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Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway, famed investor and so-called “sage of Omaha,” writes a letter to his investors every year. His 1985 letter coined the now commonly known investment quote: “We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy when others are fearful.”
Buffett embraced the budding concept of “behavioral finance”—the idea that our psychological traits and behaviors impact our investment choices. He was correct in this regard: Simply telling people to “buy low and sell high” doesn’t work well when people are petrified when prices collapse or excitedly greedy when stock investing is easy. Adding the psychological expression of “acting greedy” or “acting fearful” gives foundation to the somewhat useless advice of “buy low, sell high.”
However, is hopping between the vices of fear and greed over and over in one’s investing life a recipe for success? How often are we told “Be not afraid!” by our Lord and his messengers? Vice is hardly the choice for any Christian. Should we embrace fear and greed repeatedly, we will become fearful and greedy people. Instead, I propose, we should not be greedy or fearful; not accidentally, and certainly not by choice!
Rather than using Buffett’s strategy of vice investing, let us explore virtue investing. Eschewing vice altogether, Catholics should embrace the harder road of virtue, countering these evil instincts of fear and greed with the virtues of courage and prudence. Not only will countering our base instincts make us better investors, but these virtues also make us better Catholics. Simply put, courage foils fear, and prudence counters greed.
Before we tread further, let us define terms. Courage is the “mean between fear and foolhardiness,” and prudence is the “application of right reason.” Aristotle uses these definitions in his Nicomachean Ethics, a work probably dedicated to his son. We will put ourselves in the place of Aristotle’s son and listen to his advice on the application of virtue to our choices, and specifically to our investment choices.
I started a financial advice company in 2005. After just getting on our feet, the Great Recession of 2008 hit full force, and I witnessed the markets declining by over 40 percent within a year. (This was the largest decline in price for the markets in a year, ever.) For investors, this was painful. It was easy to imagine our retirements evaporating and markets never recovering.
When we feel pain, we have a choice to make. We can remove whatever is causing this discomfort (sell everything!), or we can lean into it as a chance to grow both in virtue and in wealth. After all, the &#8220;pain&#8221; we feel when we work out at the gym is a pain we want, and the &#8220;pain&#8221; we feel when we lose money is something we want to avoid. However, both pains are instructive when we reframe them in the light of virtue.
People were losing their homes as sub-prime mortgages collapsed. People saw their 401(k) or IRA get cut in half. Every instinct was to sell and move away from equities. However, this event was one of the greatest investment buying opportunities in a generation, perhaps rivaled only by the &#8220;COVID collapse&#8221; of 2020. The pain we felt was a signal pointing to a future where the pain pays off. Leaning into this pain is an act of courage. Courage is a choice, and this this particular courageous choice resulted in tremendous investment returns in the years following 2008. In March of that year, the DOW was at about 6,300 points. Today, the DOW is over 40,000 points.
In the moment of the investment decision, the virtues of courage and prudence serve us well. But further, generosity is like prudence, as it too thwarts greed and can be practiced long after the moment of the trade. So we act prudently, countering greed, and then move on to the virtue of generosity with our money. We grow in virtue twice! Prudence helps us build competence over time, and our motion toward generosity perfects this initial choice of virtue.
Courage serves as a spark for virtue generally, but specifically in burning away fearful impulses. Courage moves us to faith, a higher virtue, and like how prudence can birth generosity, our repeated acts of courage increase our faith. We trust God in everything because we have faith in his promises to us (and because he places charity in us). We trust that all our actions bring about our good and the good of others, as God “works for the good of those who love him” (Rom. 8:28). Gains and losses from investing will come, but application of virtue to our investment choices is a more important gain, and never a loss. For what value is there in our investment returns if we only become better at acting greedy and fearful?
As Catholics, there is another aspect of courage when we invest that is not directly related to investment returns. We are called to be stewards of money, because it’s actually God’s money, and he entrusts it to us. If we invest in companies that might promise great returns but do so knowing that these companies produce pornography, provide abortion services, or employ slave labor, we profit from evil. The courageous Catholic investor chooses to own investments in alignment with our faith, even if we expect lower returns. Accepting the risk of lower financial returns means accepting the risk that some of what we want in our financial future might not happen. But it’s worth it! Our Lord tells us in Matthew 6:20-21, “Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
The good news is that I’ve seen many investors choose virtue with their investments and be pleasantly surprised when returns come in as good or better than comparable “vice”-based options. We can choose virtue and be rewarded—if not here, then certainly in our life with God.
Greed and fear lead not to virtue, but to further sin. Warren Buffett’s investment decisions resulted in the good of tremendous wealth, but also a great evil: he recently <a href="https://studentsforlife.org/2021/06/25/warren-buffett-pledges-to-donate-half-his-fortune-to-population-control-efforts/">bequeathed</a> about $300 billion to Planned Parenthood, Catholics for Free Choice, NARAL, and many other pro-abortion organizations. No matter his wealth, he is hardly a man for Catholics to emulate in all things.
Let&#8217;s look at an example of greed potentially overwhelming our reason even today. We&#8217;ve witnessed the meteoric rise of Bitcoin. At the time of writing this article, the price of the currency is up over 50 percent in just a couple months! For those sitting on the sideline, watching others seemingly get rich, the instinct to jump in and buy is strong. But where does this instinct find its origin? Are we &#8220;applying right reason&#8221; to buying these coins, or is there a sense of greed in us, urging us to get rich? It&#8217;s easy to lie to ourselves. We can find someone online to justify our instinct and dress up our greed-founded opinions as &#8220;research,&#8221; but this is not a recipe for investment success. Rather, it is a form of gambling. Do crypto-currencies have a place in your portfolio? Perhaps. Is it easy to fall into the vice of greed and set reason aside when buying these coins? Absolutely.
Choosing virtue over vice is no promise of investment success—there are no promises of investment success—but it is a promise of sanctification. In my years helping families and institutions invest with prudence and courage, I have yet to see the choice of virtue do anything but move people toward Christ. Let us prudently invest our money while we focus on the more important “investment return” of growth in virtue. What is the truly “long-term investment” if not the virtues of faith, hope, and charity compounding within us?
Let us imitate the saints and our Lord in courage, prudence, generosity, and faith, and not emulate men who know nothing of “treasure in heaven.”
St. Joseph of Arimathea, ora pro nobis.

A Catholic and His Money . . .

<div>Why did God create the tree of good and evil?</div><div>The consensus of theologians is that the tree of good and evil was present as a test for Adam and Eve. The tree gave Adam and Eve a choice to obey God or disobey God. The forbidding of eating from that tree was the only thing that Adam and Eve were instructed not to do. So this was not a matter of being confused by too many commandments or being overwhelmed by commandments. They were given one clear simple rule. It tested whether Adam and Eve trusted God.
If that tree had not existed, Adam and Eve would have lived in a world without any real choice or commitment. Their only choices would have been what to eat and what direction to walk in. Such a world is not befitting a creature that can freely make moral choices. The &#8220;downside&#8221; to having the freedom to choose is that we can make the wrong choice, but it is essential to the nature of free choice and gives meaning to our right choices.
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Why Did God Create the Tree of Good and Evil?

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Biblical words matter. But we need context and Tradition.

Over on Twitter, the “outspoken atheist, anti-theist, [and] freethinker” Imtiaz Mahmood has offered <a href="https://twitter.com/imtiazmadmood/status/1667498593505230848?s=46&amp;t=AQKVwQLjnQ7eylYMba5zHw">one of the wildest theories about the origins of Christianity</a>. He starts off with a bold assertion:
<blockquote>We know that Jesus Christ was a fictional character created by the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 AD and modelled after Julius Caesar to pacify the poor in the Roman Empire.</blockquote>
The idea that Christianity is simply the Roman government’s attempt at creating an official religion is obviously false: they already had an official religion, in which the emperor was honored as a god. How would the poor be “pacified” by abandoning that religion in favor of one in which citizens are reminded that “we must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29)?
But this is just the first of many of what we might call Mahmood’s “creative” historical claims. For instance, he writes that “most certainly, Augustine inserted the virgin birth, Jesus as God, the Holy Trinity, Original Sin, forced conversion, and holy wars, all of which were adopted at Nicaea.” All of this is quite impossible, since Augustine was born on November 13, 354, well after Nicaea.
In fact, his whole theory of the origins of Christianity is refuted by a mass of ancient evidence. I’ve written about the beliefs of <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/the-early-church-was-the-catholic-church-digital/">the Christians living before the year 200</a>, so I can attest that (a) they did exist, (b) they worshipped Jesus, and (c) we have their own testimonies to this fact, from their own writings… long before the legalization of Christianity. But even if you know nothing about early Christian history, I hope Mahmood’s historical claims strike you as strange. The First Council of Nicaea, after all, was an empire-wide gathering of Christian bishops. But how could that be if there was no Christianity (and hence, no bishops)?
Mahmood goes on to explain that the Gospels were “written by the Romans,” which is why “the Romans smell so sweet in the Gospels.” For those of you who have never read the Bible (or even watched The Passion of the Christ, etc.), the story begins with the birth of Jesus, at which point King Herod seeks to have him killed, upon learning that that Jesus is being called “king of the Jews” (Matt. 2:2). The contrast is obvious: Herod is a Roman puppet, and his father was an Edomite, not of the Davidic line, who secured the throne through his political ties to Julius Caesar. Jesus is the true king of the Jews, foretold throughout the Jewish Scriptures.
Similarly, Mark begins his narrative of the life of Jesus by calling it “the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1:1). As University of North Carolina-Greensboro’s <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Literary_Study_of_the_Bible/TsaKDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&amp;gbpv=1&amp;dq=Roman+caesar+evangelion&amp;pg=PA351&amp;printsec=frontcover">Dr. Christopher Hodgkins explains</a>,
<blockquote>This apparently straightforward statement is more layered than it sounds: it not only announces a beginning, but appropriates and repurposes a formula of Roman emperor-worship. Most Mediterranean peoples at the beginning of the Common Era [&#8230;] would recognize a Greek phrase like this: euaggeliou tou Augoústu Kaísarou huiou tou theou; “the beginning of good news of Augustus Caesar the son of the god.” Statues and monuments were engraved with words like these honoring Augustus&#8217;s “descent” from his adopted father, “the divine Julius.”</blockquote>
The opening of Mark’s Gospel is therefore chock-full of both theological and political importance, since it “puts the Roman world on notice that their Lord Caesar has a rival in the Lord Jesus.”
This dramatic tension is brought to a climax during Holy Week, when Jesus is arrested and turned over to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate (Matt. 27:27-31). It’s true that Pontius Pilate seems to believe Jesus is innocent of any crime, but that’s hardly to his credit. On the contrary, he’s indifferent to truth and justice (famously asking, “what is truth?” in John 18:38), and worried only about what’s politically expedient: in this case, appeasing the bloodthirsty mob assembled before him. And the mob knows this, demanding that “if you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend; every one who makes himself a king sets himself against Caesar.” (John 19:12).
And so, faced with a tension between fidelity to principle and his political ambitions, what does Pilate do? He has Jesus, a man he believes to be innocent, executed. In the words of Matthew 27:27-31,
<blockquote>Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the praetorium, and they gathered the whole battalion before him. And they stripped him and put a scarlet robe upon him, and plaiting a crown of thorns they put it on his head, and put a reed in his right hand. And kneeling before him they mocked him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” And they spat upon him, and took the reed and struck him on the head. And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the robe, and put his own clothes on him, and led him away to crucify him.</blockquote>
Pilate even has a mocking inscription placed above the dying Jesus, declaring him “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews” (John 19:19). And yet, according to Mahmood, “the Romans smell so sweet in the Gospels” that the only explanation is that the Roman government invented the entire story as pro-government propaganda?

Did the Romans Invent Christianity?

<div>What if you can’t get to church on Sunday?</div><div>The general principle of the Church is that no one can be obligated to do the impossible (Nemo potest ad impossibile obligari). If someone is unable to attend Mass, then his obligation is abrogated.
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