Universal Love in Fratelli tutti, and in Economics

Abstract: Recent immigration policy research, and Pope Francis’s recent encyclical on universal love, highlight the challenge of balancing local loves (of nation and local communities) and the imperative of universal charity. Economics is unable to provide more than an arbitrary balance between local and universal because it is unable to describe the social goods around which communities form. Catholic social teaching has not yet produced a balanced account due to its (often justified) suspicion of nationalism. This paper explores the requirements for a healthy description of such a balance, rooted in Hittinger’s Catholic account of societies, and Aquinas’s analysis of the order of charity. The article concludes with a discussion of social welfare functions. In immigration economics, social welfare functions rarely include the interests of immigrants, automatically adopting a strong order of charity. Arguments about whether this exclusion is justified bring into focus the social goods at stake in national communities – the very goods economists find difficult to model.