Evolving and implementing a social economics: the American Catholic experience

This article is modeled after Robert Michels' classic study of European social democracy. It attempts to ascertain the possibility of evolving and implementing, independent of government sponsorship, an integrative social economics. The study focuses on the largest American denomination, American Catholicism, which possesses a hierarchical structure and sophisticated techniques of communication and mobilization. It examines a representative sample of Catholic publications dividing them into three ideological categories – Augustinian, Thomist, and Liberationist – and it scrutinizes these in terms of orientation on a variety of social economic issues. The paper concludes pessimistically about the improbability of evolving and implementing an integrative social economics.