Put forth a robust defense of the free market as the most morally and materially satisfying economic system and you invite all manner of invective and accusation. What are you, some kind of dissenter?
Not so fast. Although the documents of modern Catholic social teaching normally begin with Rerum Novarum (1891), students should instead start with Pope Leo XIII's Quod Apostolici Muneris(1878), an encyclical entirely devoted to socialism, in order to understand that socialism and the free market are not being described as equally objectionable. For while socialism is per se condemned, the market is criticized only for alleged abuses.
Nor could the Church condemn the market in and of itself, since it rests on the inoffensive principle of peaceful, non-coerced exchanges between rightful property owners. Breathless claims to the contrary notwithstanding, that is all the free market amounts to. With Leo XIII having described the rights of property as "inviolate" in one encyclical and "sacred and inviolable" in another -- phrases the Left has spent the past century trying to explain away, I might add -- the Church would have to acknowledge the essential justice of a market economy at some level, even if she might for whatever reason still have complaints to register here and there.
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