Catholics for Social Justice!

A good idea.  Excerpts:

Few efforts to cajole corporations into a deeper sense of social responsibility have been more celebrated than the “Sullivan Principles,” elaborated in the late 1970s by African-American minister Leon Sullivan to apply economic pressure on South Africa to revise, and eventually abandon, its system of apartheid.

By consensus, the “Sullivan Principles” worked because they condensed volumes of lofty theoretical language about global solidarity and human rights into a short set of concrete, practical commitments, which had a visible impact in the real world.

Building on that model, the Vatican may now be preparing to develop a similar template for business ethics in the 21st century – a sort of Catholic version of the “Sullivan Principles” – based on Pope Benedict XVI’s 2009 social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate...

If anything, the aim of these new “Sullivan Principles” would be even more audacious than the original – not to bring down a racist system in one nation, but to reshape an amorphous economy that spans the entire globe, often defying control by anyone, pushing it in the direction of enshrining “gift” alongside profit as a core economic value.

The “Logic of Gift” symposium brought together academics who specialize in Catholic social teaching with a cross-section of business professionals. The aim was to flesh out what notions such as “gratuity,” which loomed large in the pope’s encyclical, mean when applied to running a private equities fund or managing an international retail goods firm.

Underlying those discussions was a frustration that the noble aspirations of Catholic social teaching often evaporate when it’s time to move from theory into practice.

As one participant put things, “We seem to have a sense of what we yearn for, but behavioral specificity is thin.”

Andreas Widmer, a former Swiss Guard who now runs a private fund in Boston promoting enterprise solutions to poverty, provocatively suggested that captains of industry should give themselves a test: “If you were arrested for being Christian business leaders, and the police did an audit of your company practices and policies, would they find evidence of the social tradition informing your business?...”