for mobility. He was at the forefront of a conservative reprise of the “Americanism” debate that dominated the Catholic Church in the late nineteenth century. Where “Americanism” opponents—including Pope Leo XIII—condemned it at the time for its embrace of modernism or liberalism, Novak focused on the founding American values of equality, liberty, and religious freedom that would allow faith to flourish in a pluralistic society.^{Footnote 12}

The third component was a moral-cultural system that encouraged a work ethic, individual initiative, honesty, and respect for property. It checked greed and corrosive individualism by nurturing generosity, compassion, integrity, and concern for the common good. Novak embraced French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain’s “integral humanism,” which urged the cultivation of a rich associational or communal spirit. This, Maritain offered, would steer a middle course between statism and libertarianism. In democratic capitalist societies, Novak wrote, “humans have the capacity to see themselves as others see them, and to hold themselves to standards which transcend their own selfish inclinations.” On those rare occasions that it stumbled, American capitalism still contributed to human betterment. Novak reflected on this in discussing his The Guns of Lattimer, a book on coal owners’ violent reaction to a Pennsylvania coal miners’ strike in the late 1890s. Even the mine owners, whose acknowledged an “unsavory role” during the strike that resulted in sheriffs and armed deputies killing nineteen unarmed immigrant strikers, “must . . . be given credit for the inventive genius which opened new worlds to those they ‘exploited.’”^{Footnote 13}

In the spring of 1984, Simon and Novak called upon these business leaders to join the Lay Commission in defense of democratic capitalism. Those who agreed to serve included high-ranking corporate chief executives, investors, and real estate developers such as Joe Haggar, president of clothing manufacturer Haggar Company, Edward Littlejohn, member of the corporate advisory board of Pfizer, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, and Steven Rothmeier, president of Northwest Airlines. In addition to a handful of lawyers and those in the publishing industry, Alexander Haig Jr., former secretary of state, and Clare Boothe Luce, former congresswoman and ambassador, joined them, as did faculty and administrators from a handful of colleges (none of them Catholic institutions). There was not much diversity in the group. Although two union leaders agreed to join, they withdrew before the first meeting. The wealthy men who constituted a significant majority of the membership (there were only three women) helped to fund their work. So too did conservative foundations such as the Bradley Foundation and the Earhart Foundation, among whose earliest grant recipient was pioneering free-market scholar Friedrich von Hayek.^{Footnote 14}

Lay Commission members moved into the national spotlight in the middle of 1984 without apology. “Our very Baptism gives us, as the Second Vatican Council made plain in talking about the new age of the laity, a responsibility to bear witness to the whole Church, our experiences,” Novak told those gathered at the group’s first meeting, convened in June at New York’s Plaza Hotel. It was a novel sight: not since the 1889 Catholic Lay Congress in Baltimore had lay Catholics gathered formally and independent of the clergy. At that event participants marked the 100th anniversary of the first Catholic diocese in the United States and extolled the compatibility of American citizenship with Catholic identity. The Lay Commission’s task was more difficult, since it would be offering a perspective on the Church’s social teaching at odds with its bishops. They felt justified in doing so. Novak explained on several occasions that on matters of doctrine central to the faith, “the teaching of the bishops is clear and supreme when in conformity with that of the Holy Father and the whole college of bishops.” On matters pertaining to the “social order,” however, the hierarchy’s teaching was “necessary and fruitful, although more engaged with matters fraught with ambiguity and danger of error.” In this second area, he argued that, if necessary, they must correct the bishops. William Simon was blunter than Novak in charging that the Pastoral Letter was ecclesiastical overreaching: “Bishops have no particular authority in addressing [the] U.S. economy. Economics is the particular province of laymen who have expertise on how the world functions.” For Simon, the bishops’ efforts had taken on a partisan tinge. Writing to John O’Connor, archbishop of New York, he charged that the national bishops conference was engaged in political lobbying. “Should there not continue to be a separation of church and state?” he asked.^{Footnote 15}

Private Lobbying and Public Debates

Even as they began work on their own document, the lay group attempted to leverage their influence with individual bishops and powerful church leaders in the hopes of stopping work on Economic Justice for All or at least modifying the bishops’ criticisms of American capitalism. “Catholics throughout the country should express their conscientious judgments to their local bishops,” Novak instructed readers of the conservative National Review. Some in the Lay Commission heeded Novak’s suggestions, including Robert Buckley, president of Allegheny International, a multinational manufacturing company. He reported that his bishop was “deeply interested” in the Lay Commission’s perspective. Simon used a discussion with his bishop in New Jersey about Catholic schools (“I do a great deal of fundraising for things like this”) as an opportunity to explain the deficiencies of the bishops’ position. Several bishops, including those at the helm in California, New Mexico, and Louisiana dioceses, shared their criticisms of their fellow bishops’ work with the Lay Commission. At their national meetings, however, bishops in the nation’s nearly two hundred dioceses approved by wide margins the drafts put before them. Nor was Simon able to get William Wilson, U.S. ambassador to the Holy See (and Ronald Reagan’s close friend), to support the Lay Commission’s efforts. Wilson agreed with him that the bishops were “out of touch with the younger generation . . . [which] not only understand capitalism, but support it.” He explained that, given his official position, he could not provide a public endorsement. “I had mistakenly thought that perhaps the creation of this commission might tend to serve as a moderating force in their letter,” Simon told fellow commission members. “I guess that’s not going to happen, is it?”^{Footnote 16}

Novak’s lobbying of Archbishop Pio Laghi, papal envoy to the United States, proved fruitless as well. He had reason to be optimistic about Laghi’s support: he was a leading conservative and consummate Vatican insider, although he spent most of his time abroad, including six years in Argentina in the 1970s as a papal envoy during the worst excess of the country’s military dictatorship. Novak corresponded frequently with the diplomat and was grateful to Laghi for putting him in touch with sympathetic Church officials during a 1984 visit as part of a Reagan administration “citizens panel” helping to determine whether the United States should withdraw from UNESCO, a United Nations agency. In a letter marked “confidential” that he sent Laghi shortly after the release of Economic Justice for All, Novak wrote that the bishops’ “tone” was “often excessively accusatory [emphasis in original] in the style of the American left.” He paired the bishops’ work with that of liberal Protestant organizations such as the World Council of Churches. Novak invoked Cold War characterizations in his warning that “care should be taken not to fuel the anti-American rhetoric so common at the United Nations, among the Marxists, and pervasive in the American media since Vietnam.” The historical record is silent on how Laghi handled Novak’s advice. In true diplomatic style, the seasoned Laghi responded in a polite and noncommittal manner. If Laghi worked behind the scenes on their behalf, it was unsuccessful. Pope John Paul II held a single discussion of the Pastoral Letter with a small delegation of American bishops, including Archbishop Weakland, during which he raised no objections.^{Footnote 17}

In an effort to paper over the growing public animosity, Novak insisted that the Lay Commission’s efforts were not a rebuttal to the yet unseen draft, and that they worked well with Weakland. The archbishop “is a fine man and he’s been very cooperative, [and] welcomed our efforts with delight,” he told one audience. And yet, both sides traded accusations that the other misrepresented their views and promoted dangerous caricatures of them. In a memo to prepare them for a meeting with Weakland, for example, Michael Joyce counseled the Lay Commission to “acknowledge the needs of the poor, and not permit the Bishops to take the ‘high ground’ on the subject. We should be aware that we are being portrayed in the press as indifferent to the poor.” (Weakland recalled years later that most of them arrived at the meeting in limousines.) The Lay Commission members, in turn, pilloried the bishops with charges of radicalism. “The Novaks and the Simons are quick (and dishonest, I believe) to accuse us of extreme statism,” complained Bishop William Weigand, a member of the bishops’ drafting committee. Indeed, Novak described Economic Justice for All as “often whiney and ungenerous as the political left is wont to be.” When asked if it was a socialist document, Novak demurred, but noted that the bishops “used Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda’s slogan ‘economic democracy.’ There’s a program attached to that.” With his usual candor, Simon proclaimed that “the influence of Marxism is now very great in the Catholic seminaries.” The bishops might not be Marxists, he admitted, but their staff and consultants were—and the bishops themselves “must at least be sympathetic to such ideas.”^{Footnote 18}

They charged that the bishops supported “liberation theology,” a much-debated movement among Catholics that originated in Latin America in the 1960s. It interpreted the teachings of Jesus Christ in relation to liberation from unjust economic, political, or social conditions. As liberation theology took on many forms, its popularity spread to North America and elsewhere. The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI) criticized certain aspects of it in the mid-1980s—especially its political manifestations—for advocating “Marxist concepts.” The bishops insisted their efforts were not those of liberation theology. “You can’t lift Latin American liberation theology and apply it to our system,” argued Jesuit priest and adviser to the drafting committee David Hollenbach. Although they eschewed such an affiliation, they did embrace its “preferential option for the poor” in their analysis. By the time the bishops were drafting their document, this principle of Catholic social teaching had become widely held. Lay Commission members, however, were adamant that the bishops’ efforts were tinged with Marxism. J. Peter Grace, a chemical company owner and Reagan-appointed head of the Private Sector Study on Cost Control in the Federal Government, dismissed the “preferential option for the poor” as “the trendy attitude among clerics.”^{Footnote 19}

Public opinion was sharply divided. Liberal observers and rank-and-file Catholics questioned the Lay Commission’s motives and legitimacy. Catholic peace advocate and nationally syndicated columnist Colman McCarthy zeroed in on the corporate funding of the AEI, Novak’s employer, as his chief motivation for taking on the bishops. “Novak has been busy as an altar boy as he sprinkles holy water in profuse blessings on the economic beliefs of his patrons,” he wrote. Commonweal editor Peter Steinfels questioned the Lay Commission’s right to speak on behalf of the laity, as did Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest and Georgetown University law professor (and former Democratic congressman), who told Novak in a public debate that there was “enormous resentment of your self-appointed group that are seeking, in a very belligerent way, very aggressive way, with lots of money to undercut what the bishops are saying.” Catholic theologian Monika Hellwig, writing to the Washington Post, noted that the group in effect “has commissioned themselves.”^{Footnote 20}

But the Lay Commission’s office received bundles of supportive letters. The head of an Alabama television station lauded its “courage and wisdom” in the face of the bishops’ folly; a suburban Washington, D.C., attorney denounced the bishops’ “comedy of errors” and wished them well in “the showdown between the forces of conservatism . . . and liberalism within the church itself”; and a South Carolinian told of his “exultation” at the news of the Lay Commission’s formation. “I am having a mass offered for the intention of your committee,” he promised. They received praise from self-identified lapsed Catholics (“I think you’re on the side of the angels”) as well as non-Catholics. A Michigan man was “very interested in using your letter as the basis of a proposal to be made to my Protestant denomination.” So too did Catholic clergy write. From rural Wisconsin, a priest assured them that he “agree[d] with your ‘free enterprise’ thrust which many these days are working to destroy for a form of socialism.” As far as a Dayton, Ohio, parish priest was concerned, “On the area of economics surely it is we clerics who are ‘lay’ people, since you are more involved in our economic system than we are.”^{Footnote 21}

Many understood the cultural, political, and economic issues as all of one piece. Church leaders, complained one woman, “have allowed our religious world to crumble in the wake of Vatican #2 [sic], leaving us bereft who dearly love our Catholic faith.” Another critic noted that since the silencing of Father Charles Coughlin, the popular “Radio Priest” who denounced the New Deal and spoke favorably of fascism, he had “waited for someone to speak out on the many moral and ethical issues intertwined in our economic system.” For others, there were concerns about the bishops’ power within the church (“this liberal hierarchy . . . controls most of Catholic information”) as well as their political influence (“Let them first register as a political organization and give up their tax exemption”). Economic Justice for All tested their patience as lay Catholics. “The days of expecting the laity to pay, pray, and obey are over,” announced “A Catholic Businessman” writing to Novak. They asked how they could accept the bishops’ teachings. One man confessed, “If it is as bad and socialistic as I fear I cannot accept it as truth which I must believe.”^{Footnote 22}

Contrasting Economic Perspectives

In their 120-page draft released in November 1984, the bishops wrote that “acts of charity” were important, but insufficient, in overcoming economic injustice: “All have a larger responsibility to remove the causes of injustice through their actions as citizens and through government and the political process.” This could best be achieved, they held, by adhering to the tenets of “subsidiarity” and “socialization.” Leo XIII articulated these concepts first in Rerum Novarum, and they appeared in subsequent papal encyclicals and other teaching documents. They were rooted in the pope’s effort to facilitate Christian living in what he thought to be a flawed secular world. Although not opposed outright to capitalism, Leo XIII mourned the dissolution of the traditional guild system and the emergence of an industrial system that disrupted the family and social order. He criticized both capitalism and socialism. The former encouraged greed and exploitation; the latter was abhorrent for its materialist understanding of society and its dependence on the state. All classes, Leo wrote, “should dwell in harmony and agreement.” They must “reestablish Christian morals.” What should the state do to bring this about? “Whenever the general interests or any particular class suffers, or is threatened with harm, which can in no other way be met or prevented, the public authority must step in to deal with it.”^{Footnote 23}

Leo’s successor, Pius XI, provided the classical formulation of “subsidiarity” in 1931 in Quadragesimo Anno (“In the Fortieth Year”). He envisioned not a small government, but a strong, limited one. It would encourage intermediate bodies and organizations such as families, community groups, unions, and business to protect individuals or smaller organizational forms from larger organizations such as the state and corporations. Pius XI argued that “it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.” Even as he placed the burden for intervention on “higher associations,” the pope noted that “as history abundantly proves it, it is true that on account of changed conditions many things which were done by small associations in former times cannot now be done save by large associations.” This might involve international governing bodies, as Pope John XXIII called for in 1963 in Pacem in Terris (“Peace on Earth”), to address the nuclear arms race.^{Footnote 24}

Weakland and his fellow bishops acknowledged this balancing act. Subsidiarity, they noted, “does not support the view that the government which governs least governs best.” The principle of “socialization,” developed most fully in 1961 in Pope John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra (“Christianity and Social Progress”), highlighted the need for coordination and direction of complex social systems in order to benefit the citizens for whom they exist. In this tradition, Economic Justice for All called for a “new cultural consensus” that individuals had rights in the economic sphere. “Although these economic rights are not listed in our Bill of Rights, their spirit was familiar to many of our ancestors.” They held that society “has a moral obligation to take necessary steps to ensure that no one among us is hungry, homeless, unemployed or otherwise denied what is necessary to live in dignity.” There was more: with this support, individuals and groups would work to ensure the dignity of individuals and build stronger communities to bring about a moral society. Their broad vision of economic citizenship went alongside more modest proposals. The bishops eschewed economic planning, endorsing instead a range of economic policies and social welfare programs, most of which could be fitted comfortably into a Great Society legislative framework.^{Footnote 25}

Although they claimed that they parted ways with the Bishops only on the means of achieving a moral economy, the Lay Commission’s Toward the Future staked out novel positions on key aspects of Catholic social teaching. “We American Catholics are privileged to receive two precious legacies: Catholic faith and citizenship in the United States,” they began. It was not so much a theologically driven work—the first scripture reference appears only at the midway point—as an expository essay on American exceptionalism. Novak and his fellow commission members chided church leaders for “a certain lack of development in official Catholic economic thought.” Unfortunately, the bishops had not yet come to know the priority Anglo-American culture placed on “crucial social values [such] as sympathy, fellow-feeling, benevolence, a sense of fair play, and a due regard for the way the self would be regarded by an objective observer.” They insisted that the bishops had allied themselves with liberation theology. It was, they wrote, a flawed expression of Christianity in action that would lead to authoritarianism. America had something to teach the Catholic countries in Latin America, the Philippines, and elsewhere whose peoples “have never quite mastered the secrets of producing bread and producing liberty.” For Novak there was no alternative to democratic capitalism. “There is already a liberation theology in North America, whose symbol is the Statue of Liberty,” he told a reporter in 1985.^{Footnote 26}

The group publicly rejected libertarianism. “We’re not laissez faire capitalist. We argue that the state has an important role,” Novak insisted in his debate with Father Drinan. The authors did not call for cuts in programs for seniors, the handicapped, and children, nor did they advocate for the elimination of food stamps or education programs. Their endorsement of the church’s traditional support for “the rights, legitimacy, and crucial social role of free labor unions” surprised some, including Monsignor George Higgins, a nationally known “labor priest” and critic of the Lay Commission, who found it “in some respects . . . better than the sections of the Pastoral dealing with the same issues.” This was due to the efforts of Novak and James McFadden. The overriding theme of their section on labor unions was the role they played in fighting communism and in avoiding third-party politics. Novak and McFadden encountered resistance to some of the language in this section of the document at a commission meeting. When McFadden, a Democrat who had served as New York City’s chief labor negotiator in the 1950s and 1960s, pushed them to provide backing for measures supporting management-labor partnership schemes several members balked, including investment banker and former Nixon adviser Peter Flanigan, who observed that this would be “going very far.” McFadden spoke forcefully as well about the need to include a passage chiding management for interference in union recognition elections. Pfizer’s Edward Littlejohn replied that he “paused a little bit about that as if management didn’t have a right to participate which after all is an election to which there are parties.” Despite these protests, the published document urged a “new era of cooperation” between labor and management, and noted the “difficult period” for U.S. labor unions due in part to the fact that “some firms or industries have campaigned against unions in elections among their workers.” They observed that resolving unfair labor charges “take unconscionably long and ought, in fairness, to be expeditious.”^{Footnote 27}

For the most part, Toward the Future offered general support for workers’ well-being, but no more. In addressing the devastating effects of plant closings that ravaged cities across the country in the 1980s and led to the loss of 1.5 million manufacturing jobs, Norman True, commission member and president of the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation, told his colleagues that such losses “are simply a reflection of the fact that we live in an extremely dynamic economy, out of which there is much good, and very little bad to be found.” The group rejected “systematic protectionism.” They did include some watery language that encouraged employers to “consider the long-term security” of their workforce, but they did so alongside a cautionary note urging “prudence” in establishing measures requiring employers to address the problem since it “will almost certainly impair the nation’s economic dynamism and raise the costs of new employment.”^{Footnote 28}

Given the Lay Commission’s much-vaunted business credentials, it is surprising that there were few recommendations, save for keeping interest rates low and fiddling with the tax code. They weighed in on much-discussed wage stagnation by affirming their support for the Church’s “living wage” teaching. They observed, however, that “in more affluent societies as ours” even low-paid workers made “considerably more than the sort of sufficiency just above subsistence levels which was sought so desperately by even our recent ancestors.” Although commission members steered clear of addressing comparable worth and sexual harassment—the two most discussed issues related to working women in the 1980s—they acknowledged that the situation for female heads of households was “rather more bleak” than that of families with two wage earners. McFadden, who “came out of the tradition [that] . . . it is best to have the mother at home to take care of the children,” nevertheless agreed that some adjustment in tax exemptions for dependents was in order. The University of Pittsburgh’s Alberta Sbragia especially urged that fellow commission members pay attention to workplace gender issues. Responding to one member’s claim that his secretaries were well paid (“Most secretaries don’t work for you,” she retorted), Sbragia claimed only that it was “a question that has to be addressed. I am suggesting thinking about it.” Just as they did with their recommendations about displaced workers, they warned that their endorsement of company-provided child care, maternity leave, flexible hours, and other measures (they made no mention of government programs) be tempered by the “plain realism” that these would entail considerable costs that businesses might not be able to bear.^{Footnote 29}

Commission members connected economic policy with social and cultural concerns by emphasizing free-market capitalism’s privileging of personal responsibility, and by noting the limited role of the state in such matters. Although they did not focus on the hot-button issues of racial inequality and abortion, the Lay Commission denounced illegitimacy as a “moral disaster,” noting in particular the negative consequences of divorce. They decried efforts to “shift the blame to others, to external conditions, or to ‘society.’” The bishops, Simon wrote, “ignore the moral factors that contribute to poverty: namely, family breakup, drugs, crime and violence, failure to finish school, teenage pregnancy. . . . Ironically, this is an area where the Bishops have real authority.” They took the “culture of poverty” approach in locating poverty’s cause in dysfunctional families and communities, noting the disproportionate number of poor African Americans. Government assistance “should continue” but “voluntary associations—in neighborhood churches, schools, fraternal organizations and other cooperatives—should be given far more attention in the way we think about public policy.”^{Footnote 30}

The devaluation of the government’s role in the economy in the Lay Commission’s revisionist understanding of “subsidiarity” was the most substantial section in Toward the Future. Here they highlighted Pius XI’s emphasis on the importance of local associational bodies while noting in passing that decisions by higher-level bodies “are often necessary,” but warned that “they are also frequently somewhat flawed by their relative weaknesses.” Absent in their truncated rendering of “subsidiarity” was the important point that, when Pius XI wrote that it was wrong “to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do,” he was providing a general principle for all social actors, including corporations. Lay Commission critics countered that the pontiff did not argue for smaller government: he wrote that the “public authority” should let subordinate groups handle matters and concerns of less importance “so that it may move freely, powerfully, and effectively do all those things that belong to it alone because it alone can do them: directing, watching, urging, restraining, as occasion requires and necessity demands.”^{Footnote 31}

More than anything else, the conservative group rejected the bishops’ notion of “economic citizenship” as a dangerous intrusion into the workings of the free market and profit making (“the reward for risk-taking and invention”). “The Founding Fathers believed in economic rights—but they meant property rights and individual liberty,” Simon fumed in an interview. He informed an audience at the University of Notre Dame that, if economic rights were enshrined in American law, it would result “in citizens becoming wards of the state.” Novak did not engage with the bishops’ more capacious understanding that collaborative efforts would flow from a social order structured around basic economic and workplace rights. Instead, he contended that economic rights to such things as income, food, shelter, and a job were not truly “rights” inhering in the nature of human persons, but rather that they are “goods” indispensable to a full human life. It was in the power of each person to provide for these. “Human persons ought not be wards of the state,” Novak wrote. “They ought not to be dependent. They ought not to be servile. Nothing less than mature independence and self-reliance is becoming to the dignity of human persons.” Toward the Future promoted free markets as empowering, not economic citizenship: “They are a social device permitting the virtues of human providence to set to work within them.”^{Footnote 32}

The flood of partisan reaction in the nation’s newspapers pointed to a deep divide. The bishops won the praise of major newspapers, politicians, economists, and organized labor. Their reaction to the Lay Commission’s work was negative. Upon publication of Toward the Future, one New York Times reporter noted that “some economists would argue that it underestimates the role that government may play in furthering the growth process.” A Washington Post editorial observed that Novak’s characterization of the bishop’s work as “whiney” was “an adjective now much used in describing people who worry about the poor.” Notable conservatives offered their expected criticisms of the bishops’ work. Economist Milton Friedman found the “collectivist moral strain” to be “repellant.” Neoconservative Norman Podhoretz weighed in as well. He noted that “being Jewish . . . [he] would normally consider it impertinent to argue” with Catholic clergy. Nevertheless, since the bishops had addressed non-Catholics in their document, he proceeded to note that their “radical redistributionism” would be calamitous. Evangelical preacher Billy Graham thought that the bishops had been “overly absorbed in activism,” and the Moral Majority’s Jerry Falwell deemed the Pastoral Letter to be “endorsing socialism.”^{Footnote 33}

Catholic newspapers did not weigh in on Toward the Future. Philip Lawler, head of the American Catholic Congress, a conservative group, told Wall Street Journal readers that Archbishop Weakland strong-armed Catholic editors to ignore the Lay Commission. Nevertheless, it won acclaim from conservative Catholics. Activist and speaker Phyllis Schlafly—best known for her successful campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment—considered it “learned and eloquent.” The National Review’s William F. Buckley Jr. called the bishop’s work “an accumulation of lumpen clichés” and the Lay Commission message “brilliantly thought out and executed.” And, although non-Catholic, Ronald Reagan put his imprimatur on the document when he invited the Lay Commission members to the White House in late 1984.^{Footnote 34}

The Lay Commission spent considerable funds to publicize its work. Simon reported to fellow commissioners that they distributed Toward the Future to each Catholic bishop in the United States, all parishes, some seven hundred “media and opinion leaders,” and they placed advertisements in Commentary, a neoconservative journal, as well as the National Catholic Register and The Wanderer, two conservative national Catholic weekly newspapers. In addition, news of its document’s release appeared in every major national newspaper and news magazine as well as the three national television networks and the Public Broadcasting Service. “All in all, I think we’ve been very successful in bringing our findings before the public,” Simon concluded.^{Footnote 35}

In the end, Toward the Future did not influence the bishops’ second draft of their letter released the following year or the final version published in 1986. As the bishops were working on these revisions, Novak wrote to Joyce that “someone close to the drafting committee of the bishops” disclosed to him that the final version would contain more praise for the achievements of the American economic system. “We could interpret it, broadly, as a move in our direction,” Novak noted optimistically. Nevertheless, the Lay Commission members were glum after reading the final document. Simon wrote to a sympathetic priest that the bishops had not dropped their “absurd . . . utopian fantasy” of economic citizenship. James McFadden thought that the final version was “every bit as bad” as the first draft. Even Novak, who wrote that the final version “is more balanced than its predecessors,” agreed that “the Letter was a moving train, not possible to stop.” In fact, in the short-term they had little to show for their efforts. An initiative by one member, real estate investor Caesar Arredondo, for the group to develop a national network of “resource parishes” in affluent suburbs to cut poverty in “opportunity parishes” was stillborn, as was Simon’s proposal to develop a study guide based on Toward the Future for Catholic schools. In the fifteen years before his death in 2000, the former treasury secretary divided his time between philanthropy and high-stakes takeovers and sales of banks and failed savings and loans associations (in 1993, federal regulators seized one of his properties, Western Federal Savings and Loan, when it sank into insolvency).^{Footnote 36}

Nevertheless, its other prominent members, emboldened by their commission work, continued to spread the free-market message. Michael Joyce persisted in speaking and writing against Economic Justice for All. He lectured audiences at Yale University and elsewhere on the bishops’ “bad economics” and argued that the nation’s welfare system was a species of totalitarianism on a political continuum with the former Soviet Union. He was at the helm of the Bradley Foundation for fifteen years before moving to Washington, D.C., in 2001 at the urging of President George W. Bush’s adviser Karl Rove, to form “Americans for Community and Faith-Centered Enterprises.” Joyce, who died in 2006, also set up a similarly named nonprofit educational foundation, based in Phoenix, to advocate for faith-based groups. In addition to his long and distinguished academic career at the AEI, Michael Novak has served on various government boards, including, in 1985, the Presidential Task Force on Economic Justice. He received the prestigious Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1994. The Templeton Foundation, which includes a $1 million purse given at Buckingham Palace to its annual recipients, rewards those who have made “an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.”^{Footnote 37}

Conservative Catholics did not need to worry: Economic Justice for All was the end of the bold, progressive episcopal initiatives prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s. Despite their well-resourced and planned roll-out of the Pastoral Letter through Sunday sermons, diocesan newspaper articles, study guides, and television specials (in English and Spanish), there is no evidence that a groundswell of Catholic support emerged. Over the course of the next three decades, the nation’s Catholic bishops would never again approach social teaching in such a wholesale manner. In the early 1990s, under pressure from the Vatican and in the face of feminist criticism, they scuttled plans for a pastoral letter on women in the Church and society. By then, Pope John Paul II had already begun to implement a policy that downplayed the role of national episcopal conferences. In the 2000s, prominent cardinals at the helm of large archdioceses garnered news headlines, not the bishops’ conference (by then reorganized and named the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops). As the pope appointed more conservative bishops, their collective focus shifted to issues of sexuality, reproduction, marriage, and embryonic stem-cell research.^{Footnote 38}

It was the rejection of the bishops’ arguments by lay Catholics that offered the most proof that free-market economic thinking had taken hold of some of the faithful. A Connecticut attorney and “the product of a classical Jesuit education” wrote to one of the bishops on the drafting committee to complain that Economic Justice for All had “failed to give credit to the American system of capitalism.” Drawing on his white ethnic roots, he asked, “How many descendants of Eastern European countries would want to trade places with descendants of their ancestors who still live there?” Shortly after the release of the first draft of the Pastoral Letter, the Washington Post interviewed a Worcester, Massachusetts, bank executive and Catholic who declared that, through volunteerism, “we can deal with real need neighbor-to-neighbor if people take time to care.” Another Massachusetts Catholic, the vice president of a manufacturing firm, echoed the Lay Commission’s criticisms: “What they’re saying is pushing toward more government programs. . . . I’d rather see the bishops pushing toward the individual.” More than anyone else, these were the Lay Commission’s constituents. “I have to feel that in our Report we kept faith with our consciences and with our intellects and experience,” Peter Grace wrote Simon. “Like you, I hope that, in the future—the near future—our dissenting opinion will prevail.”^{Footnote 39}