Real Clear Politics has
a fine interview with Fr. Robert Sirico up. I know his work, but knew nothing of his biography: no idea he used to be a radical. He talks about Nuns on the Bus & smoking pot with Jane Fonda, but the most interesting bit is the connection he makes between the Austrian school and Theology of the Body in response to a question about why he quotes Hayek and von Mises but rarely Milton Friedman:
...my approach is very personalistic. When I met Christopher West, in
two minutes we were on the same page even though he's not particularly
interested in economics, and I'm not an expert in that whole area of
Theology of the Body, but we both had the same starting point --
anthropology.
The history of personalism began with a former priest, Franz Brentano
and among his followers was Carl Menger, who was the teacher of Ludwig
von Mises. I wrote a long article on all this some years ago in the Journal of Markets and Morality.
The basic idea here is that Brentano begins a whole way of thinking
about phenomenology and personalism comes out of that. You then have
these two schools of thought: one ends up in psychology and philosophy
-- among those people you'd find Edith Stein and Karol Wojtyła; in the
other school you have economists and sociologists. And there are certain
points of dialogue between the two schools.
Rocco Buttiglione, an adviser to John Paul II who had a lot to do with the writing of Laborem Exercens and Centesimus Annus -- now, God forgive him, he's an Italian politician -- said that if you read The Acting Person in juxtaposition to the first five chapters of Human Action,
there is this preoccupation with the act, the purposefulness of human
will, beginning the anthropology of these two approaches. Now, they go
off in different horizons. I'm not at all saying that Wojtyła ripped off
von Mises, but the point is that they're coming from a backdrop that is
not too dissimilar.
Later in the interview he gets to one sentence from his mom that in a way sums up all law and politics. As a child he had neighbors who were Holocaust survivors. She explained it to her young son:
she came for refuge from a place where she and her husband were treated like animals.
Fr. Sirico elaborates:
There was no abstraction in what she said. She simply found something
that was close to what I knew and the way you treated steers and these
people I knew and the way other people treated them -- morally, I knew
the whole case. Just from a few sentences I knew the whole thing: you
have dignity of life, you have everything.
