I find this commentary on CIV particularly welcome and incisive, especially in view of Fr. Nichols's long-standing reputation as a student of Ratzingerian theology (see capsule profile posted after the article). Like Fr. Schall, he appreciates the document as a theological work, not just as a 'social encyclical'.
Singularly useful at a glance is his enumeration of what Benedict XVI 'likes' and 'doesn't like' about the world economy today.
Maybe it's my Protestant upbringing, or my philo-Eastern) Orthodox proclivities, but social encyclicals that present themselves as, essentially, essays in natural ethics leave me uneasy.
I understand, though, why they are written. Since the Fall of man, the vices have always run riot in society. But since the middle of the 18th century a whole range of moral dystopias have actually been argued for. That makes a difference to the world in which the Church works.
If political elites, and their accompanying intelligentsias, no longer grasp the fundamental principles of what is good for man in society, then the popes will have to recall them to some basic natural decencies.
You might think that for bottom-line wisdom about how people should live together, statesmen and philosophic sages would be enough, without a divine Incarnation to found an infallible Church. And you would be right. But desperate times need desperate measures.
There is some supernatural sense in popes instructing people about matters of entirely common sense.
The supernatural presupposes the natural. In salvation grace gives new resources for good works done according to the law of creation.
But the wide hearing these encyclicals get in the world of the modern media - beginning with the invention of the telegraph - means the popes have to be careful.
Envisaging basic good order in society is not giving people the vision of the Church for a deified humanity in a consummated cosmos thanks to the descent of the Trinitarian energies in the God-man Jesus Christ.
If the launchers of these humane appeals are not savvy, statements of "integral humanism", however well-intentioned and even necessary, will tend to reduce the imaginative horizons of their Christian readers to the natural level.
Historians will be able to show, I think, how this was an unintended consequence of Pope Paul's VI 1967 letter
Populorum Progressio, "On Furthering the Development of Peoples". It helped usher in an age of humanitarian moralism, as distinct from a full-blooded dogmatic Christianity, in the western Catholic Church.
I re-read that letter for the sake of understanding Pope Benedict XVI's new encyclical
Caritas in Veritate, which presents itself as a commentary, in changed circumstances, on its Pauline predecessor. (Had it not been for delays, at first in the papal timetable, and then through the need to make some reference to the recent economic recession,
Caritas in Veritate would, no doubt, have been published in 2007, for the 40th anniversary of
Populorum Progressio.)
Populorum Progressio is not without strong hints of the real framework of Christian thinking, which turns on God, Christ, salvation, the mystery of the Church.
And its "final appeal" carefully distinguishes three registers in which it wants its readers to take away its message: Catholics; other Christians; non-believers.
Above all, it reiterates that humanism will not be "integral" unless, in its pursuit of all the conditions that make up a good human life, it is oriented towards "the Absolute" which is God himself.
In such words Paul VI echoes the writings of the French Neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, his chief inspiration in social matters and whom he cites.
The trouble was, people took the conditional - the account of the conditions - but they largely left the Absolute behind. Which is what an increasingly secularised culture expected (and wanted) anyway.
Does Benedict XVI do any better in this new letter? It will not surprise those who have followed the very different paths through life of Montini and Ratzinger to hear that he does.
For Benedict, charity needs illumining by both reason and faith (3; 9), two distinct yet convergent ways of knowing. Not surprisingly, then, there is more genuine theological doctrine in the new encyclical.
Sometimes it is upfront, sometimes it is expressed in a coded way which is one of the reasons people may find this letter difficult to read - something which certainly could not be said about Paul VI's enviably clear and far more straightforward document.
The upfront theology is easy to spot. Benedict's thought about social engagement is Christological and even (54) Trinitarian. Let me take some examples of his Christocentrism, itself a sine qua non of genuinely Christian thought.
The "charity in truth" of his title is the human face of the divine person of the incarnate Word (1). It reflects the God who is simultaneously Logos and Agape (3).
If "humanism" is what you are looking for, only Christ is the revelation of what humanity is (18), a passage indebted to Pope John Paul II's 1979 letter
Redemptor Hominis (which itself initiated a more Christocentric reading of the Second Vatican Council's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,
Gaudium et Spes). The Church's social doctrine points, therefore, to the "New Man", Christ "the principle of the charity that 'never ends' " (12).
Like Benedict's earlier letter
Spe Salvi (2007),
Caritas in Veritate is also eschatological, and this is another litmus test of thoroughly revelation-grounded thinking.
If global society could achieve unity and peace it would, to that extent, prefigure the final City of God to which the Church directs her own longing (7).
The cosmic nature in which human society is set and which it inevitably transforms will be re-capitulated in Christ at the end of time (48): a difficult concept but essential for any distinctively Christian attitude towards the environment.
Moving on to the "coded" theology, this concerns chiefly the idea of gift or gratuitousness (34; 37; 39). Gift theory entered sociology in the Twenties and reached philosophical theology some decades later.
The practice of giving, or gift exchange, can be seen as a signal of transcendence, and a clue to how to understand the doctrine of creation.
That reminded theologians of a theme of ancient Christian thought,
the self-diffusiveness of the divine goodness, itself with a background in the best paganism (the gods are not envious).
Benedict uses a low-key version of gift theory to promote the idea that connatural with the divine plan are forms of economic activity with a built-in element of the gratuitous: in effect, preferential treatment by business in dealing with the poor. There is a touch of the divine about it.
This larger injection of theology indicates one of the things Benedict is seeking to do in this encyclical, which is to shoe-horn papal social doctrine into tradition with a capital "T".
In other words, he wants to argue that,
thanks to its consonance with elements in Scripture and the Fathers, and its affinities with confessors or martyrs who died for defending the demands of the common good, these documents, whose continuity before and after the Second Vatican Council he stresses, cannot be regarded as merely prudential or exclusively natural in character (12). It will be interesting to see how far this line of thought is allowed to go.
Pope John Paul II's first encyclical began a process of linking the content of Church comment on social issues more closely with key doctrines. But what is now being suggested is that the authority of the apostolic Paradosis in some way also covers social encyclicals of this kind.
Without prejudice to that question, let us formulate it more modestly. What does the Pope like? And what doesn't he like?
So what does he like?
- He likes treating justice as inseparable from charity.
- He likes an objective account of the common good (not a subjective one based on opinion surveys).
- He likes human rights if they are fundamental ones that are genuinely linked to virtuous practices, and people recognise the corresponding duties.
- He likes markets so long as they operate in a humane fashion, and state intervention, on condition it doesn't reduce people to passivity by welfarism.
- He likes helping farmers, whether by introducing new methods or improving traditional ones.
- He likes scientifically based industry if it is marked by generosity in making know-how available.
- He likes trade unions and, in general, institutions intermediate between the state and the individual - so long as their goals are genuinely civilising (or, in the case of trade unions, just).
- He likes ecology when it avoids neo-paganism and incorporates a "human ecology" which, among other things, shuns contraception and abortion, eugenics and euthanasia.
- He likes globalisation if it leads to a sense of a single worldwide interdependence of people, a kind of secular analogue to the catholicity of the Church.
What doesn't the Pope like?
- He doesn't like treating technology as the means to utopia, nor deploring it as an interference with our naturally paradisiac condition, à la Rousseau.
- He doesn't like single-minded entrepreneurs motivated exclusively by the profit motive, nor financiers who juggle with notional assets in pursuit of miracles of unnatural growth.
- He doesn't like the diversion of aid to improper ends, whether by donors or beneficiaries.
- He doesn't like treating different cultures as obviously equal in every respect, nor does he like homogenising cultures and making them all the same.
- He doesn't like the mass media when they don't care a hoot for their possible effects in undermining human dignity.
Placed on the lips of a modern Pope, it can scarcely be said that much of this comes as a shock. But, in a way,
to reduce the encyclical to a set of such likes and dislikes, recommendations and caveats, is to miss the point. The point, or most of it, lies in the way the various items listed in the recipe are connected up.
How are they connected up? The overall shape they belong with owes something to the more than half-century long concern of the popes with
the interplay of "subsidiarity" and "solidarity" in economic and social life: roughly speaking, when to leave people or groups to act alone and when - by appeal to the sovereign - to make the members of a whole society act together.
But just as John Paul II liked to filter these ideas through his (philosophical and theological) personalism, so Benedict XVI, without abandoning that personalism, fine-tunes them by reference to
his key concept (philosophically and theologically) of relation.
This helps him to articulate
his master idea in Caritas in Veritate, the idea of a "person-based and community-oriented cultural process of worldwide integration that is open to transcendence" (42).
As I read the encyclical, I tried to ask myself what this master-idea would entail in the two countries I currently know best, England and Ethiopia. I soon found that answering my own question would be no easy task. This is the price one pays for a style of writing which avoids particular examples for the sake of universality.
But behind and beneath the operation of the master idea is another - hardly facile but possibly more manageable - leading question, and it links this, the Pope's third encyclical, with
Deus Caritas Est (2005), which was his first.
In his forthcoming book
Dante in Love, A N Wilson says that the question which exercised the medieval poet-statesman in all his many and seemingly quite disparate interests was, what is love? Love at every level: personally, emotionally, mystically, socially, politically, divinely. This is also the question driving the Pope.
With the integration of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei into the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the pontificate is drawing near to one of its greatest challenges.
By satisfying the followers and sympathisers of the late Mgr Lefebvre about the real continuity joining the state of Catholic teaching before and after the Council, can this pontificate simultaneously entrench in Catholic consciousness a feeling for that seamless, unruptured garment in the wider theological community and Church?
Granted the importance to traditionalists of not letting go of "Christendom", the question of the social doctrine of the Church will be central to this task.
Caritas in Veritate speaks of the need for a supernatural perspective on society (3; 18). It talks of the requirement that God have "a place in the public realm" (56). It claims that, as the religion of the "God who has a human face", Christianity - and by implication, only Christianity - carries within itself the criterion of a transcendence-linked integral humanism society requires (55).
These, then, will have to count in place of the older emphasis on the impossibility of social life without the true religion and the Christian prince.
It is difficult to feel confident that the juridically recognised world-governmental authority for which the Pope, following Paul VI, looks for assistance (57) would be much of a substitute for the Byzantine Basileus or the Holy Roman emperor in some pertinent regards. Am I being cynical in asking whether that is why this encyclical ends (79) with a request for prayer?
Fr Aidan Nichols's latest book is From Hermes to Benedict XVI: Faith and Reason in Modern Catholic Thought(Gracewing).
Born in 1948 in Lancashire, England, Nichols is an Oxford-educated Dominican priest who served as the first John Paul II Memorial Visiting Lecturer at Oxford University for 2006-8, the first lectureship of Catholic theology at that university since the Reformation.
He has written at least 28 books on theology and Christian history, since his first in 1980 on 'Theology and Image in Christian Tradition'. Very significantly, his second book, published in 1988, was The Theology of Joseph Ratzinger: An Introductory Study, which was reissued in July 2005 as The Thought of Benedict XVI: An Introduction to the Theology of Joseph Ratzinger. It is certainly remarkable that an Anglophone writer thought as early as 1988 to publish a study of Joseph Ratzinger's theology.
In 1998-2001, he published three analytical volumes on Hans Urs von Balthasar's theology and a fourth book in 2007.
For more practical reasons, I like this reaction from an economist who zeroes in on one of the Pope's specific formulations in arguing for human life and the individual as the proper focus of development.
Population growth and the encyclical:
Development expert considers
Benedict XVI's innovations
Interview by
Antonio Gaspari
ROME, JULY 16, 2009 (Zenit.org).-
Caritas in Veritate proposes that population growth is needed to bring the world out of the economic crisis. And the president of the European Center for Studies on Population, the Environment and Development agrees.
ZENIT spoke with Riccardo Cascioli of CESPAS about Benedict XVI's contribution to theories on demographics and the methods to truly guarantee development.
Cascioli here explains why the encyclical offers the true solutions to the recession and even why
the Pope should be considered for a Nobel Economics Prize.
What is your evaluation of the encyclical?
Extraordinarily positive, because in going deeper into the theme of charity and truth in the economic and social perspective, he considers from the point of view of reason the most controversial issue of our time: the meaning of human presence on earth, our task and destiny.
While in the West for decades now, ideologies that tend to disfigure man have taken hold -- the worst of which is "humanism without God," as the Pope recalls -- in this encyclical, the person, with his dignity and responsibility, is again placed where he belongs: at the center of creation.
And it shows how the anthropological question is not a philosophical problem; on the contrary, it is determinant for economic and social realities. This is clearly in continuity with the magisterium of Benedict XVI, committed to revalue reason, the faculty specific to man.
But it is also in continuity with John Paul II, who back in 1997 clearly said the decisive battle of the third millennium precisely revolves around man, the pinnacle of creation.
The points dealing with the demographic crisis and the environment are quite innovative. What do you think of this?
It is fundamental that he has said with such clarity that "to consider population increase as the primary cause of underdevelopment is mistaken, even from an economic point of view."
This is a decisive point, because from the '80s onward, global politics -- under the auspices of organizations like the United Nations -- precisely endow programs for population control, considered as a "negative" for development and for the environment.
And also regarding the environment, the encyclical illustrates and shows the actual situation which is already part of the patrimony of the Church's social doctrine and which can be summarized in the phrase: Nature is for man and man is for God.
"If this vision is lost," the encyclical says, "we end up either considering nature an untouchable taboo or, on the contrary, abusing it." In this way, it indicates precisely the schizophrenic situation of the secularized Western world.
The economist Ettore Gotti Tedeschi maintains that the Pope deserves the Nobel for economy because of highlighting the relationship between the crisis and the falling birthrate. What do you think?
I think he is entirely correct. There is truly a demographic crisis, and it is that of the developed countries, which for more than 40 years have a birthrate lower than that of the generational replacement level.
The encyclical brings us to see how this is the fundamental factor in the current economic crisis. And the answer cannot be merely "technical."
In recent years we have understood how the sinking birthrate influences the problem of pensions, for example, but this is only one aspect of a crisis that is much broader and bound to worsen in the coming years.
Governments -- and economists -- need to reflect on this point.
For some decades, international institutions have maintained that to favor development it is necessary to reduce births. What are the results of these policies?
Currently, there are many developing countries whose birthrates have dropped below the generational replacement level. Also in general, all the countries of the world -- except for a few rare exceptions -- have experienced a drastic descent in the number of births in recent decades. But not even one country has overcome poverty and underdevelopment thanks to these policies.
On the contrary, controlling births has diverted important resources needed to promote true development projects. Moreover, the savage application of these policies -- as in the cases of China, India and other Asian countries -- has caused grave social disequilibrium, of which the absence of hundreds of thousands of women is merely the most striking aspect.
It is not coincidence that this encyclical does not use the concept of "sustainable development," which is based precisely on a negative view of population. This is an important aspect, because even from certain Catholic environments, there is pressure to accept the ideology of "sustainability."
Contrary to the proposal, even from some Catholic circles, that to save the planet, there must be a reduction in development and demographic growth, (and hence, the theories about reductionism), Caritas in Veritate explains that development is a vocation to support the common good and that there is no development without demographic growth. What do you think?
Here as well the encyclical brings clarity and dismisses many prevailing norms. Development -- understood as integral development of the person and of populations -- is man's vocation. And this is what we should tend toward. Reduction is not a value, nor the way out for the economy.
The true challenge is taking the fundamental dimensions of development. It is not a coincidence that the encyclical puts the right to life and the right to religious liberty as fundamental conditions for true development.
Certain elements that seem damaged to us -- like working conditions or the environment in countries involved in a development as rapid as it is chaotic -- are actually the fruit of a concept that reduces development to economic growth, in which man is reduced to a mere instrument of this growth.
Returning to the theme of development, Benedict XVI's encyclical proposes a social revolution that passes from "solidarity" to the concept of "fraternity" and that joins together truth and charity. How do you see this?
It supposes a great novelty on which it is important to reflect. The term solidarity today goes along with a reductionist and sentimental view of charity, which the encyclical wants to turn around. And, consistently, it dedicates an entire chapter precisely to "fraternity."
While solidarity highlights a person's actions toward other people, fraternity highlights what we receive, because it presupposes the recognition of one father, without whom we cannot consider ourselves brothers. Once again, it emphasizes the vocation of man as the factor that determines everything, also community life.
[Quite apart from the technical distinctions between the definition of solidarity and fraternity, the word 'fraternity' itself is much more descriptive,less abstract and more personal than 'solidarity', which sounds like a word to describe the physical 'strength of materials', to use an engineering term.]
For decades, the Catholic world has seemed to be divided between those who do charity work and those who are dedicated more to bioethical questions, like the defense of life and family.
With this encyclical, the Pope maintains that there is no charity without truth and that only in truth does charity stand out. Thus it emphasizes that "without truth, charity is confined to a narrow field devoid of relations. It is excluded from the plans and processes of promoting human development of universal range, in dialogue between knowledge and praxis." What would you say about this?
Life is one and it cannot be divided into sectors. But at the same time, just as with a house, there are foundations, there are walls, partitions, the roof and the trimmings.
The right to life and religious liberty are the foundations. Without foundations, even the most beautiful houses are bound to collapse with the first wind. The current economic crisis proves this, but if this lesson is not understood, the crisis will not be halted.
However brilliant and trailblazing Benedict XVI's thought may be, I think perhaps hell will freeze over before any Nobel jury considers him for any prize - though I would have tagged him as a runaway candidate for Literature (the body of his writing is just as consequential - more, really - and as graceful in the use of language as Winston Churchill's World War II volumes wjhich earned him the Nobel for Literature), an unusual category for religious leaders who are generally considered for the Peace Prize.
But just consider the ideology-driven choices that the Nobel juries have made in the past two decades in those two categories! Economics would certainly be even more novel for a Pope, but the dominant liberal laissez-faire ideology - which anathemized the Pope for what he said about condoms, for instance, and which dominates the Nobel juries - would never allow that!
Of course, I would be more than happy to be proved wrong. Now, who's doing the paperwork for the nomination? I say nominate him in both categories.
Not Peace, because that's increasingly iffy and questionable - and the most ideologically-driven of all the categories. Think Yasser Arafat! And why, for instance, Ronald Reagan, John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher were never 'rewarded' for bringing down the 'evil empire'!
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/07/2009 05:35]