Posted earlier in the BENEDICT NEWS thread:
I had been hoping for a significant English article about CIV that I could post todat on the first month anniversary of the encyclical. A blogger alerted me to this article for a monthly magazine which makes soem good points, mostly at the expense of George Weigel for what I continue to think was an uncharacteristic rush to judgment - mostly negative - on the encyclical. He has since sort of made up for that, of course, by a more typical sober column that I also posted here.
Is the Pope capitalist?
No, he is simply Catholic
By Stuart Reid
For the issue of Sept. 1, 2009
Hilaire Belloc said, “Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe.” As far as Catholics such as George Weigel and his neocon pals are concerned, however, that is so Old Europe. To them it makes much more sense to say, “America is the Faith and the Faith is America.”
From the Faith of America comes the Weigelian Church, which preaches liberal capitalism, pre-emptive war, the Little Way of Sarah Palin, global democratic revolution, and faith and works.
Walker Percy saw this Church coming in
Love in the Ruins. He called it the American Catholic Church. One of its major feast days was Property Rights Sunday, during which the ACC would display a blue banner showing Christ holding the American home (with white picket fence) in His hands.
The ACC would probably not have liked the Pope’s new social encyclical,
Caritas in Veritate — Love in Truth — any more than George Weigel does.
Caritas runs to 30,000 words and is a summary of Catholic teaching on such matters as economics, trade, and employment.
It is, in other words — at least as far as the media is concerned — a politically charged document. And since Weigel is one of America’s most politically charged Catholic thinkers — known, especially, for his strong support of George W. Bush — his views on the encyclical had been eagerly awaited.
[What does his support of W have to do with his views on the encyclical????]
In some quarters, George Weigel is seen as a guardian of orthodoxy, a hammer of the dissenting liberals who question papal teaching on such matters as contraception, abortion, and marriage — the “cafeteria Catholics” who pick what they like from the Catholic menu and turn their noses up at the rest.
Now suddenly, in his reaction to
Caritas at National Review Online, Weigel has himself become a dissenting Catholic. He was not pleased that, for example, the encyclical says more about wealth redistribution than wealth creation and spoke of its “clotted and muddled” language and “confused sentimentality.”
Caritas was disjointed, he declared, the work of so many hands that “the net result is, with respect, an encyclical that resembles a duck-billed platypus.”
With respect? Quack, quack. What irked Weigel especially, I suspect, is that
Caritas in Veritate lavishes great praise on the Pope Paul VI’s 1967 social encyclical
Populorum Progressio, which was denounced as “souped-up Marxism” by the
Wall Street Journal.
[Also, I continue to believe, because Benedict XVI did not focus on John Paul II's social encyclicals, which for B16's purposes were less relevant to CIV than Paul VI's PP.]
For some right-wing Catholics that verdict became de fide, along with National Review’s gag — “Mater, Si, Magistra, No” — on the publication of John XXIII’s equally progressive social encyclical
Mater et Magistra in 1961.
['Progressive' meaning 'socialist' or 'socialist-tending' rather than pro-capitalist?]
But conservatives in the 1960s should really not have troubled their shaggy little heads with the Church’s apparent “lurch to the left.” The fact is that capitalist ideology — as it has emerged in modern times — has never been embraced by the Church, and it should come as no surprise that it is not now being embraced by Benedict.
The historian Eamon Duffy summed up Catholic social teaching nicely when he wrote of Pope Pius XI (no lefty he), “he loathed
the greed of capitalist society, ‘the unquenchable thirst for temporal possessions,’ and thought that liberal capitalism shared with communism ‘satanic optimism’ about human progress.”
It is possible that the great foe of communism Whitaker Chambers would have agreed with Pius. On Christmas Eve 1958, in a letter to his friend William F. Buckley Jr., he wrote, “capitalism is not, and by its essential nature cannot conceivably be, conservative. This is particularly true of capitalism in the United States, which knew no Middle Ages; which was born, in so far as it was ideological, in the Enlightenment.”
“Conservatism,” he added, “is alien to the very nature of capitalism whose love of life and growth is perpetual change … conservatism and capitalism are mutually exclusive manifestations, and antipathetic at root.”
One of the things to remember about the Catholic Church, perhaps, is that it is Christian and therefore not inclined to look with great favor on Mammon. It seeks a way of pursuing the good life, even the prosperous life, that does not involve denial of God or — a key point in Benedict’s encyclical — the abandonment of life at any stage of its development.
Not easy, of course, but, though Weigel contemptuously dismisses the idea, there is a Catholic third way between capitalism and socialism, not the one seen by Benedict’s co-religionist Tony Blair — that took us into Iraq and fed us to marketing men, with their spread sheets, Polish nannies, and suits without ties — but by such people as G.K. Chesterton, the Southern Agrarians, and Konrad Adenaeur, whose political principles were based on Catholic social teaching and who led West Germany into her Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle).
Maybe this third way will never play in Peoria or in Stratford-upon-Avon. Still, it pleases me that
Caritas in Veritate will have answered at least one important question: Is the Pope capitalist? He is not. Neither is he socialist, of course, far less a liberal. What is he, then? The Pope is Catholic.
I find it sad that Catholics who consider themselves politically conservative should be split into 'regular' conservatives, I suppose one might call them, such as Mr. Reid, and those who have been labelled 'neo-cons' ['neo-' because they advocate a 'new conservatism' or are lately come to conservatism? - and which conservatism: Catholic orthodoxy or political conservatism?] like Weigel and Michael Novak.
The latter has written at least three essays tending to question the Pope, to say the least, on aspects of the encyclical. The first one was in First Things, 'The Pope of Caritopolois' which was posted here, in which, surprisingly, he says "The Catholic tradition — even the wise Pope Benedict — still seems to put too much stress upon caritas, virtue, justice, and good intentions, and not nearly enough on methods for defeating human sin in all its devious and persistent forms". To which my immediate reaction was: But what methods are there except what Christ taught????? Love and abandonment to God in prayer! Which, of course, this Pope, like other Popes before him, ceaselessly preaches.
The two others were longer essays for the Italian newspaper Libero, the first of which was entitled "But I prefer John Paul II's Centesimus Annus', and the second, more recently, entitled 'So much charity, less truth'.
(For context, Centesimus Annus was John Paul II's take on social and economic issues in the world following the collapse of Communism-Marxism, so by its nature, it was bound to be 'anti-socialist' and consequently 'pro-capitalist'. But again, that is to interpret papal encyclicals according to conventional categories of thought!)
In fairness to Novak, the headline writer chose to use in both cases an actual line from the essays taken out of context, and Novak also tries to bend over backwards to make a 'softening' statement after articulating a criticism (but I find such effort condescending rather than deferential to the Pope).
Novak did have one positive reaction - the brief essay he submitted to the Catholic Thing forum, also posted here at the time.
In any case, I find it objectionable that Catholic writers of whatever ideological shade should use the Pope in any way to wage war against those who have politically/ideologically opposed views.
An initial reaction to Reid's article by someone who appears to be more formally rooted in the affairs of the Church reinforces the distressing nature of the intra-Catholic 'ideological wars'.
Surprise, the Pope is Catholic
by Daniel Nichols
I had been planning on writing at length on Benedict XVI’s new social encyclical,
Caritas in Veritate, but Stuart Reid has written so well on it in
The American Conservative that I will just link to his succinct and eloquent essay here.
I will only add that I am much gratified and not a little bewildered by the Catholic neoconservatives’ reaction to it. Gratified, because I have been saying for years that they are not interested in conforming their thought to the mind of the Church, but only in bending it to fit their ideology, a sort of romantic free market fundamentalism wedded to belligerent nationalism. Conservative Catholics have generally taken issue or even mocked that contention, but here are Novak and Weigel proving my point beyond dispute.
I heard Novak on the radio dismissing
Populorum Progressio - Paul VI’s encyclical, which Benedict was commemorating - as the Church’s “pinkest encyclical”. And he has since criticized the Pope for putting “too much stress upon caritas, virtue, justice and good intentions and not nearly enough on defeating human sin”.
A vicar of Christ is overemphasizing Divine Love? That sort of leaves one speechless, and never mind that Mr Novak’s strategy for “defeating human sin” in the past has included preemptive war. And never mind that the market controls which the neocons find so offensive are precisely geared to defeating the human sins engendered by the market.
And Weigel really went overboard in attacking the encyclical, which he “respectfully” likened to a “duck-billed platypus”. He then proceeded to instruct the faithful on what parts of
Caritas they should ignore.
Which is bewildering. The strategy of co-opting the Church’s social teaching, in selecting isolated passages from isolated encyclicals to prove their contentions while ignoring all that counters them, has served the neoconservatives so well in the past that one can only wonder what has changed them.
Not that an honest reading of the Church’s teachings did not contradict them at nearly every point; I suspect that only the willing were deceived. But once again it is evident that, as Mr Reid says, the Pope is not a capitalist. Nor is he a socialist or a liberal or a conservative. Surprise, the Pope is Catholic.
I hope I will be excused for enjoying my intellectual opponents making fools of themselves. I will try not to take inordinate pleasure in the spectacle. But it will be a struggle.