It may be simplistic, but I am warming to Michael Crosby's definition of economics: economics concerns the balance between persons, relations and resources.

We in the West are seduced by the idea that economics concerns resources and their trading.  But as Crosby points out, “when resources take priority over persons involved and affected, including how they relate to each other and make transactions, the market takes priority... When this happens the freedom of the market takes precedence over authentic individual freedom."  (Crosby, 62).

This is a simple but telling analysis of the global financial crisis.  In the free market, the trading of resources takes priority over people.  In the free market the winners are those who achieve the most trading.  To achieve that, the most valued quality is greed.  It is not simply about controlling the most resources because the rich man may simply be sitting on his assets, or heaven forbid, giving them away.  No, the winners in the free markets are the most active traders, because their trading activities will create demand for more and more goods. 

This leads not only to more trading, but more desire/greed for the goods available.

These active traders are the winners because they give priority to resources.  But the existence of winners implies the existence of losers.  In an un-regulated free market, the gap between the winners and those without access to resources, will become wider and wider.  The symptoms of this runaway greed are now all too visible, from astronomical executive salaries, to sub-prime mortgages.

The past few months have taught us all new words and new disturbing facts to go with them.  Giving priority to resources, opened the floodgates of greed and consumer objects.

 The solution is not to put priority onto relations.  Starting with relationships , Crosby argues, will always lead to a command economy.  Then the gap will expand between the powerful and the powerless, the central bureaucrats with their holiday dachas, and the peasants scratching a meagre living from unproductive soil, or between much travelled Ministers and lay brothers used as personal servants. 

 As Franciscans, we should be arguing for, and living out,   economics which places priority on persons.  Crosby shows that though Francis wrote no criticism of the violent and unequal society he found in Assisi and Italy, he lived out an alternative economy by creating fraternal communities.     

 Hermitages and houses should have only the resources needed for the persons in them.   In other words, in an economy which places priority on persons, resources have little importance. To maintain a priority on persons, resources should in fact be stripped away to only that which is needed.  The purpose of poverty is to throw persons into the high light.

Likewise, Franciscan fraternities do not give priority to relations in their economies.   To define members of the community as anything other than a sister or a brother, is to give those members coercive power over others.     This was a revolutionary thought for the contemporaries of Francis. Every member of mediaeval society was in an unequal power relation, either with control or possession of other persons, or without power.

I know too little about economics to judge whether Father Michael's analysis is too simplistic.   However, it gives me a good insight into the current crisis.  

Crosby says Francis had a choice when God pointed out the church crumbling around him. Either he could point out the ruins, or he could repair them. In the spirit of repairing, rather than critiquing,  as Franciscans we should resolve again to live with those around us, whether at church, in the wider community, or in our Franciscan oikonomia  more intentionally, more intensely, seeing more deeply that each person we meet is our equal with whom we share the resources God has given us. Thank God for them.