CHAPTER II. THE PRACTICAL GUIDANCE FROM MENSURAM BONAM - Getting started. Adopting a faith-based process.

34. For investors beginning this journey, the key is to set aside time for honest examination—to interrogate practices and assumptions, and to formulate the terms that are applicable for faith-consistent investing. Not every aim, nor every quandary, will be resolved. The priority is to start, using preliminary deliberations and decisions to keep learning—to keep growing capacities for aligning investments to faith. That process may include: • Formulating an Investment Policy Statement, which identifies the chosen governing principles from faith, and sets the horizon for investments. Setting or re-setting such a policy brings faith considerations into direct conversation with an investor’s priorities, risk tolerance, return objectives, and time horizon. In effect, this serves as a proactive “balance sheet,” identifying moral as well as financial assets or aims, and liabilities or risks. (See the table in Chapter 1, 23). • With this Policy as a guide, risk parameters are revised to reflect both financial conditions and ethical expectations. This framework for risks in their multiple dimensions becomes the pivot on which to base a prudent construction of financial portfolios. • Specifically identifying values, both to reflect the tolerance for risk, and the degree of urgency for realizing faith-consistent outcomes. The usual investment norms of prudence and due-diligence are, in this case, required in full; enlarged to include more of the ethical considerations that impact choices and results. • Importantly with faith-consistent goals, the very system for investment reasoning is reset. Questions and criteria for performance impact investment strategies, and become a filter for evaluation options and results. Small changes can make a big difference, particularly as they combine with others’ efforts to implement faith-consistent investing.

• Faith-consistent criteria thus allows investors to make more precise decisions about assets, securities, properties, issuers, and other fund options. This criteria also guides participation in affecting market players and performance through engagement, enhancement, and exclusions. (More regarding these processes is detailed below in 39.) • Monitoring progress is crucial for fulfilling authentic fiduciary duty, realizing security and sustainability, while aligning with the vision and values of faith. The monitoring also takes stock of learning, to strengthen the faith-guided investment process, and to build capacity for future investments. Modes of financial management and economic commerce may, naturally, vary from region to region, and from investor to investor. Not all large investors have yet adopted this process. Small investors, or those managing personal assets, will also bring varying degrees of expertise or resources to these questions. Faith-consistent investing is a trajectory rather than a fixed recipe or accomplishment. This is why the lessons from those larger Catholic institutions that have wrestled with faith-consistent investing are germane to all investors. In building such an investment approach, several different routes may be selected by investors or asset owners. MB describes some of them below. As referenced in Chapter 1, various Bishops’ conferences and some Vatican bodies have also issued much more detailed sets of rules that can also be accessed for reference and inspiration (See 25).

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“Mensuram Bonam”. Faith-Based Measures for Catholic Investors: A Starting Point and Call to Action

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