Should Catholics Consider the Morality of our Investments?
The Catholic Church does not have defined dogmas about how we should invest but there are many church documents that help form a framework for Catholics to invest. The Vatican and the US Bishops each produced documents in recent years specifically addressing investing.
I recently posted two short videos. The first discusses how investing is an active process and there should be additional discernment around how we are investing our dollars. Here is the transcript:
Are there moral and immoral ways to make money? And does investing have anything to do with that? I think most people would agree that there are immoral ways to make money, and that relates to what we do for our jobs, but can we also relate that to our investment accounts? You know, Catholic social teaching gives us a pretty clear guidelines on how we should live our life. And there have been documents from the US bishops as well as from the Vatican that talk about.
Investing being a much more active process and that we really should have just some discernment over the companies that we're investing in. So if we look at the last video I did and we realize that investing in the stock market is simply owning companies, and as those companies get more valuable and they have profits, that's ultimately reflected back in the share price and how your account grows. So should we be investing in companies that derive a lot of the revenue from immoral practices?
Stay tuned for the next videos as we look at what some of those practices might be.
The next video discuss the four pillars of Catholic Social Teaching and how that relates to your investments. They are:
Life and Dignity of the Human Person
Call to Support the Family and Community
Care for God’s Creation
Dignity of Work and the Dignity of the Human Person
Here is the transcript for the video:
Alright, here it is: the four pillars of Catholic social teaching and how we think about them in building out a portfolio. Okay, number one, life and dignity of the human person. So if there's companies out there that are actively performing abortions or creating abortive faces or they're supporting abortion, and a lot of other ancillary things that kind of go along with that, that's a major red flag. So that's that's pillar number one. Number two, call to supporting the family and the community.
So this is really a call to businesses to be able to have a pr a pro-family culture, right? Are are people able to take time off to be with the kids? you know, is there just a general philosophy around supporting the community and the family? Number three is care for God's creation. So, you know, are are companies trying to help eliminate pollution and and things like that, trying to actively preserve the earth versus the destroy it. Frankly, most companies
Are on board with that right now because that's pretty in vogue secularly. but still something to make sure we're keeping in mind, especially as things change over time. Last and absolutely not least, dignity of work and dignity of the human person. So I think this is gonna become a bigger deal over time with AI specifically, but it has been a big deal in the past, making sure we've got proper safe working conditions. And you know, that's better. There are certainly parts of the world that still are not.
Great about that. and then also making sure we're paying a fair wage. I think that is a big piece that still is an issue today. Then the big piece too that I think is we talk about the dignity of work and this AI, you know, automation culture, are we just widgets or are we people? Right. And we want to try to have companies that are treating people as people and that there's dignity in work and understanding that aspect is a part of the human condition and that we're not just like I said, we're not just widgets.
And we can't just be replaced by machines. We are humans with souls. And so that's that's number four. A lot more that we could expand on there, and I'll do that in future videos. But if you like this one, follow, like, subscribe, all that good stuff. drop a like and a comment, and we'll see you in the next one.