See preceding page for earlier entries today, 7/9/10.
For his weekly column today, John Allen writes about two topics, the first one being about "Benedict and Obama: A partnership delayed but not yet denied", which you may check out yourself
ncronline.org/blogs/all-things-catholic/obama-and-benedict-partnership-delayed-not-ye...
I personally find it rather preposterous because it is based on two false premises: 1) That there was ever an intention by either side for a 'partnership', other than the passive kind which comes from an occasional convergence of views on certain obvious issues. An 'Obama-Benedict partnership' was never anything but the wishful thinking of liberal Catholics like Allen (and OR editor Vian, most conspicuously!) who are over-eager to place Obama 'on the side of the angels' - odd that they should think that was necessary at all since they bought into the myth that Obama walks on water; and
2) That Obama has ever thought he needs the approbation of the Vatican for anything (the Pope has no army divisions, after all) - he's more interested in courting the Muslims to the point of telling the head of the Obama-denatured NASA that the primary mission today of the once-glorious space agency is to make Muslims feel good about Muslim achievements in the arts and sciences (which were many and admirable, but they arose during the Middle Ages and stopped there!!)
However, Allen's second topic is on the first anniversary of CIV, and Allen's commentary for the occasion is so far a rarity even among those Catholic writers who were very gung-ho about CIV last year.
'CIV was one of the clear
PR success stories
from the Vatican'
July 9, 2010
This week marks not just the anniversary of the meeting between Benedict and Obama, but also the release of
Caritas in Veritate. (The encyclical was presented in a Vatican news conference on July 7, 2009, although formally it carried the date of June 29, the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul.)
Originally projected for release in 2007 in order to mark the fortieth anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s social encyclical
Populorum Progressio, the document was delayed for two years in order to allow Benedict to reflect on the implications of the global economic crisis.
At the PR level,
Caritas in Veritate is among the few clear success stories in recent Vatican experience. Timing its release to coincide with a G8 meeting in Italy and the encounter between the Pope and Obama ensured significant global interest, and Benedict’s analysis (including his call for a world political authority with “real teeth”) generated wide, and often positive, editorial comment around the world.
Toronto’s
Globe and Mail, for example, editorialized that “the letter’s strength is in challenging all ordinary agendas, and in denying that business, politics and morality are separate, watertight compartments of human life.”
Even
The Economist conceded that “despite some lapses into trendy jargon,”
Caritas in Veritate “is certainly not a banal or trivial document” and will “occupy a prominent place among religious leaders’ competing attempts to explain and address the problems of an overheated, overcrowded planet.”
To mark the one-year anniversary of the encyclical,
Avvenire [which all these years Allen maddeningly insists on calling L'Avvenire as if he has never seen a copy of the newspaper or referred to it online!], the newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference, published interviews on July 7 with two leading Catholic commentators: Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, a distinguished economist and since September 2009 the chairman of the Vatican Bank, and Archbishop Giancarlo Maria Bregantini, president of the Italian bishops’ Commission for Social Problems, Labor, Justice and Peace.
Taken together, the two interviews seem to make a single point, one with obvious relevance for divided American Catholics:
Defending the unborn and defending the poor are a package deal, and ignoring one at the expense of the other is always a mistake. (The attempt to cajole the Church’s pro-life and peace-and-justice wings into a better working relationship would seem deliberate, since in Italian terms Gotti Tedeschi is seen as a prominent conservative while Bregantini is a liberal favorite.)
* * *
Here are a few highlights from the interview with Gotti Tedeschi, who worked at senior levels for various banks and multi-national companies in addition to teaching economics in Milan and Turin before taking over at the Vatican Bank (formally callede IOR, from the Italian acronym for “Institute for the Works of Religion.”)
What should world leaders have learned from Caritas in Veritate?
Assuming they actually read it, they should have understood three things:
Economic development isn’t possible where people don’t have children, and it can’t be founded either on consumption or debt. In sum, economic development is either integral, or it doesn’t exist.
Can one say that the economic crisis ‘rewrote’ the encyclical?
One might say that during those two years, some important points were integrated: think about the first chapter, where
Humanae Vitae [Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical on birth control] is forcefully confirmed, as a way of clarifying that the reason for the economic crisis is a collapse in fertility.
The rejection of new life -- induced in the Western world from 1975 to 1985 by neo-Malthusian movements -- is at the origin of the economic decline, and of the various “compensatory maneuvers” attempted over the last 25-30 years.
Everybody has commented on this encyclical. What are the most common errors?
The first is that many go directly to the fifth chapter, which speaks about the redistribution of wealth, the economy as gift, and so on. They read it forgetting about the other four chapters, and ignoring the introduction -- it’s like reading the Ten Commandments by skipping the first.
Other commentators held that the Pope wanted to give a new shape to capitalism: however, Benedict XVI is not giving lessons on the economy, because his call concerns not the means but the ends. The market and capitalism are instruments, and the Pope knows that an instrument in itself is neither good nor bad.
One year since it was published, what do you think of the encyclical?
I’m convinced that nothing is more rational than Catholic morality, and that this is one of the most rational encyclicals -- more than
Rerum Novarum.
All of
Caritas in Veritate is permeated by a clear thrust:
that the means cannot take on a moral autonomy, that they must have a clear end, and that this end is explained by the truth which the human person needs as a point of reference.
In that sense, the introduction is almost a mini-encyclical against the dominant nihilism.
* * *
The following are a couple of highlights from the interview with Archbishop Bregantini, well known for his social advocacy. At the moment, Bregantini is asking critical questions about a mini-boom in windmills in his region of Molise, in central Italy.
While representing a potential source of clean energy, the wind mills have been constructed, according to critics, in poorly chosen locations without regard for environmental impact. Some critics charge they’re more a boon for certain well-connected contractors than for the environment.
What’s the fundamental intuition of the encyclical?
I think the heart of it, which seems ever more profound, is that ethics improves the economy. The Pope recalls that rules of an ethical nature render economic activity better able to serve the human person and to protect the ‘little ones’ of the earth, who otherwise would be crushed.
The Pope, following the Christian anthropological vision, asks that respect always be given to the little ones, whether we’re talking about unborn life, the family, the relationship with the environment, and in all other areas.
What form does this intuition take?
What’s striking in the encyclical is the deep logical coherence, even ontological coherence, between respect for a baby in its mother’s womb, and respect, for example, for creation, for the migrant laborer, for everything God has created. The Pope proposes a coherent ethical vision.
For example, while I defend Molise from ill-advised windmills, I also look to the struggling family expecting another child, the young man who’s unemployed, and the elderly person who needs dignified hospice care. This means there’s a deep unity in the struggle against everything that kills life.
What does this mean concretely?
For the Church, it implies a precise duty to take sides against anyone who threatens the dignity of the earth with the same evangelical zeal with which we condemn those who kill a life in the mother’s womb. This needs to happen at various levels in the defense of life.
* * *
As a footnote, the “True Wealth of Nations” research project at the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies, an independent body hosted at the University of Southern California, is organizing an event in Rome in tandem with the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace Oct. 15-16 titled “Caritas in Veritate and the United States.”
The symposium brings together a diverse sampling of leading intellectual lights from the American Catholic church, along with officials from the Council for Justice and Peace, to ponder the reception of the encyclical in the United States and its potential implications.
Along with the best and brightest of American Catholic thinkers, organizers have also asked me to sit in -- apparently on the theory that such a high-brow event needs at least one amateur to lower the tone.
[Allen is being too modest. He is invited to all these gatherings because he invariably writes about them, and he has a following and cachet even in the secular media who consider him an authoritative, all-knowing voice on Catholic affairs. As a reporter, I admire him for his diligence and initiative, but he is not always accurate, even about easily veriable facts. However, I have more serious objections to his opinions when they arise from patently fallacious but to him, dearly-held, premises. ]
I did find one other commentary on CIV online today from a regular contributor to a US Catholic online newspaper who uses a pseudonym and zooms in one specific provision of CIV:
Pope Benedict XVI on the economic situation:
Not for the faint of heart (liberals or conservatives)
Well - here is a challenge for those Catholics who like to say they are orthodox AND political conservatives- even as the Pope calls us “to liberate ourselves from ideologies, which often oversimplify reality in artificial ways..”.
If you don’t like social security systems, and you don’t like trade union organizations, and you like deregulation of the labour market for the benefit of corporate outsourcing, and you believe that Man should conform to the “free market” - not the economy to Man - you may need to go to the Vatican and line up for spanking.
Or better yet, just repent of your ideological ways, and read the Social Doctrine of the Church with an open mind and an open heart. The Pope’s social teaching is consistent with what the Church has been teaching and advising ever since the first papal social encyclical back in the late 1800′s.
From
Caritas in Veritate, paragraph 25:
25. From the social point of view, systems of protection and welfare, already present in many countries in Paul VI’s day, are finding it hard and could find it even harder in the future to pursue their goals of true social justice in today’s profoundly changed environment.
The global market has stimulated first and foremost, on the part of rich countries, a search for areas in which to outsource production at low cost with a view to reducing the prices of many goods, increasing purchasing power and thus accelerating the rate of development in terms of greater availability of consumer goods for the domestic market.
Consequently, the market has prompted new forms of competition between States as they seek to attract foreign businesses to set up production centres, by means of a variety of instruments, including favourable fiscal regimes and deregulation of the labour market.
These processes have led to a downsizing of social security systems as the price to be paid for seeking greater competitive advantage in the global market, with consequent grave danger for the rights of workers, for fundamental human rights and for the solidarity associated with the traditional forms of the social State.
Systems of social security can lose the capacity to carry out their task, both in emerging countries and in those that were among the earliest to develop, as well as in poor countries.
Here budgetary policies, with cuts in social spending often made under pressure from international financial institutions, can leave citizens powerless in the face of old and new risks; such powerlessness is increased by the lack of effective protection on the part of workers’ associations.
Through the combination of social and economic change, trade union organizations experience greater difficulty in carrying out their task of representing the interests of workers, partly because Governments, for reasons of economic utility, often limit the freedom or the negotiating capacity of labour unions. Hence traditional networks of solidarity have more and more obstacles to overcome.
The repeated calls issued within the Church’s social doctrine, beginning with Rerum Novarum[60], for the promotion of workers’ associations that can defend their rights must therefore be honoured today even more than in the past, as a prompt and far-sighted response to the urgent need for new forms of cooperation at the international level, as well as the local level.
The mobility of labour, associated with a climate of deregulation, is an important phenomenon with certain positive aspects, because it can stimulate wealth production and cultural exchange.
Nevertheless, uncertainty over working conditions caused by mobility and deregulation, when it becomes endemic, tends to create new forms of psychological instability, giving rise to difficulty in forging coherent life-plans, including that of marriage. This leads to situations of human decline, to say nothing of the waste of social resources.
In comparison with the casualties of industrial society in the past, unemployment today provokes new forms of economic marginalization, and the current crisis can only make this situation worse.
Being out of work or dependent on public or private assistance for a prolonged period undermines the freedom and creativity of the person and his family and social relationships, causing great psychological and spiritual suffering. [Obama ought to read this! ]
I would like to remind everyone, especially governments engaged in boosting the world’s economic and social assets, that the primary capital to be safeguarded and valued is man, the human person in his or her integrity: “Man is the source, the focus and the aim of all economic and social life”[61].
Does anyone believe that the Catholic Church can understand human sexuality and biology well enough to apply moral teachings to such things as homosexuality and embryonic stem cell research - but is too thick to comprehend economics and the moral application of basic principles to market and labor theory and practice?
Doesn’t Scripture provide enough evidence that simply following our desires in any realm - be it sexual or economic is not enough - not for a good end to result??
Every human transaction of a sexual or economic kind has something more than mechanical operation at play. The God who created human sexuality for our good is also the God of economics, and He desires that the good of Man be “the source, the focus and the aim of all economic and social life.”
Goodness usually requires some effort, some will to do right by others, not just to blindly follow one's impulses in bars or malls: Hedonism and consumerism go hand-in-glove - and they only appear harmless if you ignore abortion clinics, broken homes, sweatshops and harsh manual labor. Which we all do when our attention is engaged with publicity about consumer products and politicians.
Well, I’m awake, thanks in large measure to Catholic social doctrine which serves the Lord's purpose by giving us a glaring light to see the world in which we live - to see the abortions and the sweatshops and the human trafficking of poor and vulnerable people.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 09/07/2010 23:31]