Catholic Church Ethics
In the current 3ED of our book (out this month) we have extended a bit the consideration of religion in business ethics. After all, religion is a source of ‘right and wrong’ for a lot of people on earth. However, the debate on religion has received an interesting twist recently with the way the Catholic Church has dealt with the child abuse cases, which have popped up recently in an unprecedented manner. The case shows that ‘business’ ethics, or more broadly, organizational ethics, is also a topic for a church. In some ways, one could see the Catholic Church as the oldest and one of the largest ‘multinational corporations’ globally, with roughly 2,800 subsidiaries (dioceses) and 1.5bn members in nearly every country of the world. In some ways it is to no surprise that ethical infractions occur in such an organisation. Albeit that the current problems of the church are going beyond the normal ethical problems of MNCs and consist of criminal actions and human rights violations commited b...