Political Economy and Christianity

Fray Zeferino González wrote Political Economy and Christianity in 1862, when he was a professor at the University of Santo Tomás de Aquino in Manila. At that time he worked as a teacher in the Philippines, at that university, founded by the Dominicans.
In this essay Zeferino criticizes the theories of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Malthus, and Proudhon, and defends an authentic Christian political economy. It is based on traditional Catholic thought, as a solution to the problems of the workers.
In Political Economy and Christianity , Zeferino González analyzes economic thought from a religious perspective.
It defends an economy in keeping with Christian charity and brings new initiatives for the religious formation of the working class. This is how he analyzes and distances himself from Adam Smith’s thought:

“Smith is like the head of that semi-materialist school of political economy, which sees in man only a capital and a producer of wealth; school whose desiccant principles, and whose selfish doctrines tend to make the lot of the poor more miserable, instead of alleviating their misfortune; school, in short, for which they mean almost nothing and in which religion and morality do not enter at all.”

In this book Zeferino anticipates some of the ideas of Christian Democracy, which later became a powerful European political ideology. The Christian Democrats ended up building the modern welfare states. In these States, social measures were adopted to effectively reduce poverty and social inequality, with a mixture of economic measures and a Christian perspective.