SUMMARYThe attitude that Roman Catholic thought should adopt towards the market principle of price establishment turns on implications to be derived from its support for the foudations of the private enterprise economy, the reaction evident in recent years in favour of some more liberal version of the goal of a reformed socio‐economic order, and such direct discussion of the market principle as has occurred.‘Official’ Catholic thought has repeatedly affirmed the necessity of guarding private property, initiative and freedom, and urged limiting the role of the state; so that basic, though duly qualified, support for the private enterprise economy is the clear and inescapable consequence.Next respecting the vision of an ideal socio‐economic orderMater et Magistraseems to mark a welcome resetting of the balance in favour of the neo‐liberal trend in Catholic social thought. It makes no mention of the goal of a corporative economy with the rigid implications inherent in this, substitutes a looser perspective of associational groups and action as the means of filling the old void between unorganised individuals and the state, and shows awareness of the diversity of desirable patterns of reform in different coutries.Lastly, incorporation of the market principle into Roman Catholic thought requires, on the one hand, full acceptance of it as inevitably associated with and necessary to private property and enterprise, and on the other hand and more formally, a working out of its institutional character and the legal and moral safeguards dictated by commutative, distributive and social justices.It has to be borne in mind that the entire argument implicitly views the advanced Western country as the norm, and is subject to considerable qualification respecting the underdeveloped country and various spec