Arimathea Investing
CV NEWS FEED // Catholics must put their money where their faith is and defund immoral companies, says Daniel Catone, founder of Arimathea Investing. In an exclusive interview with CatholicVote about the importance of investing in moral companies, Catone shared how Catholics can direct their money toward organizations whose work and products fully conform to the moral and social teachings of the Church.
CatholicVote: Why is it important for Catholics to examine the companies they invest in? What are some of the moral principles that should inform investing?
Daniel Catone: What I realized before I started Arimathea was that I was not living an integrated life. I had my career, time at church, time with my family, my friends, all these different parts of my life that were underneath the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ.
But my investment world was over here doing its own thing, and I was investing in whatever I wanted to invest in, and I really didn’t think that that was underneath Christ’s authority. It was just something over there that we don’t really think about.
But our Lord tells us that one day we will face judgment. We will close our eyes for the last time, and we will reopen them, and we’ll be face-to-face with our Lord.
And He’s going to ask us to take account for every careless word that left our mouths, but He’s also going to ask us to account for every careless dollar that left our wallets. The way in which we engage with the world is dictated by the Church and through her Catholic social teaching that we have as a great treasure for us. And it talks about the way in which we’re supposed to engage with the markets and with others and have a preference for the poor, and all these types of things.
And so it’s really important that the moral decisions that we’re making with our money, whether it be what products we purchase, what investments we make in our IRA and that type of thing, are in conformity and alignment with the will of God. And if we’re in alignment with the will of God, we know we’re, of course, on the right path, and that’s the benefit of God and His people.
It’s very important for Catholics to look at the way they are investing. We should vote with our dollars, both in the products we buy and with the proxies that we vote. Every share that we own is a vote that we have to be able to affect decision-making at corporations in the United States.
CV: What are the more common serious problems with companies that are discovered when Catholics look at whether their investments are in accord with Catholic moral and social teaching?
Catone: There’s a whole lot of problems out there in the investment world with what corporations are doing.
Number one, we commonly will see companies that are providing products that directly contradict the teachings of our Lord Jesus. This could be in vitro fertilization (IVF), this could be abortion products of different kinds, it can be weapons of mass destruction, it could be pornographic material. All these types of things can be found in the products that are produced by the companies we own.
How does this relate to us as investors? When we own shares of stocks, we are co-owners of the company and receive a material benefit from the activities of the company that we own. No different than if you and I were to start a business together and each own one share of stock, 50-50. If I’m doing evil things and you’re benefiting from that through a dividend payment to you, you’re participating in that evil.
For example, Microsoft had a subsidiary that they bought that was paying 49 cents an hour to its workers in the Philippines to do programming. That’s a sin that cries out to heaven for vengeance, which is depriving a worker of a just wage for even one day.
Another example would be the common screening that’s used even by Catholic investment managers. The U.S. will allow Catholics to own companies that produce pornography as long as it’s less than 5% of the revenue of that company. But the company is making billions and billions of dollars in revenue. That’s a lot of money coming from something so evil. At Arimathea, we don’t believe we should be making any pornography with our investments.
So those are some of the common ones we’ll see. It’s abortion stuff. Another one that we commonly see that I think is of note, certainly for CatholicVote, is, with the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the new laws that have taken place across the U.S., we’re getting the rise of a concept called “abortion travel.” This is where companies are paying sometimes upwards of $10,000 for someone to go from Texas to Colorado. If they live in Texas and need to go to Colorado for an abortion, the company will reimburse that.
We actually do that type of analysis and work to make sure that people aren’t investing in companies that are paying for abortion for their employees to get them back to work quickly at the sacrifice of a child, so we’re making an impact there.
CV: How can Catholics ensure that their investments are always supporting companies that do not violate the Church’s moral teaching?
Catone: Number one rule is you have to start by looking at it. We got to stop keeping our 401k and our IRA over there in the distance doing its own thing: out of sight, out of mind. That’s not how we’re supposed to live as Catholics.
The way in which you can know this stuff is by working with financial professionals that have access to the research. At Arimathea, we’ve got lots and lots of financial advisors that work directly with us that are trained and equipped to be able to help investors identify this very detailed research so that they can rest assured that they’re not funding pornography, abortion travel or slave labor, all those types of things. But you have to be discerning because not all the research out there is of equal value.
There’s some research that’s super high quality and some that’s really, frankly, not. But we actually provide free audits for investors up to the top 10 holdings and give an analysis back to them so they know exactly where the violations of those companies are. We show them the evidence for it and say, here’s the violation and here’s the evidence.
And then that helps them make an informed decision, both with their proxy voting that they’re making, as well as whether they should own the company at all.
CV: What services does Arimathea Investing offer for those who wish to invest in a morally informed way?
Catone: Our services can be broken down into two halves.
The first half is our research and analysis. If someone sends us their portfolio, we can send them a report back showing what are the issues in that portfolio that they should carefully consider, either divesting from companies or advocating with us to those companies to make changes. And there’s a lot of success that can happen there. We’re launching a whole new program in 2025 to help Catholic voters at these companies change the direction of these businesses.
So that’s the research side. The other side is the investment side.
At Arimathea, we can actually manage portfolios with our financial advisors, with these end-using clients, with their financial advisors, so nobody even needs to get fired to help rebuild those portfolios. They don’t own any of those evil companies that are trying to destroy God’s kingdom, even though they’ll fail.
But we can help on the research side for free, giving a free audit of their top 10 holdings back to the investor, and we can directly manage their assets with their financial advisor or with one of our financial advisors or us directly. That way, they’re handled.
CV: What inspired the patronage of St. Joseph of Arimathea?
Catone: St. Joseph of Arimathea is our patron. I chose him. He’s in all four Gospels. When I was reading the Gospels one day, I came across this particular passage in Luke, and you have this description of St. Joseph that’s this hinge point between Christ’s life on earth and his resurrected life.
When you look at the story, we learn a lot about St. Joseph. One of the things that we learn is he’s an intensely wealthy man, maybe one of the wealthiest men in all of Judea. We know that because he had a new hewn tomb.
Well, I’m an amateur Egyptologist. I love studying archeology. And one of the things that I do know is in the Near East, your most valuable possession was your tomb. And it was a family tomb passed on from generation to generation to generation.
But not St. Joseph’s. His was a new hewn. That means he is a self-made man. He carved his own tomb with his own servants, and that’s really a testament to the amount of money he had. His money, though, was used for God’s kingdom.
Specifically, he donates his new hewn tomb for the Lord, and the Lord is never to be outdone in generosity, so what does the Lord do? Borrows it for a couple nights.
Not knowing about the resurrection, St. Joseph still gave his tomb over to the Lord along with the Shroud of Turin, and then the ointments, and the other things that went on our Lord’s body to preserve it and give it fragrance.
That’s a pretty incredible act of generosity. I think St. Joseph epitomizes Christian generosity, that you give your best to God and to God’s people, and St. Joseph did that.
But he was also an intensely powerful man. He went to Pontius Pilate and said, “Hey, that’s my friend over there. I’m going to take his body with me. He needs to be buried.” Pontius Pilate washes his hands of it because he didn’t want to deal with it, but that’s a very powerful and courageous act of St. Joseph.
We should be powerful and courageous in our decisions as investors and making sure that we’re putting God first and putting ourselves on the line and our futures on the line to benefit God and His kingdom, just as St. Joseph did.
He demonstrates not only courage but also a tremendous act of faith. Looking back in history, we’ve got the sacraments, we’ve got the Church, we’ve got all the saints, we’ve got all the support to help us believe. Yet, our faith is still very small. St. Joseph, though, he didn’t have any of those things, and yet he acted out of faith for our Lord.
When you look at St. Joseph, you see a powerful man, you see a generous man, and we see a courageous man and we see a faithful man. For those reasons, we chose St. Joseph of Arimathea to be the CEO of Arimathea. He’s the true CEO, not me.
The work that you guys are doing at CatholicVote is incredible and important. We’re trying to do something similar in finance with voting to help change these companies’ directions, aggregate all these votes to make a real big impact so we can help these companies stop supporting abortion, stop supporting pornography, stop supporting slave labor, all these terrible things that businesses get involved in. We’re making a lot of progress.
