NEWS FEATURE: Priest preaches wealth-is-good gospel to eager business leaders

c. 1998 Religion News Service GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. _ The movers and shakers clutch cocktails and mingle in elegant style. Dick DeVos, president of direct-sales giant Amway Corp., moves through the sea of evening dresses and tuxedos with his wife, Betsy. Peter Cook, chairman of importer-distributor Mazda Great Lakes, chats and schmoozes. At the center […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. _ The movers and shakers clutch cocktails and mingle in elegant style. Dick DeVos, president of direct-sales giant Amway Corp., moves through the sea of evening dresses and tuxedos with his wife, Betsy. Peter Cook, chairman of importer-distributor Mazda Great Lakes, chats and schmoozes.

At the center stands the Rev. Robert Sirico.


Dressed in clerical garb, the Catholic priest revels in the festivity of the glittering Ambassador Ballroom in the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel here. The event is in celebration of his brainchild, the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty.

The Grand Rapids-based group Sirico launched just eight years ago to infuse religious leaders with the moral basis of free-market economics has grown beyond even his own ambitious imaginings.

And with it, so has Sirico, who provides business leaders something they’ve long lacked: a dauntless and smart collar-wearing Roman Catholic priest who is on their side. His provocative blend of capitalism and Christ stands in marked contrast to the preachings of mainline Catholic and Protestant clergy who sometimes question the inherent goodness of an unfettered free market.

“We have helped to make it more understandable how people can participate in the free and vibrant economy and not see that as a contradiction to their Christianity,” Sirico says. “Seeking the betterment of their community and their families and their businesses is not diametrically opposed to the gospel.”

West Michigan, a bastion of conservative capitalism, was the perfect place to launch his venture.

“A lot of people have encouraged us to move to Washington,” Sirico says. “That would be insane. Part of our whole uniqueness is we’re not from Washington.”

Today, the institute occupies spacious offices in downtown Grand Rapids, will probably top $3 million in operating costs by century’s end and employs 18 full-time staffers. Sirico has taken his wealth-is-good gospel to Latin America, Africa, Asia and _ as it struggles with the awkward infancy of capitalism _ the former Soviet Union.

Sirico is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and Forbes magazine.

But his high profile and intellectual combativeness have a cost.

In recent years, he has been a priest in search of a home.

He has left the Paulist Fathers, the religious order that ordained him in 1989. For a time, he was part of the Diocese of Lansing. Now he is in Kalamazoo, where he’s planting the seeds for his own religious order, St. Philip Neri House.


A brash, bright New York transplant, Sirico has gathered around himself some influential names. Betsy DeVos, chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party, is a member of the Acton board of directors.

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Sirico says an argument over economics, of all things, led him to a religious conversion in the 1970s. The product of a working-class Catholic home, the Brooklyn-born Sirico became a self-described “soft Marxist” during the cultural upheaval of the ’60s and abandoned the faith of his childhood altogether.

A series of discussions with a friend started him seriously questioning his socialist ideals. That led to broader philosophical concerns about humanity’s place in the universe.

He wondered: What is it about human beings that gives us the right to private property?

A trip to Rome led him back to the faith of his childhood. He returned and went straight to the confessional. “After 13 years, I had a lot to confess,” Sirico says. “Things I had done, movements I had associated with, causes I had advocated that I really regret now.”

The specifics will have to wait for his memoirs, he says. “I’ll disclose things I haven’t disclosed publicly, simply because of the embarrassment of them or the deep regret I feel.”


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His thoughts on freedom and the free market came together even as he found himself contradicted by seminary teachings on economics and Liberation Theology, a movement of the poor in Latin America that incorporated Marxist ideas.

Frustrated by what he saw as an anti-business bias among his teachers, Sirico thought those who produce society’s wealth _ and all the possibilities it brings for human employment and dignity _ were being ignored and at times dismissed.

“Very often I heard homilies preached that inevitably insulted business people,” he says.

Sirico organized his response shortly after he became a priest.

Named for 19th century English thinker Lord Acton, the Acton Institute shares the vision of Catholic conservatives in general, but it carries a unique emphasis on educating seminarians about economics. Today, it runs retreats for businessmen and organizes conferences.

The institute relies on a bevy of big money contributors with names that read like a list from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s”vast right-wing conspiracy.” Last year Amway Corp.’s founding families, the Van Andels and DeVoses, contributed more than $10,000 each. So did the family foundation of millionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, who helped fund the conservative American Spectator’s efforts to investigate President Clinton.

And as proof that Sirico doesn’t bow to the gods of political correctness, his fund-raising list includes tobacco-producing Philip Morris Companies Inc.

Two years ago, when Republicans pushed welfare reform through Congress, mainline Protestant and Catholic clergy questioned the legislation in Washington and state capitals. Sitting before congressional committees, Sirico supported the sweeping new laws and argued for even more reform. He wanted all responsibility for social services to be taken from government and returned to religious and nonprofit institutions.


Who knows the needs of the poor better, the argument went _ a heartless bureaucrat or a parish priest? Release citizens from an oppressive tax burden and they can return that money in charitable contributions, this time given freely. “He appears to have become the darling of the conservative right, that’s the basis of his credibility,”says the Rev. Fred Kammer, president of Catholic Charities U.S.A., who sat opposite Sirico in welfare reform hearings.

Sirico came to national prominence because his message meshed with the growing conservative mood in the country, Kammer says. “He gave a kind of veneer of Catholic respectability to those political movements.”

Sirico has plenty of ardent defenders.

For Steve Forbes, former presidential candidate and publisher of Forbes magazine, Sirico provides an indispensable recognition of “the moral basis of democratic capitalism.”

“It’s not a Faustian bargain, greed and shady dealings,” Forbes says. “The essence of capitalism is moral. If you don’t have a moral foundation, capitalism doesn’t work.”

Sirico says his institute will move beyond its Catholic roots in years to come.

Todd Whitmore, associate professor of social ethics at the University of Notre Dame, calls Sirico and other neoconservatives “dissenters” within Catholicism.

No less an authority than Pope John Paul II has taught that the free market is “a good mechanism for the production of material wealth,” Whitmore acknowledges. But he says the pope does not believe in an unbridled market, and doesn’t take Sirico’s libertarian view that the government should have little to no involvement in business.


“Catholic social teaching has a much more expansive understanding of the positive role of the state in general,” he says.

DEA END GOLDER

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