There are certain vices that Catholics seem to be especially prone to—and even some that only Catholics can commit. At points where the structure of the Church or the fullness of the moral law is especially at odds with our sinful human nature, our personal weaknesses, or the unique features of our age, Catholics, being sinners, will always find special ways to sin and fail, to squander the moral advantages that our Faith gives us.
For example, because we believe that our sins can be quickly and certainly absolved in the Sacrament of Penance, we can be tempted to take God’s grace for granted, sinning our way through the week with gusto, knowing that a quick trip through the booth cleans us up, much as an automatic car wash confers its benefits with little active participation from the vehicle’s owner.
And because the Catholic tradition is one that, uniquely among the world’s scattered Christian communities, recognizes the essential role of human reason in comprehending revealed truth, Catholics of a certain intellectual disposition are especially tempted to rationalism and all forms of prideful intellectual excess. (See esp. the cases of Abelard, Küng, K. Rahner, D. Powlett-Jones.)
Or because we observe the fasting and abstinence of Lent, we suffer what must seem especially bizarre to non-Catholics: the temptation on Friday evenings in March and April of wanting to eat enough battered, fried codfish to send a 40-ton whale into renal failure.
There are two uniquely Catholic temptations I wish to focus on here. First of all, Catholics have a unique perspective upon civic order as something always imperfect and really meaningless when compared with the City of God: we know we are supposed to render unto Caesar and all that, but can be difficult to take Caesar seriously when we know that the Church is the perfect community to which we and our allegiance belong through baptism. Secondly, Catholics have historically had a unique experience of community life in America, one in which the ties of parochial and ethnic community—Irish, Italian, Polish—in the midst of a Protestant Anglo-Saxon society has always encouraged us to think of ourselves as a kind of state within the state, a parallel or even superior community in which we look out for and take care of our own. That’s part of what is meant when we speak of the “ghetto experience” of American Catholics before 1960.
I wonder if these two facts of Catholic life in America make us prone to a unique and dangerous temptation whenever we do business in the City of Man. Last week’s daily allegations of corruption about the Fiesta Bowl staff and its recently-fired president, whose generosity with Bowl resources towards several Catholic causes was cited in the report that led to his dismissal, have given me cause to think about this again. This story is still very new, but it makes me think back to another one that was devastating for Phoenix Catholics 20 years ago.
I wasn’t in Arizona for the Charlie Keating scandal of the 1980s, but I know many who were, and many who were themselves personally affected by it. It is hard to ignore the fact that at the heart of that tale of billions of dollars, fraud convictions, and the legal-if-questionable purchase of political influence was a man whose staunch and visible 
Catholicism was central to his life’s work. The money he gave to pro-life causes, the Missionaries of Charity, and anti-porn crusades wasn’t exactly dwarfed by the money people lost when Lincoln Savings and Loan went bust, but Keating’s religion was serious business for him, and people knew it. He was a giant of Catholic public life in Phoenix in the 1970s and ‘80s, and an entire generation of orthodox Catholic men and women in this city was inspired to go into business in no small part because Keating was so proudly and actively Catholic. I know some good people who made their names and their careers as foot soldiers in his empire; the crisis of faith that many lived through when it all crumbled in bad investments and federal charges was a social and financial catastrophe that made Phoenix’s experience of the priestly sex-abuse scandals of the last decade look mild by comparison.
I know Phoenix Catholics of an older generation who still insist that Keating was framed—that he was taken down by personal enemies who hated him because of his very public anti-abortion and anti-pornography crusades, or whose implacable enmity towards him and his business empire was a kind of Satanic hatred towards all the good that God was doing through his power and influence. Such simplistic defensiveness seems to be a ghetto attitude to me, no different from the response of so many black Americans to OJ Simpson’s murder rap: of course he was set up, runs the thinking. They have always been out to get us.
I have some personal connections to the 1980s and ‘90s world of monied Phoenix Catholics, to persons far less prominent than Charles Keating, and no more than a tiny fraction as wealthy as he ever was. The stories I hear from that era—maybe just because no one ever tells tales of decent men who pay their taxes and attain modest prosperity—are oft-disturbing accounts of business partnerships that ended in betrayal and bankruptcy, of small-time real estate fraud, of high society adultery and divorce, of friendships severed when big money was at stake: stories of other seemingly good and faithful Catholics who went down in scandal and took others with them.
What I am trying to get at is this: is there something about the ghetto experience of American Catholics that might make it especially tempting for us to go crooked when big money is at stake? Is the Catholic belief that the laws of man are just pale imitations of the perfect justice of God rather too easily perverted into disregard for the laws of man, especially when dealing with a mass of confusing and even contradictory bank regulations or tax codes? Has the Catholic “ghetto” experience of the 20th century, in which we looked out for our own and did our best to solve problems internally, made us dangerously prone to tribalism in business and politics—and created a world in which Catholics are a little too inclined to give other Catholics jobs, to lend and borrow and invest together, and to look the other way when the deals start to get suspicious? “What’s the point of running an organization if you won’t help out your friends,” I once heard a reasonably successful Catholic man of business say. I couldn’t help but get the feeling that he was the spokesman for an American Catholic worldview that was much larger than himself.
Or are we just ordinary sinners—neither more nor less prone to corruption than other Americans when millions of dollars pass under our noses? I certainly haven’t seen enough cash or Catholics to say for sure.
As Christians, we must prepare ourselves to live an “underground” existence, but our model should be the catacombs, not the Corleone family. We are obliged in conscience to obey the laws of the state, even when it sanctions practices we know to be abominable before God:
When citizens are under the oppression of a public authority which oversteps its competence, they should still not refuse to give or do what is objectively demanded of them by the common good… (CCC 2242)
But it is not enough just to obey civil laws; merely to abstain from fraud and tax evasion is hardly the standard of the gospel. The law of charity also obliges us to participate actively in civil society and in public life:
It is the duty of citizens to contribute along with the civil authorities to the good of society in a spirit of truth, justice, solidarity, and freedom. The love and service of one’s country follow from the duty of gratitude and belong to the order of charity…Submission to authority and co-responsibility for the common good make it morally obligatory to pay taxes, to exercise the right to vote, and to defend one’s country (CCC 2239-40).
And don’t misunderstand me: the “good of society” requires entrepreneurs whose business ventures provide wealth for myriads of others besides themselves. The public weal requires risk-takers and developers and probably even college football bowl game organizers. Catholics are under a special Christian obligation to participate in business and politics—and even the most public of scandals involving members of the Body of Christ ought not to embarrass us to the point of withdrawal.
No matter what the risks or temptations, the common good requires our full, conscious, and active participation. To be silent spectators in the life of the community is not enough.
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created a world in which Catholics are a little too inclined to give other Catholics jobs, to lend and borrow and invest together
This is a straw man: only a modern American would imagine that having a cultural identity, associating with one’s confreres, would be something sinister. The truth of the matter is that this is how human beings have always lived. We have always grouped together in societies. And despite what the arbiters of current good taste would have us believe, those societies have never been purely arbitrary assemblages of people. The Church, furthermore, expressly approves of such organizations and recognizes that their maintenance is a natural component of the human condition. Hand-wringing about the “ghetto” is principally little more than modern distaste for natural human societies—and it is undeniable that the modern world is exorcised by a Rousseauean hatred for human societies other than the state—applied in the ecclesiastical setting.
I will acknowledge that American Catholic insularism was perhaps overly pronounced in some ways, insofar as it limited the Church’s ability to evangelize the wider culture. But, frankly, the evidence would suggest that it actually was capable of doing so quite effectively, so I don’t know how strong of a criticism that actually is.
when the deals start to get suspicious
Herein lies the second problem: modern financial regulations are so complex, and frequently so non-intuitive, that full and technical compliance for anyone high enough up the food chain becomes almost a matter of chance. Indeed, many of the scandalous financial wrongs that cause people to point fingers these days are not malum per se. (I say that from a quite traditional point of view, too: it’s not merely that such acts “don’t hurt anyone else,” as one often hears modernists say about drug use and suicide, but that they frequently do not even harm the common good in any discernible manner.) So one does not act irrationally when one looks askance at accusations of insider trading or mismanagement (one can readily look with skance at those who run ponzi schemes: these are readily recognizable and clearly predatory). Nor should the fact that a respected individual engaged in “unethical business practices”—whatever that is supposed to mean in this laughably immoral age—shake anyone’s faith. There are plenty of truly evil things in the world about which to be disturbed.
In sum, more at the conclusion than the premises, I think the essay points to a very real phenomenon: the gap between the American and the Catholic conception of the world and the human person. Of course, I greatly doubt that many American Catholics—and almost certainly any American Catholic younger than, say, 50—really have any awareness of this gap or make many ordinary decisions based on having absorbed a “Catholic” rather than an “American” worldview. (Maybe we have learned more Catholic criteria for decisions and apply them very consciously, but we certainly didn’t learn from any ghetto or apply them instinctively.) The fine distinctions between the two systems could fill many pages and are widely debated elsewhere. And I would vigorously disagree with the conclusion that suspicion of or disregard for law is an integral component of a Catholic ethic or “worldview”: quite the opposite, in fact. What Catholics tend to suspect is not civil laws and civil systems, but America and the American experiment: this place, set up by Protestants for Protestants and filled with Protestants, which long articulated numerous ideals that were not our ideals and today cannot be trusted to apply even those ideals, is nice and has a lot going for it, but isn’t quite right. And it’s not quite right not because we live and work with other Catholics, but because of the nature of the thing itself. But again, I would bet all the cotton in Mississippi that this sort of suspicion or thinking has essentially zero connection to the lawfulness or lack thereof of any particular person. I simply don’t see it.
This is really well-written. I had some of these thoughts.
For me, it comes partially of thinking only the best of the people we may be acquainted with, and of those we know well. Could this kind of activity lend itself to a kind of blurred intention, of good causes supported, and bad decisions made valid through the morality they serve? Similarly, the Church teachings on many of the complex social issues that include what justly and rightfully is due to us could leave an gray area in the minds of some who are financially successful. I for one, am thankful my life in this area is fairly simple, and that I’m not trying to ride a camel through the eye of a needle; although my temptations though different, are equally sanctifiable for me.
In our failures, it’s our reaction and humbling need for mercy that helps to sanctify us. Praise the Lord for getting caught; this is a great act of mercy.
Thank you for a great (and courageous) post.
I am reminded that we cannot serve two masters. I liked the comment that Keating was framed because he was so visibly pro life and ant porn. It is the Mel Gibson rational of who cares if he cheated on his wife, is anti jew, and fathered a child out of wedlock while married. After all, he made Passion of the Christ. Every saint is a sinner. The only difference is that a sinner who does not repent will be remembered by his sin (Bill Clinton) and the saint who is also a sinner but repents is remembered by his saintliness (St. Augustine). I agree that business laws change all the time, but ethics don’t. In addition, it is time that men pay particular attention to the legacy that they leave to their sons and daughters. That is their first and foremost business. I also loved the honesty and admittance of the Fiesta Bowl executive and as fellow Catholics we can forgive any offenses and demand the most ethical behavior from future Catholic businessmen. My only question to those defending Keating and the like is this, why can you acknowledge wrong doings of secular society, but not the Catholic ghetto? Are you afraid or is it possible that you are guilty as well and can relate? I can relate to all those who share in my sketchy past, but God forgives and heals. Just Ask!