I’ve surveyed many of the uploaded lectures and videos of this year’s Austrian Scholars Conference and have noticed a large grouping of catholic scholars speaking either from the reference point of the catholic church or about Catholicism/libertarianism… I don’t mind but is there any particular reason why this is the case? Is the Catholic Church more inclined to be Austrian?
It probably has to do with the revival of interest in the Spanish Scholastics.
I think many of the Spanish Scholastics were Catholic priests.
I think Hayek was Catholic O_o.
I say “I think” because a month or so ago wikipedia’s Hayek page said he was one of the “12 Catholic Nobel Laureates invited to discuss the relationship between their Catholicism and their work with the Pope” (paraphrase from memory). Since then someone has added that “Although Hayek was not catholic” to the entry. However I double checked the reference provided there (I was curios), and the book explicitly states that Hayek was catholic . Sooooo… he probably was Catholic, then 
?
Not that any of this matters, of course. Being catholic myself, It just happened to catch my eye.
Anyway, as far as the relationship between Catholicism and Austrian economics is concerned, Huerta de Soto has a couple of fun (and silly) footnotes in Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycle, that make some strange connections between Christianity and Austrian economics; There’s a footnote on pages 56-57 that basically claims that Jesus (erm… Son of God Jesus, not the Jesus who wrote the book) chased the money changers out the temple not because he objected to the practice of money changing, but because Jesus thought the money changers were dishonest for using a fractional reserve system! Also, I think he makes a connection between Mises carpenter metaphor for the the business cycle, and some portion of the Sermon on the Mount. Wacky.
There seems to be some fascination from certain quarters of the religious right in AE. If I had to craft a motivational hypothesis for this, I would guess that the fact that AE criticizes state power but not church power and that Rothbardian/Hoppean AE is not value-neutral would be two big reasons. For example, Gary North poses as a proponent of AE at times but he is nothing of the sort. He is a Calvinist Reconstructionist which means that he believes that the end of the world will usher in a 1,000-year long reign of Christian government on the Earth, headed by none other than Jesus Christ himself. His fondness for AE is a weird combination of academic interest in economics and natural alignment with the anti-(secular)-government aspects of AE. I am not as familiar with the Catholic side of the house but I would be surprised if the dynamics involved are very different.
Rothbardian/Hoppean non-value-neutral economics opens the door for religious input to economics. After all, the right values are the necessary starting point for sound social theory. Rothbard and Hoppe consistently begin their analysis of society from natural law theory, which is not value-neutral, and take this as the foundation for property rights and, thenceforth, all of economics and, ultimately, human society.
Clayton -
Austria is primarily a Roman Catholic country.
There is some truth to all the above but the main reason is that an entire panel came for that purpose from Guatemala. They traveled as a group.
The Scholastics had some ideas similiar to praxeology I believe.