Social Economy, Local Development, and Catholic Ethics in Southern Europe: Between Moralizing Capitalism and Solidarity Alternatives

While contemporary Catholic campaigns on issues related to family policy, educational policy and civilizational issues enjoy high visibility in the public sphere (della Sudda 2014), this is not the case for socio-economic campaigns. Yet Catholic social thought continues to inspire conceptions of economic linkages and of local socio-economic configurations. These experiments have even undergone a silent process of renewal since the 2008 economic crisis, which particularly hit Southern Europe. The hypothesis assumed in this paper is that the elective affinities (Weber 1991) existing between Catholic thought and economic approaches are to be numbered in the plural, and that this pluralism can be fully grasped only at the local scale. This paper instead emphasizes the internal diversity of the various Catholic ethics. The Catholic entrepreneurial repertoire tends to oscillate between a straightforward discourse on the need to raise the moral standards of capitalism and a search for utopian alternatives to the market economy, with an infinity of nuances in between. Local observation provides an opportunity to grasp the concrete dimension of these interpretations as well as the doctrinal and ethical interpretations made by the social actors concerned. This perspective also permits some consideration of the changes experienced by the Catholic matrix, which was long a major presence in the territories considered here. The economic crisis has paradoxically given new visibility to this entrepreneurial repertoire, with Catholic discourse aiming to extract the socio assistance repertoire from its purely charitable dimension by including it within a global approach to economic action. Comparison will focus on the Spanish Basque Country and on the Italian province of Brescia, in Lombardy. Both territories have long been Catholic bastions, within industrialized regions, with high levels of regional social capital. Both have experienced, in different ways, a process of accelerated secularization. On the economic front, both territories were affected by the 2008 economic and financial crisis which created difficulties for part of the regional economy, starting with the industrial sector. My fieldwork was intended to (a) find out ‘what remains’ of a Catholic territorial matrix which long played a crucial role in the historical constitution of the social capital within these regions; (b), to measure the pluralism of Catholic approaches to economic linkages in a context of post-secularism and economic crisis. The paper comprises four sections. The first addresses the theoretical debate about the contribution made by religion to local development. The second section compares narratives of the role played by the Catholic matrix in matters of local development in the Spanish Basque Country and in Brescia. The third section proposes a typology of contemporary Catholic approaches to the economy, based on our fieldwork. The final section reviews the individual career profiles of five Catholic entrepreneurs and activists, in order to refine at an individual scale what has been said about the role played by religious and political socialization in the shaping of economic ethics. By doing so, the paper proposes a pathway from the territorial matrix down to the individual actor, passing through the meso-organizational scale.