Note: I’m not trained in philosophy, theology, or Newman, so please correct me if I’m missing something below. Thank you!

Newman’s Circle of Knowledge

A 51-year-old John Henry Newman wrote about the Circle of Knowledge in his 1852 work, The Idea of a University. He argued that all branches of knowledge are interconnected and form a single, unified whole.

The interconnectedness of all truth

Because the universe is a creation of a single Creator, all facts and truths about it must eventually connect. Knowledge is not a collection of isolated subjects, but a circle, or a web. Every science (meaning any branch of learning; for example, history, literature, and economics) provides a partial view of reality. They complete, correct, and balance each other.

Omitting a science

It is dangerous to omit any branch of knowledge. If you remove one “slice” of the circle, the remaining sciences will naturally expand to fill the gap, but they will do so poorly because they are trying to answer questions outside of their domain.

Newman’s example was to argue that Theology (a science) must be included in the university curriculum. Without theology, the circle becomes warped. Not only because it is the study of God—a privileged place in the circle for a Christian—but also because it is a science.

For example, how can a Theology-lacking commentator journalist do their duty to report and comment on reality blind to moral and spiritual truth? We get distorted commentary. A distorted human experience for those following.

The removal of “True Economics”

We should expect that the circle is similarly warped upon a removal of economics. In the classical sense, economics is the study of scarcity, value, and the organic interaction of human choices. When “money printing” lightens the constraint of true post-Fall scarcity, economics as a science is no longer true. Its slice of the circle is compromised. Other sciences then compete to encroach upon its rightful domain.

Politics & Finance step up

Today, it seems that the sciences of Politics and Finance have expanded to fill the gap Economics left. Without the discipline of a “hard” economic reality, the distribution of money becomes increasingly a matter of political willpower. We fund ventures, whether private or public, that have assumed money is relatively infinite. The central bank—theoretically an Economic institution—loses its role. Its decisions are increasingly influenced by the encroaching asks of politicians wishing to prevent fallout from a market correction.

Confusion about scarcity

This removal of Economics creates confusion as well as excess scarcity for those who believe the false economic system is true. We begin to believe that resources are infinite rather than finite. We get political optimism and financial speculation, which waste resources. Popular messaging then doesn’t line up with the reality of prices of food and housing, which have dwindled in affordable supply. We are no longer looking at the truth of how things are, but at how we wished they were, or how we are told they are.

The Circle with vs. without Economics

Life in Newman’s balanced circle, with a True Economics, might look like this:

• The dominant force is unified truth / natural law

• The exchange of money reflects what is valuable this side of heaven

• More resources and fairer distribution; intellectual and social harmony

• Educated, balanced citizens

Life in the warped “money printing” circle, we might say would look like this:

• The dominant forces are political will / growth finance

• Money is a tool for social engineering, influenced by the Father of Lies

• We misallocate resources; confusion and blame game

• A confused and dependent populace

Our next post is part 2 of our miniseries, The Catholic Church’s Historical Teaching on Inflation. There we’ll study Papal responses to questions from 12th-century Spanish kings about inflation in gold coins.

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St. John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Author note (June 2026): We’ve stopped posting these as the series seemed more fitting within a theological treatise on “inflation,” which is in development.

The Church’s Historical Teaching on Inflation

Let’s review what the Catholic Church has taught about inflation.

I will expand the research of Prof. Dr. Guido Hülsmann that prefaces his 2008 book, The Ethics of Money Production. He is professor of economics at the University of Angers and a corresponding member of the Pontifical Academy for Life.

Definition of inflation

We need a working definition of inflation to start. Here’s Prof. Hülsmann:

We can define [inflation] as an extension of the nominal quantity of any medium of exchange beyond the quantity that would have been produced on the free market. This definition corresponds by and large to the way inflation had been understood until World War II.1

Simplifying:

Inflation can also be called a forcible way of increasing the money supply, as distinct from the “natural” production of money through mining and minting. This was also the original meaning of the word, which stems from the Latin verb inflare (to blow up).2

Present day, most people mean by inflation a lasting increase of the price level, an effect that begs the question: what caused it? This ambiguity makes the modern definition often less useful than an alternative. We will study the classic definition: the forcible increase of the money supply—one clear cause of a lasting increase in the price level, among other effects it causes.

Context on Christian inflation doctrine

Prof. Hülsmann notes that the Christian treatment of this subject is relatively light:

There are very detailed statements of Christian doctrine when it comes to the morals of acquiring and using money; for example, the Christian literature on usury and on the ethics of seeking money for money’s sake is legendary. But important though these problems may be, they are only remotely connected to the moral and cultural aspects of the production of money, and especially to the modern conditions under which this production takes place. Here we face a wide gap.3

What we will study is therefore to be treasured!

Three eras of teaching

We can divide his review of the Church’s teaching into three eras: Sacred Scripture, diverse 12th-14th century teachings, and 19th-21st century encyclicals.

Sacred Scripture

First “era”: Sacred Scripture, as interpreted by the Magisterium and the Fathers and Doctors of the Church.

Leviticus 19, 35-36

Our first building block is directly from God in Leviticus 19 regarding stealing using the monetary system of the time:

35 Do not any unjust thing in judgment, in rule, in weight, or in measure.

36 Let the balance be just, and the weights equal, the bushel just, and the sextary equal. I am the Lord your God, that brought you out of the land of Egypt.

It is the last ordinance of the chapter, which ends in the next verse:

37 Keep all my precepts, and all my judgments, and do them. I am the Lord.

The Book of Leviticus is set at the base of Mount Sinai at the Israelite camp in the wilderness. It is the second year after the Exodus. Moses has received and shared the Ten Commandments and the tabernacle has been constructed. God now provides Moses detailed instructions to sustain the covenant community on their journey toward the Promised Land. We presume the location to be the tabernacle of the testimony because of Leviticus 1, 1:

1 And the Lord called Moses, *and spoke to him from the tabernacle of the testimony, saying:

The “Holiness Laws” of Leviticus chapters 17-26 are derived from its central and frequent refrain, which appears in verse 2 of chapter 19: “Be ye holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy.” Our verses 35 and 36 contain elements of the Moral Law and Judicial Law categories of the Old Covenant. The moral remains binding on Christians—justice is eternal. The judicial is not binding—using the specific monetary tools of the time is not required today.

In verse 36, we read about balances and weights first. This pair of monetary tools accompanied pure metal money in Old Testament northeastern Africa, that is, the Egyptian empire under which the Israelites were slaves. Note that standardized coinage was not used; pure metal, often silver, or gold, was the medium exchanged. Here’s how the system worked.

• The weights. These weights, often stone or bronze, were official standardized units.

• The balance scale. The pure metal (the payment) was placed on one pan, and the standardized weights were placed on the other until the scale balanced.

There were many ways to steal in this system—the most common was differing weights. A dishonest person would have two bags of weights: a slightly heavier set used when buying goods (to force the seller to give more silver) and a slightly lighter set used when selling goods (to give less silver than required). Another common way was to have the balance itself tilt to one side. “Let the balance be just, and the weights equal” thus forbids stealing with the tools of the monetary system.

Catechism of Pope St. Pius X on the 7th Commandment

Indeed, the Magisterium teaches that what we’ve read is a form of stealing, and an advanced form: fraud. Pope St. Pius X in his Catechism on the Seventh Commandment—Thou shalt not steal—informs us:

9 Q. Is it only by theft and robbery that another can be injured in his property?

A. He can also be injured by fraud, usury, and any other act of injustice directed against his goods.

10 Q. How is fraud committed?

A. Fraud is committed in trade by deceiving another by false weight, measure and money or by bad goods; by falsifying writings and documents; in short, by deceit in buying and selling or in contracts in general, as well as by refusing to pay what is just and agreed upon.4

Other mentions of this teaching in Scripture

This teaching with these specific monetary tools is repeated nine more times5:

• Deuteronomy 25, 13-16

• Proverbs 11, 1

• Proverbs 16, 11

• Proverbs 20, 10, 23

• Sirach 42, 4

• Hosea 12, 7

• Amos 8, 5

• Micah 6, 11

• Ezekiel 45, 10-11

The most concise reference is Proverbs 11, 1:

1 A deceitful balance* is an abomination before the Lord: and a just weight is his will.

Micah 6

The most dramatic reference is Micah 6, specifically verses 10-12. The setting is a covenant lawsuit in the mountains and hills of Judah. I’ll summarize Rev. George Leo Haydock’s commentary on the 16-verse chapter, who references the Fathers and Doctors of the Church throughout his work. The prophet Micah begins speaking, acting as divine messenger, sharing that God summons the entire natural world to witness His legal case against His people:

1 Hear ye what the Lord saith: Arise, contend thou in judgment against the mountains, and let the hills hear thy voice.

2 Let the mountains hear the judgment of the Lord, and the strong foundations of the earth: for the Lord will enter into judgment with his people, and he will plead against Israel.

In verses 3-5, God speaks directly, reviewing His unwavering fidelity:

3 *O my people, what have I done to thee, or in what have I molested thee? answer thou me.

4 For I brought thee up out of the land of Egypt, and delivered thee out of the house of slaves: and I sent before thy face Moses, and Aaron, and Mary?

5 *O my people, remember, I pray thee, what Balach, the king of Moab, purposed: and what Balaam, the son of Beor, answered him, from Setim to Galgal, that thou mightest know the justices of the Lord.

Verses 6-7 are “spoken in the person of the people”: they desire to be informed what they are to do to please God. They ask Micah:

6 What shall I offer to the Lord that is worthy? wherewith shall I kneel before the high God? shall I offer holocausts unto him, and calves of a year old?

7 May the Lord be appeased with thousands of rams, or with many thousands of fat he-goats? shall I give my first-born for my wickedness, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

In verse 8, Micah delivers the Lord’s requirement: God wants justice, mercy, and humility. This is one of the most quoted verses of the Old Testament.

8 I will shew thee, O man, what is good, and what the Lord requireth of thee: *Verily, to do judgment, and to love mercy, and to walk solicitous with thy God.

Micah continues in verse 9, then God closes the case. First, He asks the people pay attention to His message of judgment:

9 The voice of the Lord crieth to the city, and salvation shall be to them that fear thy name: hear, O ye tribes, and who shall approve it?

Next, He delivers His verdict. The first charge He shares is fraud using tools of the monetary system in verses 10-12 (bolded mine):

10 As yet there is a fire in the house of the wicked, the treasures of iniquity, and a scant measure full of wrath.

11 Shall I justify wicked balances, and the deceitful weights of the bag?

12 By which her rich men were filled with iniquity, and the inhabitants thereof have spoken lies, and their tongue was deceitful in their mouth.

A “scant measure” is a tool for monetary fraud for goods gathered but not weighed before exchange, like grain. The “wicked balances, and the deceitful weights of the bag” are what we studied in Leviticus. In verse 12, the Lord says rich men misused these tools and that the ill-gotten treasures and tools remain in their possession. On verse 10, Rev. Haydock’s commentary references, “Full of wrath, &c. That is, highly provoking in the sight of God” from Vicar Apostolic Richard Challoner and “False weights are often condemned” from Abbot Antoine Augustin Calmet.6

The Lord presents His just punishments and loving discipline in verses 13-16:

13 And I therefore began to strike thee with desolation for thy sins.

14 Thou shalt eat, but shalt not be filled: and thy humiliation shall be in the midst of thee: and thou shalt take hold, but shalt not save: and those whom thou shalt save, I will give up to the sword.

15 *Thou shalt sow, but shalt not reap: thou shalt tread the olives, but shalt not be anointed with the oil: and the new wine, but shalt not drink the wine.

16 For thou hast kept the statutes of Amri, and all the works of the house of Achab: and thou hast walked according to their wills, that I should make thee a desolation, and the inhabitants thereof a hissing, and you shall bear the reproach of my people.

Some of these match today’s inflation outcomes—we will revisit later.

The Lord’s mention of deception in Micah 6, 12

Note that the Lord shares that the people of the city have fostered falsehood:

12 By which her rich men were filled with iniquity, and the inhabitants thereof have spoken lies, and their tongue was deceitful in their mouth.

This cultural mention is notable because deception is what makes these offenses fraud, as we saw in Pope St. Pius X’s Catechism. We will explore more when we study inflation culture.

To conclude our study of Micah 6, let us meditate that our All-Knowing God did not need this legal process to discern the truth of the offenses. Yet he presented the drama, using His servant Micah, teaching our spiritual ancestors and recording it in canon for our benefit.

St. Paul in Romans 13

We’ll wrap up with a teaching from the New Testament that anticipates the temptation to steal with the tools of the monetary system. St. Paul commends to us the state of owing “no man any thing”—including but not limited to financial debt—in his letter to the Romans. He wrote it from Corinth near the end of his third missionary journey, around AD 57, addressing it in Romans 1, 7: “To all that are at Rome, the beloved of God, called to be saints.” The recipient was the Christian church in Rome. St. Paul gives this advice amidst social and religious tensions in the city, which we find in Romans 13, 7-8:

7 *Render, therefore, to all their dues: tribute, to whom tribute is due: custom, to whom custom: fear, to whom fear: honour, to whom honour.

8 Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth his neighbour, hath fulfilled the law.

The Greek word for “owe” that St. Paul uses is general. The verb, opheilo, can mean to be in debt (financially), to be bound by duty or necessity (morally or legally), and to be obligated or ought to do something. Thus while St. Paul’s advice covers State-related debts from verse 7, it also covers voluntary financial debts. The financial use is confirmed in Matthew 18, 28:

28 But when that servant was gone out, he found one of his fellow-servants that owed him a hundred pence:

And Luke 7, 41:

41 A certain creditor had two debtors; the one who owed five hundred pence, and the other fifty.

In this financial sense, the instruction is to settle outstanding financial debts promptly. It does not forbid taking on financial debt, as we can infer from the presence of the other forms of debt in verse 7, but instructs one to work towards the goal of paying off that debt and thus regaining the state of owing “no man any thing”. It follows that one should not voluntarily take on excessive debt that is challenging to repay. This advice is relevant to us because borrowing often precedes or even itself is a forcible increase of the money supply, as we will see later.

St. Paul brings the debt discussion to its conclusion in Christ’s message:

8 Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth his neighbour, hath fulfilled the law.

St. John Chrysostom in his Homily 23 on Romans reminds us that love is indeed the one unavoidable and eternal debt:

… “Owe no man any thing, but to love one another.” … this is a debt also, not however such as the tribute or the custom, but a continuous one. For he does not wish it ever to be paid off, or rather he would have it always rendered, yet never fully so, but to be always owing. For this is the character of the debt, that one keeps giving and owing always. Having said then how he ought to love, he also shows the gain of it, saying, “For he that loveth his neighbour hath fulfilled the law.” And do not, pray, consider even this a favor; for this too is a debt. For you owe love to your brother, through your spiritual relationship. And not for this only, but also because we are members one of another. And if love leave us, the whole body is rent in pieces. Love therefore your brother. For if from his friendship you gain so much as to fulfil the whole Law, you owe him love as being benefited by him.7

Learn more about inflation and Bitcoin

We’re excited to share more with you soon. Subscribe to be notified when a preview of part 2—featuring 12th-century Papal statements—goes live.

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My community is suffering. I want fiat pain to end ASAP. So last week I moved 20% of my savings from a Bitcoin ETF to MicroStrategy stock to support Saylor’s Sound Money Catalyzing.

But buying was going to be hard:

• MicroStrategy stock (MSTR) is volatile.

• I’m four years a finance amateur.

• I’m twelve hours a YouTube MicroStrategy analyst.

• Every hour I spend studying when to buy is an hour not doing mission work.

Risking years of a savings

Everything was going well:

• Deployed some Friday.

• Had some cash over the weekend, as Japan’s crash moved BTC from 62k Friday to 50k by Monday. A little gift.

• Deployed some Monday morning. I was grateful for this entry even though I missed the bottom by 20%.

• Deployed the remaining Wednesday, higher than Monday. I was hoping to get a better entry than Monday of course, but I was happy to not have to think about the entry anymore and get back to work.

Then minutes after the last deployment, it crashed. MSTR fell off a cliff almost immediately. 11% in a few hours. Below Monday for me. And it could go further.

Pain came fast

I tried to refocus on my “day job” the rest of the day but it was hard to get my mind off of the quick unrealized loss. I was trying to figure out what happened, what I did, and what I could do better.

I felt like I betrayed my community, even with the non-pro expectations mindset going in:

• That 11% is going to be lifetimes’ worth of savings in the future so that means I can help fewer people.

• The entry matters because I’m not trading this.

• Most of my work doesn’t produce an income.

Consequences

I logged off around 7:30 PM to refocus. I went for a walk and a workout. But I couldn’t complete it. I was nauseous.

I wrote this in my notes app when I got home: “I feel sick.”

I didn’t sleep well.

The next morning I served a funeral Mass at 10 AM. I was tired, distracted thinking about yesterday, and trying to not think about what could be happening now.

A centenarian’s funeral

I’m a little embarrassed to share this next part. The funeral Mass I served was for Father Leo Ramsperger.

Rev. Ramsperger died at 100. He started his priesthood at 30. His casket was open, his body peacefully resting in the same parish he was baptized in in 1924. With a parish 7% full and a lifetime of service. I do not know his story, but a priest of 70 years in the Archdiocese of Toronto lived a life of sacrifice.

Perspective

In silence, during the Mass, staring at the Cross at the altar, listening to the reverent choir, the art, the bishop across from me, and all of that mental pain still there despite being very aware of how shortsighted it was (I was at a funeral) — I still got some perspective.

I got back for lunch and looked at my phone to see how my capital stewardship was going. Typically nausea means it’s a good time to buy, but I still had no idea what was next. An even worse entry would have hurt.

It was. MSTR didn’t follow as aggressively so I was still underwater (I bought the top of that week’s premium) but that’s not the point.

Was I humble, being okay with my knowledge level and that it could drop? No.

Was I trusting God’s provision of sats for my mission? No.

Will I get upset in the future if I invest again then it cliff drops? Probably.

Will it hurt? Yes.

Was it embarrassing that a centenarian priest who served for 70 years lay in a casket while I was suffering because I felt I failed my community regarding a trade? Yes.

And that’s the point.

You chose this mission

You chose this mission so future generations can have sound money. The volatility will make you feel like an idiot sometimes. So you “bring it to the Cross.” As a Catholic, this means our sufferings, when offered in union with Christ’s sacrifice, can become a tool for growth, healing, and service rather than a source of despair.

This doesn’t mean our suffering magically disappears. But it does mean:

• We can grow in holiness and become more like Christ.

• We can offer these sufferings for other people, the Church, or the world and mystically help other people in other places of the world (and purgatory).

• We can actively participate in the ongoing work of Christ’s redemption.

So for me, I can acknowledge that I’m being dumb and even though I don’t understand this silly pain yet and how God wants to use it, I can still offer it up before receiving the Eucharist. This works best for me in silent prayer during the contemplative parts of the Mass.

Christ teaches and understands

As much as one internalizes Christ’s teachings on money, following the Gospel is still hard. We must try our best to:

• Be wise stewards. Stay humble in the volatility.

• Trust in God’s provision. We’ll have the bitcoin we’re meant to have.

But being a Bitcoin pioneer will still be hard. We’re probably going to have moments where the volatility hurts. Greedy. Ungrateful. Worrying.

Again, the point. Christ died for sins like these.

The future

Perhaps, in the end, our sacrifices will be forgotten in the glow of a Bitcoin standard. Maybe we’ll even be blamed and hated for the punishment that it seems we are due. Or simply a small summer Thursday morning funeral.

Yet, like the enduring faith of those who came before us, we press on. God sees all. In the quiet moments of reflection, I pray for humility, a virtue as timeless as the principles we champion.

Our journey has just begun.

On Rev. Ramsperger

“Centenary funeral for a centenarian priest”

Leo Ramsperger was born on February 25, 1924 and baptized on March 9, 1924 in St Vincent de Paul Church by our founding Pastor, Fr Lancelot Minehan. He was the fourth of twelve (or more?) children in a family that lived on Howard Park Avenue. He went to St Vincent’s School and made his First Communion and Confirmation in our church. I suspect he was one of Msgr Kirby’s large troop of altar boys, many of whom became priests.

After being ordained a priest 70 years ago, Fr Leo Ramsperger served at a number of parishes in the Archdiocese of Toronto, and was Pastor of St Paul’s in Toronto, of Holy Martyrs of Japan in Bradford, of St John’s and St Cornelius in Caledon. Some time after his retirement from active ministry in 1997, Father retired to Maynooth, Ontario. More recently he resided once again in Toronto, and I was privileged to give him the anointing of the sick and viaticum a week ago. Father frequently sent donations to the church of his boyhood. Now we have the blessing and opportunity to give him a good send-off and pray for the repose of his soul.

Grant him eternal rest, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May his soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

Yours in Christ,
Fr. Daniel

Thank you, Fr. Ramsperger.

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If you haven’t met one, Bitcoiners love to respond to worsening problems with, “Yeah, that’s because the money is broken.”

Groceries getting more expensive? “That’s the money.”

Divorce rate skyrocketing? “Yeah, money is really broken.”

I was making breakfast one morning in 2022 when podcast Bishop Barron tells me of the rise of the Nones:

“The money’s broken.”

I was too new to my faith to share widely.

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Now’s different, though.

Is Bitcoin a gift to help fix the crisis of faith?

I think so.

My faith and Bitcoin background

A bit on me quickly:

I was baptized in the 90s. Confirmed in the 2000s. But I had slowly become a None in the 2010s.

My attendance at Mass not even on Christmas and Easter by the end of the decade.

In April 2020, shortly after being let go from my job, on a podcast walk in a locked down Toronto, the Bitcoin mission clicked.

The Bitcoiner thesis

Bitcoiners believe the world began to decline in the early 20th century with the proliferation of central banks globally. It wasn’t perfect before then, but things seemed to change for the worse from then.

Morally, culturally, economically, politically… Why the increase in decrease? We changed the structure of money, mostly so that it is easy to create more of it, which causes its value to decrease if we do decide to create more of it (we did). And in 1944 and most gravely in 1971, we poured fuel on the accelerating fire.

In 1971, the President of the United States said “no more gold” in our money system. For centuries prior, money’s value was related to how much gold a society had saved. It was hard to make or find gold, so you couldn’t create more money. But no longer did this tie-to-reality exist after 1971, allowing Central Banks to create money as folks in power decided was necessary, often to fund government programs or stabilize an economy in crisis. This new system is called unbacked fiat currency, and we’re living with it today. Here’s the growth in US dollars in existence since:

This increase in US dollars helped cause US dollar prices to rise. Below, the blue line is a measure of cost of living for buyers, and the red line is a measure of cost of business for sellers:

Correlations or consequences?

To shortcut explaining the connection between “printing money” and divorce rates, a Bitcoiner might reference this website of alarming trends since 1971. “Look at all of these correlations!”

Divorce rate:

An increase from around 5% in 1970 to 10-25% four decades later. That’s from one in twenty couples, to one in four.

Fertility rate:

Families with five children were common in 1970. In 2015, two or three was the average globally.

Income inequality:

The rich got richer since 1970, in terms of “real family income”. The lower income brackets have mostly stayed the same since in terms of how much their earnings can afford them.

Cost of housing:

Buying a house in 1970 required 2.4 years of saving for one person in the United States to do so! In 2020? Almost seven years.

Adding charts about faith

There aren’t any charts on that site about the crisis of faith, though. There’s the one at the top of the article, depicting an increase in the percentage of Americans with no religious identity. Here’s another one depicting the decline of “church membership”.

70% in the 70s. 45% in the 2020s. Rough.

The crisis of faith… impacted by… money?

Did people leave their faiths because money is easy to create (which allows the individual to take on more debt, by the way)? I have two summarized explanation attempts for this correlation for you, one spiritual and one practical:

• Spiritual: The incentives of easy money tempt us to focus on spending now instead of saving for the future. This is more about what comes before one’s action.

• Practical: “Printing money” makes funding bad things easier. This is more about the act, then loops back into the spiritual because it’s possible to fund whatever.

For more detail on these and more spiritual and material effects of money printing, follow our inflation series. More on the spiritual in a moment.

How does Bitcoin stop money creation?

Bitcoin’s predetermined finite supply of 21,000,000 bitcoin makes money printing impossible, if people agree to using Bitcoin. You can “print money” by changing lines of code in the Bitcoin program, but once you do, what you’re using ceases to be Bitcoin. This social consensus on money supply is solid because of game theory (a new field in economics extensively developed in the 1950s).

This short Bitcoin video from Angel Studios explains:

Bitcoiners have hope that Bitcoin is likely to continue its steady adoption. And once adoption is sufficient, the mere existence of Bitcoin as a trusted option in the market for money will prevent governments and central banks from printing money (if they don’t adopt it as their chosen money themselves).

Back to the spiritual—it’s hard to explain

People have left the faith in droves. This is a historical fact. But because it is such a grave historical matter, it’s harder to explain because its cause is spiritual. I believe Hilaire Belloc when he writes:

In proportion as an historical matter is of import to human kind, in that proportion does it spring not from apparent—let alone material—causes, but from some hidden revolution in the human spirit. To pretend an examination of the secret springs whence the human mind is fed is futile. The greater the affair, the more directly does it proceed from unseen sources which the theologian may catalogue, the poet see in vision, the philosopher explain, but with which positive external history cannot deal, and which the mere historian cannot handle. It is the function of history to present the outward thing, as a witness might have seen it, and to show the reader as much as a spectator could have seen—illuminated indeed by a knowledge of the past—and a judgment drawn from known succeeding events. The historian answers the question, “What was?” this or that. To the question, “Why was it?” if it be in the spiritual order (as are all major things), the reader must attempt his own reply based upon other aptitudes than those of historic science.

In our course, we don’t catalogue the “spiritual disorientation” effect of printing money because it is so varied in the Body of Christ. Connecting that spiritual disorientation to the ultimate cause of one deciding not to practice their faith or believe in God is possible for an individual. There are also other factors at play—powers and principalities, etc. Apostasy is not easy to explain and not generalizable.

For example, in the past, I violated the First Commandment because I made my career my number one priority. Perhaps it was because I wanted a family and I knew nice, wealthy families. Why? My family moved to a city that had good opportunities for work. It was also a city with a big banking industry. Money is easier to make in the industries close to the central banks that decide where the newly created money goes first—this phenomenon is called the Cantillon Effect. Perhaps I wanted to be like those families, which led to a temptation to pursue career over God’s will, then combined with a lack of catechesis, perhaps I fell into idolatry and avarice, and as a consequence felt separated from God. That’s just one plausible pathway (I’m not even sure it’s true!) as to why I chose not to go to Mass and eventually stopped praying my evening prayers. This seems to be one piece of anecdotal evidence that spiritual disorientation can come with money printing.

This apostolate is devoted to learning and sharing more about the truth of money printing and crisis of faith. If you have tips, feedback, etc., please do share.

Learn more to discern the Bitcoin mission

Will fixing a broken money help fix our problems, material and spiritual?

Should you convert your fiat savings and investments to bitcoin to help?

I’ve said yes to both questions. I’m excited for the future.

A scarce digital thing has only been possible since Bitcoin’s invention in 2009—that’s magnificent advancement for humanity not many realize. “The history of mankind is the history of money losing value,” says Milton Friedman. With Bitcoin, we have a new hope for ending that. Please enjoy our inflation series to learn more so you can decide if you want to join the Bitcoin mission as well.

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P.S. I’m not the only one getting spiritual through Bitcoin

I was deeply involved in the Bitcoin community for 2-3 years. There are many people shedding their secular and materialist worldviews. Three Christian examples:

• A Bitcoin exchange’s CEO shares his journey in his Jesus is a Bitcoiner talk.

• A Christian Bitcoin conference had hundreds of attendees in 2024.

• Co-founder of the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute returns to his Catholic faith and starts a Twitter apostolate.

That’s it for now. God bless!