“Mensuram Bonam”. Faith-Based Measures for Catholic Investors: A Starting Point and Call to Action
... was released by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, and before the Holidays I finally finished carefully reading its 38 pages of content, and found it…
Effective at ...
Motivating / compelling Catholic investors to pursue faith-consistent investing,
Emphasizing the importance of investment policy, governance, process and commitment,
Translating Catholic Social Teachings into specific investment restrictions with rationales (and for non-Catholics defining / contextualizing CST and Integral Development).
Could be improved...
Almost inapproachable in length, verbosity, repetitiveness, and lack of actionable structure (Chapter II onward) - it would benefit from additional editing and deconstruction,
Misses some of the most difficult challenges of FCI: cost and complexity, company engagement, financial / ethical tradeoffs, implementation questions of benchmarks and vehicles, mapping CST guidelines to existing investment strategies, and more
Addressing practical solutions / ideas to resource constraints at most / many FBAOs to do any of this
It also calls for ...
Creating global networks of Catholic investment specialists (not clear if MB will do this) to share practices
Going forward, MB will
Publish FCI "lessons" from Catholic investors / orgs
Produce studies and run workshops on FCI with CST
"...collaborate with other sciences" to develop "new ethical [investment] metrics"
Important to note, MB is not “Vatican Investing Guidelines” as positioned in some media, rather the product of
…a dedicated working group, engaged themselves in the Church’s mission of truth, and ECHo Fund which facilitated the discussion of Mensuram Bonam in the Academy of Social Sciences of the Holy See.