For four years now many Catholics have been waiting for a new social encyclical. When would the pope treat globalization? Do a thorough treatment of environmental ethics? Comment on the global economic crisis? Come to the defense of labor? Speculation peaked two years on the 40th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s Populorum progression (On the Progress of Peoples). This morning the Vatican released Pope Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate, On Human Development in Charity and Truth.
Social activists and ethicists who still honor the memory of Paul VI will be glad to learn that Pope Benedict devotes a full chapter to Populorum progressio, one of the most reformist social documents in the last fifty years, and, somewhat late for the 40th anniversary of the encyclical, he calls for commemorating it just as we commemorate the anniversary of Rerum novarum every decade. Neo-cons will wince that he places this encyclical in line not only with Populorum progressio, but also Sollicitudo rei socialis, the most egalitarian encyclical of Pope John Paul II and their least favorite part of the late pope’s corpus.
Pope Benedict sets himself the task of updating Paul’s encyclical, especially in light of the intensification of globalization and its increasing problems. He also provides a fresh look at Paul’s encyclical, putting special emphasis on its underlying theology of the human person. His reading reveals Benedict’s own metaphysical interests, as does his title, Caritas in Veritate, and mines themes like development as "a vocation" for important lessons about the essential role of responsible freedom in human progress. Other idiosyncracies, like an insistence that Catholic social teaching has a seamless development, without any recognizable subdivisions, also appears.
The encyclical certainly bears Benedict’s imprint and reveals his preoccupations. The correlation of charity and truth is the most obvious instance; and this is probably the first social teaching document since Vatican II to insistence explicitly on the relevance of metaphysics to the Church’s social mission. The Council had abandoned the older philosophia perennis model of social teaching for the positive theology of the scriptures and the fathers and a method of reading the Signs of the Times. Caritas in veritate is ralso eplete with correlations of faith and reason, charity and knowledge, rights and duties, subsidiarity and solidarity, constantly reminding us of the Catholic "both-and."
Most intriguing to me is Pope Benedict’s postulation of a new fourth sector of society, profit-making entities committed to the common good, to figure alongside state, the market and civil society. At first it was hard for me to put my mind around the idea, but then I began to think of examples: the Gramin Bank and other micro-finance institutions; "Fair Trade" product marketers, and small investment firms, like GlobalGiving, offering support to entrepreneurs in developing countries. (I hope my examples don’t mislead, but they seem to fit the contours of the model.) They are all part of what the pope calls "the economy of gratuitousness." I am not sure these enterprises yet constitute a sector of economic life. But they are harbingers of a different, conscientious kind of economics that would not repeat the mistakes of the last 30 years.
While Pope Benedict grounds such a sphere in the interior life of the Trinity, opening lots of ground for further elaboration by theologians, he provides perhaps a more experiential basis when he writes of the need of all economic relations to have an element of gratuity to function effectively. There is a parallel in Pope John Paul II (and Bishop Desmond Tutu’s) notion that there is no justice without forgiveness. That is without forgiveness, justice will slide into oppression and offer new occasions for conflict. Thus, in economics, a Gradgrind economy in which every transaction is a matter of strict exchange will ultimately have to come to halt for lack of the oil of trust and good will and a growing sense of injustice.
The Holy Father, however, is also asking for more. While he acknowledges the implicit working of gratuity in the economy, he is looking for explicit inclusion of gratuitousness in all sectors, so that every institution recognizes its role in the service of the common good as the human development "of each and all."
Those who may tremble when Benedict appeals to Truth need not worry. For the most part, the encyclical stays close to Paul VI’s anthropology, so the truth about the human refers to those conditions that are less or more human, keeping close to the dynamism of desire in which humans desire more and more, but go awry unless they recognize the transcendent object of their desire–a formula used a number of times in Populorum progressio. In addition, there is a repeated acknowledgment that faith and reason are mutually related and reciprocally correcting, as are charity and knowledge. Benedict’s humanism, like Paul VI’s, is an integral humanism.
Drew Christiansen, S.J.
( Our main site is Tapart News and Art that Talks and we have a philosophy and relgion blog at The Rationale Com. Our Clinton Years American Dream Reversed artwork is now part of millions of search results on Yahoo, Altavista and Google under its title - Clinton Years American Dream Reversed. Our American Dream is Buring artwork was featured in the Cleveland Plain Dealer Magazine several years ago. )
For about the first twenty years, only few hundred factories were moved. However starting in the late 1980s, the number grew at a fast pace. By 1992, more than two thousand U.S. factories were moved to Mexico alone.
The elder President Bush formulated the policies of free trade but left office before he could get his programs passed in Congress. He was the first in the modern era to announce the ''new world order''. Conspiracy theories defined the phrase in various ways with many convinced that an elite powerful group were setting up a new control over the world. However, we do not need any conspiracy theories to know that so called free trade and globalization have been directed by powerful forces outside the will of the people. It is obvious that free trade and globalization have not evolved in any natural economic fashion.
President Clinton followed and passed President Bush's programs as if he under Bush's directions. President Clinton forced the passage of both the NAFTA and GATT trade agreements with a Democrat controlled Congress. He called Congress back from a Thanksgiving holiday for a lameduck session of Congress to pass GATT even though the new '' Contract with America'' Republicans due to take over Congress the following January. After NAFTA was passed, the number of factories moved to Mexico, quickly doubled to more than 4,000 former U.S. factories being moved to Mexico. Soon after that, President Clinton had to rush billions of dollars to Mexico to save the peso and the Mexican economy. The moving of production to Mexico for years did not save them. Mexican workers flooded the U.S. still seeking economic survival and the first ''stimulus package'' went to a foreign nation.
President Bush, the 2nd, followed in Clinton's footsteps and pushed forward with the passage of more so called free trade. ( Free trade is not really trade as historically practiced and defined. It is mainly dedicated to moving production from place to place for the sake of cheaper labor. Workers are put on a world trading block to compete with one another for the same jobs down to the levels of wage slave and even child labor. They are the commodities being traded and not the products.)
President Obama now follows with the economy based on making money on money instead of making things burning out. He ends up merging big government with big money as one. He jumps over the multitude who lost everything to back up the stock market . The stock market values were based on firing workers rather than hiring them.
We wrote about the - Latent Response of Philosophy and Religion in the global economic arena for years listing workers as the ''stepchildren'' of philosophy and religion at our site The Rationale Com. A list of our sites, articles, blogs and our art that talks the issues is under one url address at linkbun.ch/9axtb
We hope Pope Benedict new encyclical has arrived to save the day. We waited for the calvary to come as thousands of businesses including my own closed down due to free trade and globalization with millions losing their jobs in the computer industry alone, but the calvary never came until now.
Ray Tapajna , Editor and Artist at Tapart News and Art that talks, Chronicles of events that forecasted our economic storms - based also on several experts in the field including Manuel Castells - The Bewildered New World - and Sir James Goldsmith.
Lech Walesa, The Solidarity leader says it all. He said - I know very little about business and economics but I do know that something is very wrong when 10 percent of the people controlled 100 percent of the money.
It is a delight to witness the Catholic Church via this encyclical joining in this emergence. It can be called a ''fourth sector'' but that puts it in conflict with the other three sectors. Better to just do it as a form of the third sector, business sector, so that the rest of the sector can easily merge into it. I think this is a better political strategy. I am one of the pioneers of the socially responsible investment movement and we just did it when nearly all thought we were nuts. Now it is a major investment territory and is evolving into ''common good investing.'' The later does not stand in judgment of companies but with forgiveness joins them in a partnership that is inevitably moving into common good capitalism or life on the planet will not survive. I think just doing it in the existing sector, therefore, is a more asstute policial approach to accomplish the same end more easily.
The next step in the evolution beyond capitalism as we know it or communism is when we freely choose to give priority to the common good. Building on freedom is the essential part. Giving priority to the common good is the behavior of a fully mature human being.
Some day we will all live in common good communities, work in common good corporations, and invest in common good investment funds or we will not be here.