This is the first of two posts forming a tribute to Professor Gerald Grace who retired late last year. This post is an interview with Quentin Wodon who is a lead economist at the World Bank
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The UK system of health provision is unusual. Our death rate from Covid is also unusual. It is widely reported that our figure for deaths per million of population is one of the highest in the developed world. We could look at this figure and put the blame in all sorts of places. If only we had tightened borders more quickly, we would have had fewer cases, and fewer deaths; if only we imposed lockdown more quickly; if only we had a population more willing to comply with the state’s desire to track and trace us; if only we were on two islands 2,500 miles from the next nearest large country; and so on…
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There is a temptation to play down those aspects of Rerum novarum which related to private property. This encyclical was really about labour, it is argued. Or it is suggested that the right to property is only a secondary right subject to the universal destination of goods and therefore not important. Still others say it was an encyclical that, in this respect, reflected its time – a period when the Church’s property was under attack from extreme socialists.
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We have posted before about the late scholastics: The late scholastics, universal human rights and discrimination and other posts on this blog on human rights, globalisation, interest and property rights have incorporated their profound impact.
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Finance and banking are institutions heavily associated in most people’s minds with modernity and the development of modern economies. While there is a certain truth to that, in the sense that the scale and reach of such institutions accelerated in the nineteenth century, it disguises the fact that most of the tools, methods and institutions associated with modern finance attained their mature form in the Catholic world of mediaeval Europe.
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In the late 1970s I lived in rooms in Oriel College, Oxford, a few metres from the infamous statue of Cecil Rhodes in the city’s High Street. I don’t recall the statue, or the smaller ones also on the wall (including Cardinal William Allen) ever being discussed. Rhodes was only at Oriel for one term in 1873, leaving a lot of money to the college and to the university, partly for the scholarships bearing his name. What does Catholic Social Teaching have to say about the statue’s future, and that of similar monuments?
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Rapidly developing events and protests springing from the United States to much of the Western world (and elsewhere) have once again brought discussion about individual rights and equality – both in theory and in practice – to the forefront of public debate.
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Earlier this year, we commemorated the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II. A multitude of articles, conferences and events has marked the date but perhaps the best way to recall John Paul II is through the authorised biography produced by George Weigel titled “Witness to Hope” and first published in 1999.
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