Free Republic

Rev. Robert Sirico: The Church’s ‘anemic response’ to COVID-19 hurts everyone The political response to COVID-19 has created an economic downturn unprecedented since the Great Depression. However, the Church’s “anemic response” has deprived the poor of spiritual solace and the Church of its vocation and vitality, said Acton Institute President and Co-founder Rev. Robert Sirico on a nationally syndicated radio interview.“If we sit back and look at the big message of the Church, it’s, ‘We’re closed. We’ll let you know when we open again.’ And I think that’s very dangerous,” Rev. Sirico said on the June 26 episode of The...

"Liberty is not the power of doing what we like," Lord Acton once wrote, "but the right of being able to do what we ought." In Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy, Acton Institute President Father Robert Sirico develops a manifesto for economic liberty. On the 100th anniversary of Milton Friedman's birth, Fr. Sirico and I met at the Cardinal Stritch Retreat House north of Chicago to discuss subjects ranging from smoking pot with Jane Fonda to why Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises and Pope John Paul II have more in common than you may...

Formerly a left-wing activist who moved in the same circles as Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, Father Robert Sirico shifted rightward on economic policy decades ago after debating a friend who believed in free markets. “Throughout my life, even when I have been terribly mistaken in my ideas, I have always been open-minded and honest in looking at opposing viewpoints,” Sirico said, recalling his ideological transformation. “So when I met a friend of a friend who had completely different ideas about how the economy functions and how society flourishes under the rule of law and economic liberty, I engaged him...

The Rev. Robert Sirico is not your ordinary parish priest. He is not only the pastor of St. Mary Catholic Church in Kalamazoo, Mich., he’s the co-founder and president of The Acton Institute, a market-friendly think tank devoted to promoting “a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by religious principles.” Father Sirico, a frequent contributor to the country's top op-ed pages and regular commentator on TV, has made it his extra-spiritual calling to educate future religious leaders about the principles – and moral virtues -- of a free-market economy. I talked to him by phone Tuesday...