Interview with Economist Samuel Gregg

How Christianity Shaped Modern Banking

In this insightful interview, Samuel Gregg, Director of Research at the Acton Institute, shares his expertise on the intersection of economics, theology, and philosophy. With a keen analytical approach, he discusses the Vatican’s stance on financial ethics, the Church’s role in shaping economic thought, and the historical influence of Christianity on modern banking and capitalism.
Gregg provides a critical perspective on financial regulations, ethical investing, and the lessons learned—or not learned—from the 2008 financial crisis. He also explores the moral dimensions of wealth, property, and monetary policy, emphasizing the importance of principled engagement in finance.
Beyond economics, the conversation delves into faith, vocation, and the Christian understanding of work. Gregg reflects on his personal journey of faith, the role of Sunday as a day of reflection, and his admiration for classic literature that explores moral and spiritual struggles.
This interview offers a compelling blend of economic insight, theological reflection, and historical depth, making it a must-read for anyone interested in the moral dimensions of finance and the broader role of Christianity in economic life.
The interview took place on May 29, 2018.

Two weeks ago, the Vatican released a new document about economic and financial issues.¹ In a recent article you write “The Church has much more work to do if it’s going to make constructive contributions to the reform of a segment of modern economies.” What is in your opinion the task of the Church and its leaders? Are regulations a panacea or a placebo? 

Samuel Gregg: Well, in that document, the Vatican issues, I think, in the first, second, and fourth sections of the document, some very good principles, which I think are useful for anyone who’s working in the world of finance and banking. The third section is the section I’m more critical of, and the reason I’m more critical of it is because I think it misstates the nature of some of the problems, it reflects a lack of understanding of certain parts of the financial sector, but it also doesn’t talk about some actual real problems in the financial sector that need to be addressed. But when it comes to the Church’s overall approach to these types of issues, my sense is that the Church should focus very much upon the principles, the principles which we draw from the Bible, from the tradition, from natural law, the principles that we bring to bear upon thinking about finance and explaining those principles, why they are important, and I think that would be more helpful than the Church entering into the discussion of often very, very complicated financial questions for which a great deal of economic understanding is first necessary.

And this is important because I think the Church needs to talk about these issues, but it’s much better when it talks about the principles because when it talks about the micro-details of these problems, people don’t think about the principles, they start focusing upon some very specific problems which distract them from thinking about what’s really important in this area.

What’s the biggest challenge facing Christians and other people of good will seeking to shape the world of finance and banking?

Samuel Gregg: I think there are several challenges. The first, I think, is if you read some statements by some Christians about finance and economics, it’s quite clear that their understanding of economics is often very limited.

It’s not that they are of bad will, it’s just that they don’t know very much about economics. And it seems to me that one of the things that Christians should be doing before they comment about these issues is to have some understanding of some basic economic principles, some basic economic insights into reality because I think that makes the Church’s commentary on these issues more attuned to the realities of what finance and banking actually does. So, for example, a Catholic bioethicist presumably will want to know something about medicine before they talk about biomedical issues.

For the same reason, I think, the Christians who are talking about finance and banking, they should probably know something more about the way that these parts of the economy work. So that’s the first thing. More knowledge of economics, I think, is very important.

The second thing I think that Christians can do is to remind people that the principles that apply to Christian life in all other aspects are just as applicable in the realm of finance and banking because there’s no specific principles that apply to finance and banking. It’s the same principles that Christian ethics applies to everything else. So that’s the second thing.

The third thing I think that would be useful for Christians to do in this particular area is to think very seriously about the way in which Christians have historically contributed to the development of banking and finance. These are not modern creations. These things first emerged in their mature form in the mediaeval period, and that is a Catholic world.

And many of the key financial institutions and instruments that we take for granted today were developed by mediaeval and early modern theologians. And I think it’s important for Christians to talk about this because it’s an example of the way in which the Church has contributed to a very important segment of the modern economy. And unfortunately, many Christians have no knowledge of this whatsoever.

And that’s one of the reasons I wrote this book called “For God and Profit” because I wanted to, in part, remind Christians of their own history in contributing to the thinking about this area.

You just mentioned your book “For God and Profit”. You point out that Christianity played a key role in the rise of modern economies, especially regarding capital. What are some examples of this Christian influence on the Commercial Revolution?

Samuel Gregg: I think a very good example is the development of modern banking. Prior to the mediaeval period, banks existed, but they didn’t exist in the form that we understand them today. Banks in the mediaeval period were the first to really understand why capital is very important in contemporary economic life, that by investing capital, by investing capital in different parts of the economy, in different enterprises, you could cause wealth to grow.

And theologians got very interested in this because they were interested in, for example, questions like usury and the whole question of money lending. They were also interested in how one helps the poor in the conditions of economic growth. So, for example, they developed the particular idea that money isn’t just a means of exchange, but money in certain economic conditions can be capital.

Now, that’s a revolution in the way that people hitherto had thought about the nature of money. People didn’t really think about money as a form of capital, and it was early these mediaeval theologians who even first used this word capital to describe this new quality that money had acquired. So that’s the first thing.

On a more practical level, particular religious orders, such as the Franciscans, were the very first to set up a number of what we would call banking institutions, which is ironic in a way because Franciscans are devoted to poverty and detachment from worldly things. But they were the first to build what were called the Montipietes, which were basically lending institutions that focused very much upon lending to people who were poor. In fact, some of those institutions are still around today in the form of major banks.

So it wasn’t just theoretical contributions they were making. It was also practical contributions in the way that they allowed and encouraged the spread of financial institutions throughout Europe.

Usury is an often mentioned and controversial topic when it comes to Church history. What exactly is usury and what has the Church taught about it? Has that teaching changed?

Samuel Gregg: Well, many people think that usury is simply charging interest upon capital. But that’s not what usury is. The technical definition of usury is the act of charging interest on a loan without just title.

So those last three words, without just title, are very important because it tells us that there are just titles, just conditions under which we may charge interest. Now, what’s important, I think, to remember is that up until the mediaeval period, all the world’s economies were subsistence economies, which means there’s no economic growth in which money almost exclusively functions as a form of exchange. So it’s seen as something that’s sterile.

It’s not productive. And that was one of the common objections to money lending. You were charging people money. You were making money out of something that was seen as not productive. With the commercial revolution of the mediaeval period, what do we see? Well, we see money starts to acquire particular new characteristics, which we call capital. So money now becomes productive.

And people like Aquinas and a number of other mediaeval theologians recognize that if money is capital, then that changes everything about the way that we understand money lending. Because if money is capital, that means it’s productive. If I lend this productive money to someone else, I’m giving up my own use of it.

And so the argument of a number of theologians was, if you give up your own productive use of something and you give it to someone else, you are entitled to charge them for the loss of what you otherwise would have made as a consequence of having this capital. So what we’re seeing here is a development of doctrine. But it’s not a development in the sense that contradicts what has been said before.

There is still—usury still exists. You can still engage in usurious acts. But what happens is because we get a greater understanding of the nature of money and we understand that money takes on different characteristics in different economic conditions, we can understand why money lending in one context is wrong, but money lending in another context is correct.

This is a classic development of doctrine. And what is very important about it is it involves no contradiction with what’s been said before. Yes, opportunity cost.

And in fact, they talked about opportunity cost as something that you could legitimately charge for. They said that you could charge for the degree of risk you undertake. So if I lend money to you, there’s a risk that you may not pay it back.

In fact, the higher the risk, the higher the interest rate I’m going to charge you. And what’s interesting about all this is that these mediaeval and early modern theologians, they weren’t economists, but they had some very deep insights into the nature of economic life that really had not been discerned before. So it’s ironic that in the process of engaging in the act of moral theology, they were working out things like opportunity cost, comparative advantage, how interest rates can reflect the degree of risk of different enterprises, all of which we take for granted today as basic functionings of the financial system.

But all this was developed by mediaeval Catholic theologians. I would like it if more Christians and other people of goodwill understood this, because I think it would change the way that some of them think about finance and banking. It’s not a creation of the Enlightenment. It’s not even a creation of modernity. It’s a creation of a Catholic world.

Is it wrong for people to earn money, invest it and try to make a return on it?

Samuel Gregg: No, it’s not. In fact, if it was wrong to invest in other people’s enterprises, I can assure you we would all be living very poor lives. We’d be living very circumscribed lives, and we would probably all be dead by the age of 30. Why do I say all that? When I invest my capital in someone else’s enterprise, what am I doing? I’m giving them, if you like, the fuel, the fuel that they need to create their business in the first place.

If we don’t have capital, if we don’t have the ability to invest in other people’s enterprises, those enterprises simply will never begin in the first place. When I invest in someone else’s enterprise, I’m becoming a partner in that enterprise. I’m becoming just as important as the entrepreneur.

I’m becoming just as important as the people who work for the company, because without me, this company will not work. Without the entrepreneur, this company will not begin. Without employees, this company won’t begin.

You need entrepreneurs, you need capital, and you need employees if a business is going to begin. From that standpoint, I think it’s perfectly legitimate and usually good to invest in other people’s enterprises or even in your own.

Which are the biblical roots of private property and what is the Christian understanding of property nowadays?

Samuel Gregg: Well, I think if you look at the Bible, both the Old Testament and the New Testament, what’s interesting is that property is just assumed to be the way that people own things. This is reinforced, of course, by the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, because it says, remember, don’t steal. Well, that assumes that people own things privately, and it’s wrong to take things from other people unless you have a really good reason to do so.

So we see in the Old Testament, for example, private property is assumed. The Decalogue urges respect for private property. It doesn’t say private property is absolute.

The only thing that’s absolute is human life, and private property is about material things, and material things serve human beings. So that’s the scriptural understanding of this. I think it’s significant, for example, that when— remember in the Acts of the Apostles how the Jerusalem community share everything in common.

Many people have said, well, the early Christians were all socialists, right? But what’s interesting is that if you read the rest of the Acts of the Apostles, what do we see St. Paul doing? Does St. Paul urge everyone to live like the Jerusalem community? No. In fact, he raises money from these other Christians in the rest of the world so that he can take it back to Jerusalem so that the Jerusalem community has money to live off. So that’s actually a very good model if you think of the church.

There are some people who are called to go and live monastic lives, who live in common. They share everything in common. But that’s not the way that most Christians are called to live their lives economically, and private property enables us to do that.

What does private property do today?

Samuel Gregg: Well, I think it does more or less what it’s done always. Private property is the normative way that we realize what the church calls the universal destination of material goods. The goods of the world, the material goods of the world, are made for everyone.

Private property is the normal way in which we allow these goods of the world to serve everyone else. If you read, for example, Thomas Aquinas, he gives several reasons why he says private property is not just licit but, in fact, normative. He says things like, if everything is owned in common, no one will be responsible for anything.

He says that, in fact, that private property provides incentives for people to work. So all these things that we find in the tradition of the church and the way it talks about property, I think are very good in understanding how property functions in contemporary economies. The difference, I suppose, between today and the way that property functioned, say, up until the 18th century was that property was primarily understood in terms of land, was understood in terms of land ownership.

But we know today that while land is one form of property ownership, there’s lots of other forms of ways in which you can own property. You can have intellectual property. You can own capital as a form of property.

When you have an investment, that’s a form of your property. So the nature of property, the manifestations of property have changed as the economy changes, but the functions of property don’t change. They remain constant over time.

The role and importance of money is often discussed. What good is money?

Samuel Gregg: It’s interesting you say that because when you say something like what is the good of money, people automatically think, well, money is not good. Remember that many people misquote the Bible and they say things like money is the root of all evil.

Of course, the line is love of money is the root of all evil. So money itself is good. It’s an instrument.

It’s a good instrument. The way to think about this is imagine living in a world in which we had no money. If we had no money, everything would be by bartering.

That would lead to a lot of inefficiencies in economic life. So money enables us to enter into exchanges with people without us actually having to give a cow in return for a pig or whatever it happens to be. So it allows economic life to become simpler.

Another thing that money does, I think, is it gives us a type of power. It gives us a type of power over our own lives. It gives us opportunities in terms of how we use our capital at different points of our lives.

Money is something that as an instrument makes life better for everyone. Now, love of money is a problem, right? Because love of money is materialism. And we know that materialism is very damaging for human beings, for human morality, and for human spirituality.

So money is never a good in itself. But it’s an instrumental good without which all of us would be living very miserable lives. That’s very counterintuitive, I think, for a lot of people.

But when you think about it a little bit, you start to realize, without money, we would be living in very, very unpleasant societies. Big question. Since the beginning of Christianity.

Can a rich man go to heaven, enter the Kingdom of God?

Samuel Gregg: Well, Christ, in fact, that’s the gospel reading today. It’s funny you mention that. It’s actually today’s gospel reading. Today being May the 29th. And, of course, what’s interesting about that is that, remember, the apostles are shocked when Christ says this. So the general population is shocked.

And then Christ says it again. And his disciples, his apostles, pull him aside and say, well, what does this mean? What’s this about? Because this means that really it’s going to be very hard for anyone to go to heaven. So what I think this means is that Christ is not telling us that having wealth is somehow a fundamental obstacle to achieving salvation.

The mere possession of wealth doesn’t mean that you’re going to hell. What it is a warning against, I think, is the warning against making an idol out of money. And if you look at all the scriptures, both the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian scriptures, it’s not that money or wealth or even richness, having lots of wealth, is a problem in itself.

The problem is when you make it an idol. And, by the way, it’s not just wealthy people who make money an idol. Some people who are not so wealthy can also make money an idol.

So I think that’s really what’s going on there. It’s a warning against materialism. It’s a warning against putting money before God.

So does it mean that rich people are not going to heaven? No. It means that people who are materialistic and make an idol of money are putting their salvation at risk.

Looking back to the year 2008, 2009, have we learned anything from the financial crisis and what did we learn?

Samuel Gregg: My own view is that we have not learned very much.

Why do I say that? I say that because I see many of the same problems still existing in many Western economies when it comes to the financial sector. If there was a major crash of a bank in Austria tomorrow, does anyone doubt that the government would bail it out? No one doubts that. So what does this mean? This is a problem because when a government bails out a bank, that sends a message to other banks.

And the message is if you behave irresponsibly, if you take excessive risks and you get into significant trouble and you are big enough, then we will save you. So what do you think that encourages banks to do? It encourages them to behave irresponsibly. So we haven’t dealt with this problem, what many people call moral hazard.

Moral hazard is when I engage in risky behavior because I know that I will be protected from the negative consequences of my actions. Moral hazard remains a major problem in every single developed economy today. It’s not that people don’t understand the problem.

People understand the problem, but they’re not willing to do anything about it. They’re not willing to let a big bank fail because the idea is that if a big bank fails, the systemic effects will be so great that lots of people will suffer. Well, that might be true.

We don’t know until we let that happen. But what we do know is that when we bail big banks out, we are enabling, we are encouraging bad behavior. So that’s one example I think where we know the problem, but we’re unwilling to really deal with the problem.

So that’s one thing. I think, for example, that many of the problems of the financial crisis were caused by mistaken monetary policy on the part of the Federal Reserve in the United States and the European Central Bank. I don’t think they have fundament.

Either of those institutions, which are so big and so important, have fundamentally rethought the way that they would deal with a major financial crisis. I suspect they would behave in exactly the same way that they behaved before. And in both cases, I think they may have initially stopped some of the worst things happening, but they’ve created much more systematic problems over the longer term.

So that’s the second thing. A third thing, which I think is a problem, is that the instinctive reaction of many people to a type of financial crisis is to say, we need more regulation. And I understand why people say that.

It’s perfectly understandable. The difficulty is that I don’t think we always understand how regulations can actually encourage people to behave irresponsibly. I make this point in my book that sometimes, for example, when you introduce a very complicated regulatory environment for banks and finance, what do banks and financial houses do? They hire really smart people to work out how to get around the regulations.

This is called arbitrage, and they make money out of knowing how to get around the system. So the more regulation, the more the banks tend to behave in that way. And the problem with that is they’re not really creating wealth anymore.

They’re playing the system. They’re playing the system. And after 2008, we had significant amounts of regulation added to the financial sector in the United States and in Europe.

In fact, in the United States, what’s called the Dodd-Frank Act added 2,230 pages of regulation. And that’s in addition to the thousands of pages of regulation that existed before the financial crisis. So I guess my point is that we haven’t learned that while regulation can sometimes be part of the solution, regulation can also become part of the problem when we’re responding to financial crisis and we’re trying to understand why financial crises occur in the first place.

I think there’s a tendency to think that regulation will fix problems. Well, maybe, but sometimes it also causes a lot of problems. And I don’t see that in developed economies, developed societies, we’re really understanding how that happens.

So those are the three things I would say that we have not learned. In terms of positive things, well, that’s a shorter list. One thing I think that we have learned is that when banks and financial institutions are trying to sell you a product, a financial product that they can’t explain to you and you don’t understand, I think more people understand now I’m not going to invest in that.

Because we’re in the 2008, one of the problems was banks and financial houses selling financial products that. That was so complicated that even the people selling them couldn’t explain what they would do, what they were doing. So my point is, I think people are more cautious now about automatically being attracted to something because it’s complicated and therefore it’s going to work. And we don’t understand how, but it’s going to work. I think people now are more sceptical, rightly sceptical of people offering them things they don’t understand. And that’s good.

What can be the solution to all these things?

Samuel Gregg: Well, I have no magic bullet. You understand that? There’s no such thing as a magic bullet, but I do think there’s a couple of things.

One solution I think is for people to have a greater knowledge of how the financial sector works.

Most people, even some very educated people, don’t really know how the financial sector works. So the more we understand how it works, the more critical we can be when we start to see areas in which it makes life much more complicated or can lead to economic problems. So that’s one thing.

I think another thing that would be very helpful, besides education, would be for us to understand the role of monetary policy in generating financial crises. As I said before, monetary policy, bad monetary policy, played a major role in the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. And rethinking how we do monetary policy, in my view, would be a positive step forward.

Another thing, I think, which is, I guess, more on the positive side, would be for us to think about finance as a type of vocation, as something that people are called to do. Just as some people are called to be clergy, some people are called to be doctors, some people are called to be lawyers, some people are called to work in finance. Because part of the problem, I think, is that finance has a very bad reputation, and even those people who often understand how finance works, they still view it as somehow morally problematic.

It’s my contention that if we are to do something that’s going to make finance healthier as a part of the economy, is we need people going into work in this sector of the economy who do see it as vocation. Who see it as part of the way in which we create wealth, and part of the way in which we help to unfold God’s original creative act. That would be a positive step forward in terms of helping people to understand how finance works, but also the good, the real good that finance does in making life more free, more prosperous, and potentially more flourishing for us.

So it’s not just a question of dealing with systematic problems or institutional problems. It’s also a question of rethinking the way we think about people who go and work in this sector of the economy. Because I think most people view it as necessary, but I don’t really want to be involved in it.

We need to rethink it as something that it’s good to do because it has a vocational dimension to it.

In what ways can work in the financial sector serve the common good?

Samuel Gregg: Well, there’s many ways. I can list a few.

The first thing it does is it enables capital to be invested in efficient and speedy ways in different parts of national economies and even in the global economy. Without a financial sector, we can’t do that. You need a financial sector that allocates capital.

A second thing that the financial sector does, which is I think very important for the common good, is that it reduces risk and increases the possibility of capital growth. The reason I say that is that what finance does is manage risk, and management of risk is very difficult. But if we’re going to have growing economies, you have to have people who are willing to take risk.

We also have to have people who are willing to say, that business is a good risk. That business is not so good a risk. The financial sector does that every single day.

They’re constantly helping people to make decisions about what are good risks and what are not good risks. And when you have that, you have a lot more economic stability than you otherwise would. So that’s just two functions, I think.

Another function, of course, besides allocation and managing risk, is that they grow capital. The financial sector helps to grow capital. We don’t just need growing capital, growing amounts of capital to keep the overall economy growing.

We need capital to basically keep us out of poverty. So it’s not just a question of increasing. It’s also making sure we don’t fall back into less than optimal economic conditions.

And all those things are ways in which the financial sector contributes to different conditions of the common good. Remember, with the common good, the common good being the conditions in a society that allow people to flourish. Different institutions have different responsibilities for those conditions.

And the financial sector has a major role to play in the economic side of the common good. Now, the financial sector is not very good at raising children. The financial sector is not very good at helping people to fix their marriages or things like that.

In other words, finance and the financial sector has a specific T-Loss, a specific goal that it is particularly suited to achieving. And that’s how it contributes to the common good. To put it in very simple terms, the financial sector contributes to the common good by doing what it’s supposed to do. Which is allocate capital, create capital, and above all, manage risk.

Should Catholics think about ethical investment?

Samuel Gregg: Well, every investment choice, like any other free choice, has an ethical dimension to it. If I invest in a software company, that’s very different from investing in a company that produces pornography, right? To the extent that I invest in the company that produces pornography, that’s a serious moral problem.

So, the minimum, I think, when it comes to this question of ethical investing is do no evil. And that’s a basic principle of Christian ethics. That’s one of the fundamental principles, do no evil.

Do not consciously choose to violate any moral absolute. So, if you approach finance with that in mind, you probably won’t make many moral errors. But, so that’s one thing which I think that if you follow the Decalogue, this gives you some pretty clear guidelines about what it’s not good to invest in.

So, that’s one thing. On the other hand, when you look at some of the projects, some of the enterprises that describe themselves as ethical investing, right, what do you find? Well, it’s usually what I call politically correct investing. Which means it’s not really about the Christian understanding of the moral life.

It’s much more about something like supporting the environment or supporting particular enterprises that treat employees in particular ways, etc., etc. They’re not bad in themselves, but it’s not clear to me that investing in a company because it calls itself more environmentally friendly, it’s not clear to me that that’s necessarily an ethical choice. So, most of what is presented as ethical investing today in the world stock markets, in my view, actually has very little to do with ethical investing.

It’s much more about promoting particular causes, particular political causes. And if you want to do that, okay, that’s fine. But don’t call it ethical investing.

Call it green investing or call it I don’t like guns investing or whatever it happens to be. Because I think that ethical investing from a Catholic Christian standpoint is really about doing no evil and then thinking about the ways in which your investment can contribute to the purpose of finance, the purpose of business, which is, as I said, to grow the business, to create wealth. That’s its primary purpose.

A business is not a family. A business is not a charity. A charity is not a business. A family is not a business. And I think that much ethical investment strategies often mix these things up. They mix up investment often with political activism. The two things are very different. They need to be kept separate, at least in people’s minds. They need to be kept separate.

How did you come to faith and what does faith mean?

Samuel Gregg: Well, I’m what in the Anglo-American world is called a cradle Catholic, which means I was born, I was baptised as a child. And I had the good fortune to grow up in a family that took the faith very seriously. And as I grew older, I found the faith to be intellectually convincing. I thought it was true. I came to the conclusion that the Catholic faith is true. And I’ve always been interested in truth. And I think if you’re interested in truth and you make the conclusion that Catholicism is true, then it makes sense to be a Catholic.

So that’s one thing. The other thing is, so there’s a type of logic, there’s a logic of faith. But the other thing is, I find the church’s account of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to be convincing. I think it’s true. And I think the church has very good reasons why I can say that it’s true. So for me, becoming, growing into faith, growing into faith was a heavily intellectual exercise on one level.

But also when reading the scriptures, particularly the New Testament, I found the person of Jesus Christ to be deeply convincing. Deeply convincing. So that’s how I came to faith.

Like any other Catholic, I’m weak, I’m fallible, I sin, I make mistakes. But Jesus Christ is still Lord and the Catholic faith is still true. And my job, I think, is to try and live up as best I can to all the demands of that faith, even though, like all of us, I fail at different times.

Our newspaper is called “The Sunday”. So I’m asking you, what is Sunday for you?

Samuel Gregg: Sunday for me is the day in which I try to put aside all the things that otherwise occupy me. Occupy my mind and I try to focus it on Christ. So I go to Mass, I pray, I read the scriptures. I also try and think about the previous week in light of what the church teaches about how we should be living our lives. I try to think about where I have failed to do that and where I have, I think, successfully lived up to what the church asks us to do.

So for me, Sunday is a time of reflection. It’s also a time to participate in the sacrament of the Holy Mass. And it’s also a time to reflect on my own weakness, but also to thank the Lord for all the good He’s done for me, for my family, for those around me, and for the world.

What is life?

Samuel Gregg: Life is Jesus Christ. Life is embracing the truth of His message, realising that true life, true love, and ultimately the truth about reality is to be found in Jesus Christ. That’s what life is for me.

Life is complicated for everyone, of course, but I think if you keep, as a Catholic, if you keep focused upon that Jesus is Lord, what He says is true, and His teaching is transmitted faithfully through His church, I think you will come, despite all the struggles and difficulties that we have in our lives, you will come to the fullness of life, the fullness of happiness, and hopefully, at the end of time, one will come face to face with Christ.

What is your second favourite book, the Bible,  and …?

Samuel Gregg: It’s not the Wall Street Journal. I have two. These are both novels. One is a book by an English author called “The Power and the Glory”, and the book was written by an English Catholic author called Graham Greene. The Power and the Glory is about a Mexican priest during the persecution of the church in the 1930s in Mexico.

The story of the book is about this priest who’s an alcoholic, who has had an illegitimate child, who lives a very bad life, but nonetheless stays and continues to minister to the people that are entrusted to his care, and he ends up at the end of the… I’m spoiling the book for your readers, but he ends up being martyred at the end of the book. But it’s a wonderful testament to how people who are seemingly living deeply sinful, deeply hopeless lives can be transformed by Christ.

The second book, which is also a novel, which I read a number of years ago, is a book called “The Devil’s Advocate”. It’s written by an Australian author named Morris West, and it’s about a priest who’s dying of cancer, and he’s sent to the south of Italy to investigate the cause of the sanctity of a particular man who was killed by communists in the Second World War. It’s about how this man who died in the Second World War, how his own conversion results in the conversion of other people around him, and ultimately of this priest who lives a very detached theoretical life, how investigating the death of this man causes him to become someone who is fully understanding of the glory of Christ and the truth of the faith. They’re both very good novels.

There’s lots of books. I like lots of books. I read lots of books, but if… I was going to identify two that have been particularly meaningful for me, and I don’t read many novels, but those two books were particularly powerful for me.