The Pope and Employee Ownership

In his new encyclical, Caritats in Veritate, Pope Benedict states that "alongside profit-oriented private enterprise and the various types of public enterprise, there must be room for commercial entities based on mutualist principles and pursuing social ends to take root and express themselves." The encyclical nowhere specifically endorses employee ownership, although it does often refer to Pope John Paul II's 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens, in which he endorsed such employee-owned enterprises as worker-owned cooperatives as one means of satisfying this mutuality principle.