Some surprising reactions
to 'Caritas in veritate'
I find George Weigel's instant commentary on the encyclical strange - and obviously biased, from its very title. It seems to be more a defense - uncalled for and unnecessary - of John Paul II's Centesimus annus and an open denunciation of Paul VI's Populorum progressio - which amounts to a denunciation of Benedict XVI's Caritas in veritatis which so explicitly pays homage to Populorum progressio - in the course of which Weigel scapegoats the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, accusing it of having tried to strong-arm John Paul II into writing things the Council wanted him to write, and now apparently having succeeded in getting Benedict XVI to join their bias for Paul VI's Populorum progressio.
I must object that Mr. Weigel, whom I have always found objective and fair-minded befroe this, now sppears to make the Pope's encyclical the battleground for his differences (and, he implies, John Paul II's differences) with the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. In any case, it does not make for a flattering picture of Benedict XVI or of this encyclical - and I think it is flagrantly wrong and unfair to 'instrumentalize' the encyclical for such purposes.
It is almost as if Weigel had allowed his hostility towards Justice and Peace to take over his judgment in this matter. And to portray encyclicals by different Popes as somehow 'competitive' with each other is just not right! Every encyclical is supposed to be part of the continuum of the Church's universal Magisterium, not a self-assertive ego trip by the Pope who wrote it.
'Caritas in Veritate'
in gold and red:
The revenge of Justice and Peace
(or so they may think)
by George Weigel
July 7, 2009
In the often unpredictable world of the Vatican, it was as certain as anything could be in mid-1990 that there would be a 1991 papal encyclical to commemorate the centenary of
Rerum Novarum — the 1891 letter of Leo XIII that is rightly regarded as the Magna Carta of modern Catholic social doctrine.
The Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, which imagines itself the curial keeper of the flame of authentic Catholic social teaching, prepared a draft, which was duly sent to Pope John Paul II — who had already had a bad experience with the conventionally gauchiste and not-very-original thinking at Justice and Peace during the preparation of the 1987 social encyclical,
Sollicitudo Rei Socialis.
John Paul shared the proposed draft with colleagues in whose judgment he reposed trust; one prominent intellectual who had long been in conversation with the Pope told him that the draft was unacceptable, in that it simply did not reflect the way the global economy of the post–Cold War world worked.
So John Paul dumped the Justice and Peace draft and crafted an encyclical that was a fitting commemoration of
Rerum Novarum. For
Centesimus Annus not only summarized deftly the intellectual structure of Catholic social doctrine since Leo XIII; it proposed a bold trajectory for the further development of this unique body of thought, emphasizing the priority of culture in the threefold free society (free economy, democratic polity, vibrant public moral culture).
By stressing human creativity as the source of the wealth of nations,
Centesimus Annus also displayed a far more empirically acute reading of the economic signs of the times than was evident in the default positions at Justice and Peace.
Moreover,
Centesimus Annus jettisoned the idea of a “Catholic third way” that was somehow “between” or “beyond” or “above” capitalism and socialism — a favorite dream of Catholics ranging from G. K. Chesterton to John A. Ryan and Ivan Illich.
The encyclical rightly, if gingerly, suggests that thug-governments in the Third World have more to do with poverty and hunger than a lack of international development aid; recognizes that catastrophically low birth rates are creating serious global economic problems (although this point may not be as well developed as it was in previous essays from Joseph Ratzinger); sharply criticizes international aid programs tied to mandatory contraception and the provision of “reproductive health services” (the U.N. euphemism for abortion-on-demand); and neatly ties religious freedom to economic development.
All of this is welcome, and all of it is manifestly Benedict XVI, in continuity with John Paul II and his extension of the line of papal argument inspired by
Rerum Novarum in Centesimus Annus,
Evangelium Vitae (the 1995 encyclical on the life issues), and
Ecclesia in Europa (the 2003 apostolic exhortation on the future of Europe).
But then there are those passages to be marked in red — the passages that reflect Justice and Peace ideas and approaches that Benedict evidently believed he had to try and accommodate.
Some of these are simply incomprehensible, as when the encyclical states that defeating Third World poverty and underdevelopment requires a “necessary openness, in a world context, to forms of economic activity marked by quotas of gratuitousness and communion.”
This may mean something interesting; it may mean something naïve or dumb. But, on its face, it is virtually impossible to know what it means.
The encyclical includes a lengthy discussion of “gift” (hence “gratuitousness”), which, again, might be an interesting attempt to apply to economic activity certain facets of John Paul II’s Christian personalism and the teaching of Vatican II, in
Gaudium et Spes 24, on the moral imperative of making our lives the gift to others that life itself is to us.
But the language in these sections of
Caritas in Veritate is so clotted and muddled as to suggest the possibility that
what may be intended as a new conceptual starting point for Catholic social doctrine is, in fact, a confused sentimentality of precisely the sort the encyclical deplores among those who detach charity from truth.
[Are we talking of the same encyclical here? Paragraphs 34 and 35 - which were the ones devoted to the idea of 'gift' were far from muddled!]
There is also rather more in the encyclical about the redistribution of wealth than about wealth-creation — a sure sign of Justice and Peace default positions at work.
And another Justice and Peace favorite — the creation of a “world political authority” to ensure integral human development — is revisited, with no more insight into how such an authority would operate than is typically found in such curial fideism about the inherent superiority of transnational governance.
(It is one of the enduring mysteries of the Catholic Church why the Roman Curia places such faith in this fantasy of a “world public authority,” given the Holy See’s experience in battling for life, religious freedom, and elementary decency at the United Nations.
But that is how they think at Justice and Peace, where evidence, experience, and the canons of Christian realism sometimes seem of little account.)
[But it is not just the Council for Justice and Peace. John Paul II himself, like Paul VI before him and Benedict XVI after him, all put their faith in the United Nations - not because they see it as an effective solution to what besets the world, but because, as Benedict XVI pointed out recently, it is the only international forum so far where, at least in the General Assembly, the smallest nation-state has totally equal footing as the largest and most powerful nations. The Vatican takes its observer status in the UN seriously because it gives it a chance to make itself heard and on the record in international councils.]
If those burrowed into the intellectual and institutional woodwork at the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace imagine
Caritas in Veritate as reversing the rout they believe they suffered with
Centesimus Annus, and if they further imagine
Caritas in Veritate setting Catholic social doctrine on a completely new,
Populorum Progressio–defined course (as one Justice and Peace consultor has already said), they are likely to be disappointed.
)Here, Weigel's contempt for Justice and Peace takes over completely, and he makes it appear as if Benedict XVI were involved in a battle of encyclicals in which he, Benedict XVI, is on the wrong side!]
The incoherence of the Justice and Peace sections of the new encyclical is so deep, and the language in some cases so impenetrable, that what the defenders of
Populorum Progresio may think to be a new sounding of the trumpet is far more like the warbling of an untuned piccolo.
Benedict XVI, a truly gentle soul, may have thought it necessary to include in his encyclical these multiple off-notes, in order to maintain the peace within his curial household.
[Would someone like Benedict XVI compromise un any way an encyclical going out under his name just to 'keep peace in the Curial household'? That's almost insulting to him. First of all, although he must solicit contributions from all those 'sectorally involved, he is under no obligation to use anything he does not agree with.]
Those with eyes to see and ears to hear will concentrate their attention, in reading
Caritas in Veritate, on those parts of the encyclical that are clearly Benedictine, including the Pope’s trademark defense of the necessary conjunction of faith and reason and his extension of John Paul II’s signature theme — that all social issues, including political and economic questions, are ultimately questions of the nature of the human person.
[Is there perhaps a strong element of resentment in Weigel's 'review' that Benedict XVI used Populorum progressio as his touchstone, ratehr than Centesimus annus? And Jsutice and Peace is a convenient stalking horse to vent against because he cannot do it against Benedict XVI himself?
Also, most uncharacteristic of Weigel, he simply ignores the spiritual, theological and philosophical presentation of the encyclical to vent against Justice and Peace!]
And the first commentary by someone who had written a couple of pieces in anticipation of the encyclical also turns out to be a bit of a dud!:
The Pope of Caritapolis
by Michael Novak
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Three encyclicals already with Caritas in their title.
[Actually. only two. Spe salvi does not have caritas in its title, obviously. NJovak must be thinking of Benedict's post-synodal Exhortation, Sacramentum caritatis.]
It looks like the Pope is bidding fair to become “the Pope of Caritapolis,” who sees the whole world — in all its cultural, political, and cultural dimensions — as to be best grasped within the long history of “The City of God” — the City of God’s Caritas in this world.
By
caritas, the Pope means a distinctive form of the love that humans experience — not
eros, nor
amor, nor affection, nor commitment in choice (dilectio), nor friendship, nor all those other forms of love that humans know and cherish, each in its own way.
Caritas is the love proper only to God, among the Persons of the Divine Communion for One Another, All one in perfect Communion.
The Trinitarian Creator made us to share in this inner life and
caritas of God, a love beyond our capacities. Our love is to give the ancient world of “eternal cycles of return” a fresh and real history of responsibility, of daring, of potential progress and of threatening degradation. It is a love that obliges us to take responsibility for its fate, under a kind Providence.
This is the drama of human history, the story of Caritapolis, as the Catholic people see it. We do not often display the whole story out in public, preferring a story sparser and less romantic to match the flatness of our own times. But cherish it deep in our hearts, we do.
Now our most learned among Popes has published the fullest and most theological account of Catholic Social Thought, from its starting place right in the bosom of the Communion of Persons that furnishes us our experience of God — and also of our own nature.
The most holy, the noblest, the best, the most godlike things about us is our human capacity to learn personhood in responsible self-government (taking up personal responsibility for our own eternal fate) and to share in communion with other persons, and most of all with the unseen God.
It is as if Benedict is bringing back into play the long-neglected lessons of St. Augustine to Catholic Social Thought — re-presenting, as it were, The City of God — that is, the City of that
caritas which the Divine Persons gratuitously pour into the human heart, that it might cast the burning desire for human unity into the kindling of hundreds of millions of parched hearts.
Without eternal perspectives and without the sense of our individual immortal value — the great Tocqueville reminded us — the sheer materialism and dreck of democracy and capitalism would wear us down to mean and petty creatures. Materialism radically undercuts our human rights. Simply to survive — let alone flourish — democracy and capitalism need soul.
For Catholics, all social energy flows from the inner life of the Trinity. Everything is gift. We signal our gratitude by developing our own talents to the fullness, by becoming free, responsible, initiative-showing, creative agents of a better world, and by aspiring to that full communion of all human beings whose vocation is written into the structure of human history.
And we say “thank you.” What most distinguishes the Jewish and Christian believer from the secular materialist is the frequency and the authenticity in which the believer responds to everyday events with deeply felt gratitude. Everything we look upon is gift.
Thus, it is no surprise when empirical research shows that people who are believers give more of their time and resources to the needy than do unbelievers, and people who cherish limited government (conservatives) give more than welfare-state liberals.
The truth is, though, that both liberals and conservatives belong, in their quarreling fashions, to one same national community and one same human community.
What Benedict XVI has not spelled out yet is another forgotten lesson from St. Augustine: the ever-corrupting role of sin in the City of Man. Augustine points out how difficult it is even for the wisest and most detached humans to discover the truth among lies — and how even husbands and wives in the closest of human bonds misunderstand each other so often. The Father of Lies seems to own so much of the real world.
What are the most practical ways of defeating him? 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.
[But what methods are there except what Christ showed????? Love and abandonment to God in prayer!]
Even the Pope’s understandable
nostalgia for the European welfare-state [????? Where and how has he ever expressed this????] too much scants the self-interests, self-deceptions, and false presuppositions that are bringing that system to a crisis of its own making.
This was a crisis John Paul II saw rather more clearly in paragraph 48 of
Centesimus Annus.
[The essay seems unfinished! Not to mention that the last points Novak brings up seem to be unwarranted nit-picking.]
FIRST THINGS editor Joseph Bottum does the obvious and sensible thing, however, and points out that one should read Benedict XVI's Introduction and consider the entire encyclical in that light!
First Thoughts on Caritas in Veritate
by Joseph Bottum
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
The surprise of the encyclical is the praise of Paul VI, whose
Populorum Progressio deserves to be considered ‘the
Rerum Novarum of the present age,’ shedding light upon humanity’s journey towards unity.”
Love in truth, says Benedict, “is a great challenge for the Church in a world that is becoming progressively and pervasively globalized. The risk for our time is that the de facto interdependence of people and nations is not matched by ethical interaction of consciences and minds that would give rise to truly human development.”
Here we find the Pope’s great worry: At precisely the moment for the world’s great evangelization and the great manifestation of love, the devices by which the world has been prepared — economic and technological — are excluding the charity and denying the truth that “judge and direct” human development.
“The Church does not have technical solutions to offer and does not claim ‘to interfere in any way in the politics of States,’” the encyclical notes. “She does, however, have a mission of truth to accomplish, in every time and circumstance, for a society that is attuned to man, to his dignity, to his vocation.”
The introduction, these first nine paragraphs, have to be taken as the key to reading the encyclical. George Weigel notes the way the bulk of the encyclical exhibits various fragments of Catholics’ differing views of social virtues, but keeping in mind the introduction to the encyclical — remembering that it is not throat-clearing but the key to understanding what follows — may allow the reader to see the Pope’s over-arching intention.
FIRST THINGS associate editor David Goldman, who also writes as Spengler, is a finance analyst-economist by profession, so he speaks knowledgeably about these matters. I am a bit perplexed, however, by his first reaction to the encycllical.
He obviously agrees with its urgent call for ethics in the marketplace and with much of the economic analysis contained in it - but after offering an overview of how the market economy has actually increased the wealth across the Third World over the past three decades, he says the economics of the encyclical applies only to Africa, not to Asia and Latin America.
An African encyclical
by David P. Goldman
Tuesday, July 7, 2009, 10:59 AM
A few days before the appearance of the encyclical
Caritas in Veritate, the following news item appeared:
July 3 (Bloomberg) — Developing countries’ share of worldwide equity value climbed to a record as the fastest-growing economies lured investors amid the first global recession since World War II.
The 22 nations classified as “emerging” by index provider MSCI Inc. comprised 24 percent of world market capitalization, up from 18 percent at the start of this year, the highest proportion since Bloomberg began compiling the data in 2003. China shares surpassed $3 trillion yesterday for the first time since August, from $1.8 trillion at the end of 2008.
The increase signals growing confidence in developing countries as equity investors, spurred by interest-rate cuts and stimulus plans, redeploy cash after the worst U.S. losses since the Great Depression. The MSCI Emerging Markets Index rose 35 percent, beating a 2.9 percent advance in the MSCI World Index Index of developed economies and lifting the value of stocks to $8.6 trillion from $5.1 trillion in 2008.
In fact, the creation of wealth in the developing world is the most spectacular economic success story in world history. Nothing like this ever occurred before.
Of course, as the encyclical observes, “The world’s wealth is growing in absolute terms, but inequalities are on the increase . . . The development of peoples depends, above all, on a recognition that the human race is a single family working together in true communion, not simply a group of subjects who happen to live side by side.”
Fair enough. But the issue is not so much inequality as the position of the poorest. Even under a Rawlsian sort of ethics, if the poorest accrue the most benefits, the system is doing the right thing. If we take life expectancy as a crude measure of welfare in the poorest countries, a remarkable result pops out.
According to the United Nations, the least-developed countries’ life expectancy at birth rose from forty-seven years in 1980, when Ronald Reagan became US President, to fifty-nine years today, and is expected to gradually rise to seventy years by mid-century. India’s life expectancy has risen from fifty-four years to sixty-seven years.
What holds the global numbers down is the fall in life expectancy in Africa, from 55.3 years in 1980 to 51.6 years today. That is not the result of capitalism but of AIDS. AIDS derives from moral and cultural problems, but it has a devastating economic impact. No amount of foreign aid, market regulation, and so forth will compensate for this crater in the African population.
If one goes to East or South Asia, home to half the world’s population, the sense of optimism and well-being is palpable. People who grew up with mud floors, outdoor toilets, and a bicycle now have electricity, plumbing, and motor transport. In China’s interior, in Burma, and in parts of northern Thailand and Laos, rural poverty remains extreme, but the jump in living standards from one generation to the next is without precedent.
Brazil, Latin America’s most populous country, is flush with money largely as a byproduct of the Asian boom: its exports of soy, iron ore and beef to China will keep it rich for some time to come. Heartbreaking and enraging disparities of wealth between the Brazilian elite and the favela-dwellers of the cities or and the rural poor are everywhere—but Brazil is doing much better.
The facts seem clear: The Reagan revolution that set in motion a quarter-century boom in the United States inspired the rest of the world to adopt American-style methods. This has led to the greatest boom in wealth in history among countries that a generation ago were more visible in UNICEF commercials than in financial markets.
Despite enormous wealth disparities and abuses, more people have benefited than by any other trend in any era of history.
Except, of course in Africa, which is worse off, for reasons that have nothing to do with economics. AIDS, corruption, and war have held the continent back while the rest of the world has surged ahead.
The lesson I would draw from the available data is
somewhat different than the one in the encyclical.
Markets work reasonably well if people are moral (e.g., do not engage in behavior that leads to pandemic disease). If people fail to have children, by adopting a hedonistic model of life and sexuality, economies fail, as I wrote in “Demographics and Depression” in the May 2009 issue.
If the Biblical injunction is ignored to maintain honest courts and to decide cases without favor to rich or poor, economies fail. Markets need morality to function. No amount of regulation can replace morality. Markets can’t be better than the people who participate in them. [So in what way is his conclusion different from the Pope's?]
]
Call this an African encyclical.
Its description of economic developments applies to Africa, but not to East or South Asia, nor for that matter to most of Latin America.[????]
As a non-Catholic, I find far more persuasive than Cardinal Ratzinger’s 1985 statement on morality and markets:
It is becoming an increasingly obvious fact of economic history that the development of economic systems which concentrate on the common good depends on a determinate ethical system, which in turn can be born and sustained only by strong religious convictions. Conversely, it has also become obvious that the decline of such discipline can actually cause the laws of the market to collapse.
An economic policy that is ordered not only to the good of the group – indeed, not only to the common good of a determinate state – but to the common good of the family of man demands a maximum of ethical discipline and thus a maximum of religious strength.
I had written about that Ratzinger address last year.
It is very different to emphasize how much markets depend on the morality of the participants, and the religion whence this morality derives, and quite another to argue that morality can be imposed upon the market mechanism by various kinds of tinkering and the creation of supranational agencies.
[I don't think the Holy Father meant at all that morality can be imposed by the market mechanism itself or some supranational agency - the Catholic idea of 'conversion' always begins from the heart of the individual. He does want ethical standards built into the market mechanism and a supranational agency to see that such standards are kept by appropriate regulation.
Whether this can be done in practice is, of course, another matter, because such a 'built-in' morality mechanism would require the near-unanimous political will of those who now guide the destinies of the world by their sheer economic and political domination - and none of them have shown any such inclination so far.]