Faith-based investors urged to rise above fear

Fear is being “intentionally generated” to blunt conscience and social responsibility in the financial sector, investors from Church denominations and charities were told at a meeting in London this month

John Dalla Costa, ethicist and theologian who was one of the members of the group that was involved in authoring Mensuram Bonam, the 2022 document from the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences that explores faith-based measures for Catholic investors, was in London to address the Church Investors Group members’ day hosted by CCLA Investment Management in London.

Speaking to The Tablet, he noted that the current social turmoil makes this a “perilous” time for all investors, he detailed the pressures in the financial markets to roll back social and ecological responsibility measures, and the need to main the values of faith to navigate the new threats to stability and traditional ethics.

For the last 30 years, there had been a lot of pushback on the principles of socially responsible investing – initiatives to take care of the environment, to take care of society and to think about governance in a new way, he said. “So in this particular moment, how do we, in a sense, recast the principles from faith in a way that understands the difficulties of the moment but also build more energy and momentum around living our faith?”

It is a fearful time, he added. “Some of that fear is being intentionally generated to blunt initiatives of conscience and initiatives of responsibility. So I’ve been doing ethics and corporate social responsibility for over 30 years and we’ve made very, very slow progress, people needed to be convinced they needed to have examples that they could draw on.”

Especially with the US pushback, 30 or 40 years of work in this regard is being evaporated, he said. “A lot of misinformation [is] being used to undo things like the work that we’ve been doing on climate change.”

There has been a tension really since the 1970s around social responsibility versus the bottom line, he said. “And those forces for the bottom line have now become the institutional and even the regulatory forces.” The use of the term “fake news” to compromise investment ethics was complicating the success of business.

“The thing from a faith perspective is first of all, going back to our roots in faith. Where we recognise that fear and immobilisation actually is counterproductive to the moment it actually allows the sinister forces to have their way, so overcoming fear is very much a requirement as we think about our faith to therefore go deeper and deeper into this. We need to relearn the skills of contemplation, which are the skills of sort of waiting when we don’t have an answer, not moving to a solution but allowing something deeper, more profound to percolate, and to come to the fore.”

CCLA provides the secretariat for the Church Investors Group and has supported them for nearly two decades, hosting their members’ events and conferences.

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