The Catholic Church as Silicon Valley

Our Lady of Peace Shrine in Santa Clara, CA

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry (HT Tyler Cowen) ruminates on the past and present of Catholicism and how it stacks up to the influence of Silicon Valley. In short he claims that it’s, well, falling short in the modern age:

A simple glance at the history of the church should show that the current situation is anomalous. As Rodney Stark, the invaluable social historian of Christianity, notes, Christians in the Roman world had longer life expectancies than their non-Christian peers, a fact that can be largely attributed to the church’s welfare system, which was the first organized and professionally run welfare system in recorded history—in other words, a radical, world-changing innovation. It is attested by both Christian and pagan sources that Christians in antiquity provided health care lavishly to their own and to others; it is less often noted that in the process they literally invented the hospital, another rather important innovation.

He laments that Bill and Melinda Gates have done more to help eradicate malaria in Africa than Catholics have. Gobry is smart to point to Catholicism’s internal contradictions that e.g. pit environmental conservation against birth control:

Catholic doctrine includes care for creation, but also includes the condemnation of artificial family planning. How does one reconcile environmental conservationism with a moral vision that, if applied consistently, would lead to explosive population growth?

Seeing as how the center of gravity in the Catholic world has moved to the Global South – with Argentinian Pope Francis its official spokesperson –  it’s difficult to see how Catholicism will ever be on equal footing with Silicon Valley in both the near and long-term future. Argentina ain’t Japan. It should come as no surprise that a religious figurehead who is down on euthanasia might be at loggerheads with the “spiritual” home of transhumanism, a sizable minority of godless libertarians, and abortion as taken-for-granted.

One area of surprising agreement between the Catholic Church and Silicon Valley is global warming. But that’s about it.