The Churches in Britain have a long and distinguished record of commenting authoritatively on issues of economics and social justice, a tradition embracing the Anglican "Faith in the City" report in 1985, the Catholic statement "The Common Good" a decade later, and the more recent ecumenical document of 2005, "Prosperity with a Purpose".

It is far too soon to expect similarly weighty commentaries on the present financial crisis. But there were certain moral priorities put forward in those church reports which apply to the contemporary situation. All three challenged the assumption that economics and market forces were autonomous and not subject to moral judgement - an assumption that has almost overnight been ditched in favour of a new orthodoxy. It is suddenly acceptable in New York and Washington, as in the City of London and Westminster, to say that governments have a duty to intervene to prevent market outcomes that are disastrous for the common good. But it is worth spelling out why this has been the consensus of Christian social ethics for many years, lest the same mistakes be repeated.

The Gospel asserts clearly the priority of the human over the material. People are more important than wealth: that is what the choice between God and Mammon comes down to. In the Catholic tradition since Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891, this has been represented as the priority of labour over capital. This means today that people rather than markets must be the priority.

Relying on market forces ultimately to correct what has gone wrong with the housing market in Britain and America could deprive many people of house and home. If the Government has to become the national landlord, mortgage-lender and housebuilder because the housing market has failed in its task, then so be it. The Government can withdraw if and when it is safe for the profit motive to again drive the supply of affordable homes. The same principle applies to the ...

In the Middle Ages, the financial crisis that has devastated Wall Street would no doubt have been likened to the wrath of God that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. One of America's biggest banks, Lehman Brothers, has filed for bankruptcy, throwing thousands out of work (including up to 5,000 at its London subsidiaries) and threatening a dangerous chain reaction throughout the global financial system. As in the story ...

Stephen Hawking's bestseller, A Brief History of Time, concludes with the passage that made the book famous. If a complete theory of subatomic physics were ever reached, he wrote, people would then be able "to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we should know the ...

It may not decide who is to become the next President of the United States, but abortion is once again a hot issue as the 2008 election campaign is launched at the conclusion of the two party conventions. As during the campaign between John Kerry and George W. Bush four years ago, so attention has again focused on the Catholic vote - approximately a quarter of the whole - and how it will be affected by the strongly ...

It is refreshing to have a bishop who unburdens his mind as candidly and comprehensively as Bishop Patrick O'Donoghue has done in his latest contribution to a series of papers he has been publishing on the state of his diocese, Lancaster. Most of the bishops play their cards so close to their chests that it is hard to know what they think. Indeed, this is one of his points. He says individual bishops should feel ...