Business is the most popular major among American college students today. Approximately 19% of undergraduates major in accounting, finance, management, marketing, or a related business discipline. Business is also the most popular area of graduate study, accounting for approximately 23% of graduate degrees. Colleges and universities frequently offer business courses to students through their institution’s school of business, colloquially known as a “b-school.”
B-schools have a long history at Catholic colleges and universities. For example, “The Mendoza College of Business” at the University of Notre Dame is over one hundred years old. Boston College’s “Carroll School of Management” was founded in 1938. “The McDonogh School” at Georgetown University has been around since 1957. The long history of Catholic b-schools is supported by Pope Benedict XVI’s assertion, “Work is fundamental to the fulfillment of the human being and to the development of society.”
As the Vatican’s “Vocation of the Business Leader” explains: “The vocation of the businessperson is a genuine human and Christian calling. Its importance in the life of the Church and in the world economy can hardly be overstated.” Accordingly, the mission of the Catholic business school has historically been to offer students the benefits of a rigorous business curriculum within the broader tradition of a rich, Catholic-mission-oriented liberal education.
Over the past decade, many Catholic b-schools have been missing the moment. Though they stand uniquely positioned to buttress against cultural confusion, they have been far too frequently following the crowd. Like their counterparts at non-Catholic business schools, students, faculty members, and administrators at Catholic b-schools have invested considerable time, effort, and resources thinking about “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) but have spent comparatively little or no time contemplating the rich tradition of Catholic Social Teaching (CST).
In a scathing piece explaining why he resigned from Notre Dame at the end of 2025, renowned sociologist Professor Christian Smith recounted the story of a “bright senior finance major” and “committed Catholic weeks away from graduating” who confessed that in four years taking business classes at Mendoza, she had heard nothing about CST. Dr. Smith called this a “mind-blowing dereliction of duty.” Like many Catholic business schools, Mendoza boasts a business ethics center through which it claims students contemplate “the moral purpose of business” and “address the most pressing ethical questions in business today.”
But is it ethical for a Catholic business school to teach ethics while never covering subsidiarity? Is it moral for Catholic b-school communities to be nimbly able to cite chapter and verse from “White Fragility,” “How to be an Anti-Racist” and “Subtle Acts of Exclusion” but unable to muster anything from Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, and Centesimus Annus?
Can’t even pagans do that? So, why are so many Catholic b-schools keeping their lamps hidden under a bushel basket?
These are fair questions. And Lent offers a good opportunity to reflect on Dr. Smith’s brilliant expose. Doing so should prompt long lines at the confessional.
At the same time, hope remains a virtue. Beaten and battered Catholics know that Easter is coming. And as we lament what has gone wrong, anyone in the trenches of Catholic business education should commit to getting things right. And, as we look for a way forward, we may find some promise in these early days of Pope Leo XIV’s papacy.
Just days after his election last year, our new pope met with the College of Cardinals and explained why he chose his papal name:
There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.
Of course, having navigated the workplace this past decade, faithful Catholic professionals know that “another industrial revolution” began some time ago. And they had more recently begun worrying that AI might take things to a whole other level. Hearing this from a pope who chose his name in honor of Pope Leo XIII, dubbed the “Father of Catholic Social Doctrine” is reassuring. After all, the last Leo gave us the St. Michael the Archangel prayer, perhaps our new Leo is signaling it is time to get serious about the battles we face today.
While addressing the Vatican Diplomatic Corps in January, Pope Leo XIV gave us this:
It is painful to see how, especially in the West, the space for genuine freedom of expression is rapidly shrinking. At the same time, a new Orwellian-style language is developing which, in an attempt to be increasingly inclusive, ends up excluding those who do not conform to the ideologies that are fueling it.
The Pope went on to add:
At this moment in history, freedom of conscience seems increasingly to be questioned by States, even those that claim to be based on democracy and human rights. This freedom, however, establishes a balance between the collective interest and individual dignity. It also emphasizes that a truly free society does not impose uniformity but protects the diversity of consciences, preventing authoritarian tendencies and promoting an ethical dialogue that enriches the social fabric.
Amen. It is hard to find any shades of gray there.
Are Catholic b-schools listening? If Catholic mission is still part of Catholic business education, they should be.
After all, Catholic business students are most certainly part of what the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls “the lay faithful.” They share in the “priestly, prophetic and kingly office of Christ, and they have their own part to play in the mission of the whole Christian people in the Church and in the world.” They are called to “seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and directing them according to God’s will.”
The Catechism continues: “Lay believers are in the front line of Church life; for them, the Church is the animating principle of human society. Therefore, they in particular ought to have an ever-clearer consciousness not only of belonging to the Church, but of being the Church.” Moreover, the Catechism says that lay Christians “have the right and duty, individually or grouped in associations, to work so that the divine message of salvation may be known and accepted by all men throughout the earth.”
Catholic b-schools, without question, should offer Catholic business students the opportunity to use their faith and reason. They should challenge students to understand what it really means to be human and to genuinely protect the life and dignity of the human person. To grapple with questions about the proper relationship between the human person, work, and the marketplace. To ponder the extraordinary nature of the family unit and the critical role it plays in properly ordering society. To rediscover the logic and beauty of “subsidiarity.” To contemplate the source of “solidarity” and understand what it is as opposed to what the media tells us it means. To do the same with the “common good” and to know its authentic meaning rather than adopt it as shorthand for something it is most definitely not. To consider once and for all what the Church says about private ownership and to see very clearly what it says about socialism.
And to understand the truth that committing to these things connects Catholic business students back to the God who created each of them with unique talents to be used for His purpose.
Today, while too many corporate boardrooms have neither any idea why these things matter nor what they have to do with business, Catholic business schools should.
If you are a prospective Catholic business student–or if you are a parent or grandparent of a prospective Catholic business student–I encourage you to pay attention as you make your selection. To ask questions. Of the dean. Of the department heads. Of the faculty. Figure out if and how Catholic social teaching is integrated into the culture and curriculum of the Catholic business schools you are considering. Look for specifics and do not accept generalities.
And pray that more Catholic b-schools possess the courage to genuinely commit to, foster, and live out the unique, incredibly beautiful, and life-changing tradition of Catholic social teaching.
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“…the mission of the Catholic business school has historically been to offer students the benefits of a rigorous business curriculum within the broader tradition of a rich, Catholic-mission-oriented liberal education.”
That just about the most risable assertion I’ve read in a long, long time – something a stand-up comic would say.
Let’s face facts: the majority of Catholic schools are simply secular schools with an occasional cross on top. How many CATHOLIC schools and colleges have as their mission the education of CATHOLICS? How many CATHOLIC schools and colleges hire only CATHOLICS to do the teaching?
Let’s stop the lying and for once return the CATHOLIC church to telling the Truth.
Not many years ago, while proofreading a manuscript in a local coffee shop, I noticed an obvious university professor with her laptop and grading term papers. Said I, “What dost thou do in life?” Said she, “I am a professor of creative writing at (name of a typical Catholic university, this one Jesuit).”
She recently had asked her class of twenty-four seniors what they wanted to do in life. All twenty-four “want to be a CEO!” When asked “a CEO of what?” not even one had an answer.
Apparently, they just wanted to run stuff by being on top of other equally ungrounded widgets. It’s all about proceduralism versus content. The governance thingy. Very synodal, that.
I have an undergraduate degree in business (Economics, Penn State, no longer offered by their business school, you only get it from the college of Liberal Arts) and an MBA (Finance and Accounting) from a Jesuit School, so I find the topic interesting, especially since I am now far enough away from my undergraduate and graduate experience to assess their utility to my professional endeavors.
Much of what is taught in many classes (Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, usually in management classes) is irrelevant or outright nonsense. Whatever the hell “self actualization” is, it has no bearing on dealing with a defiant or insubordinate employee, or the good employee who is suddenly chronically late, missing work or unfocused because of a death or divorce or other personal calamity.
In the modern corporation, and lets be honest, B-schools promise to provide cubicle ready employees under the guise of preparing C-Suiters, while entirely too much line authority is delegated to “Human Resources” who are the phalanx of the DEI/CRT operation and other social engineering. Ninety years ago, most of HR would have been goose-stepping and proudly sticking out their right arm to the failed artist and his mechanized murder machine.
Until B-schools can explain how the bespeckled Julie Feiss Masino (Bachelor of Arts in communications from Miami University) can become Chairman and CEO in July 2023, drive the price of the stock down from around 90 to under 28 since her appointment as CEO, lead one of the great rebranding disasters of all time and retain her job, let alone be described as a “seasoned executive with a track record of success”, business schools need serious introspection. Here we have a BofD watching complete wreckage and being derelict in their duty. That’s not supposed to happen in B-School textbooks.
Rerum Novarum, last I checked doesn’t have much to say about that sort of malfeasance. It doesn’t encompass the issues presented by Blackrock, an ever-expanding state, AI, cryptocurrency, NGOs. It was written to a world that that no longer exists.
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I have thought and fought on this matter for years. I have an MBA and a Ph.D. from Wharton. I did my doctorate dissertation on the teaching of business ethics in business schools. I sent a questionnaire to the deans of Catholic business schools. The questionnaire sought to verify whether the respondents agreed with statements of Pope Paul St John Paul II on the working principles of using the teaching of the church in universities. A handful of deans responded. I spoke at an annual meeting of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars on the matter. Fr. Michael Scanlan TOR president of Steubenville university asked me, on this occasion, to help reform his business school. In spite of the willingness of the dean at the time, I could not make a dent.
Here was my conclusion at the time: 1/ indeed business school in Catholic universities bring a lot of students. They are a cash cow to these universities. They form regional young students to some basic business principles. That satisfies the regional business organizations. On both sides the directives are “don’t rock the boat” (as you would if you introduced Catholic Social Teachings in the middle of marketing or management courses). 2/ The discourse of Business courses on management are a mix of psychology and sociology. To make them amenable to Catholic concepts based on CST would really rock the boat.
So we were and still are in a situation where after we teach how to manage money in courses of accounting, after we teach how to manage clients in course of marketing, how to manage employees in courses of management, we offer some elective “ethics course” with the implied message “don’t forget to be ethical”, Now the business ethics courses are the worst of woke ideology, supporting abortion and homosexuality is good. I founded the St Antoninus Institute for Catholic concepts in Business.
Levi Strauss, the arguably biggest apparel corporation in the world,had been a pioneer in woke corporate philosophy. Their first program was, before “same sex marriage” was made into law, to ensure that homosexual partners would receive the same corporate benefits than the legal spouses. Levi Strauss had a team addressing all Fortune 500 companies of their sexual priorities. Around 1995, I’d check and 499 of the Fortune 500 had signed on the commitments pushed by Levi Strauss. The last one was EXXON.
The Catholic Press is also responsible. I wrote a complete workbook and handbook of Catholic management (still sold by Amazon) “Virtue Based Management”. I had to publish it myself. Publishing houses of Catholic universities had no room for publishing it after the manuscript of their own professors. Catholic business schools would not list it as a elective book to their students. Ignatius Press told me to look for a publisher elsewhere.
As a result, there is a myriad of Protestant inspired business titles. But the most interesting is the number of business book based on Indian theology.
But I am here to tell you, I did not find it impossible to introduce CST principles in the field of management as I did it. My doctoral dissertation to the Wharton school starts with a page listing 3 quotes from St Thomas Aquinas OP. I also immensely benefitted from St Pope John Paul II’ s encyclicals “Laborem Exercens” and “Centisimus Annus” where I found gems of wisdom over philosophical issues in their field reported by the usual secular psychologists and sociologists.