The Tablet of London reported in early September that George Weigel has been bringing to Polish Catholics his criticism of the “incoherent sentimentalism” of Pope Benedict XVI’s new encyclical, Caritas in Veritate. Apparently Weigel claims that since the encyclical does not represent the pope’s views, Catholics should remain faithful to the “pro-capitalist teachings” of their countryman Pope John Paul II.
Weigel, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is the author of a massive biography of Pope John Paul II titled Witness to Hope. Though widely researched and respectfully praised, the book does not very successfully establish the “pro-capitalist teachings” of the pope who, as a Fortune magazine editor complained in November 1982, was “wedded to socialist economics and increasingly a sucker for third world anti-imperialist rhetoric.” Weigel acknowledges the harsh reaction of pro-capitalists to John Paul II’s encyclical On Social Concern, six years later, but in this case he proposes that the sections of the encyclical that clash with his own interpretation of John Paul were the result of committee work and Roman Curial politics.
Weigel uses the same tactic in dealing with Pope Benedict’s new encyclical letter on charity, truth and social justice. But this time he is less gracious. With a conspiratorial tone worthy of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, Weigel suggests in an article in The National Review online edition of July 7, subtitled “The Revenge of Justice and Peace (Or So They May Think),” that some liberal virus has infected the encyclical. We are advised to read it armed with a gold marker and a red marker. The gold should highlight those passages that are authentically Benedict’s (that is, they agree with Weigel); the red is for the passages inserted by the pope’s evil peace-and-justice twin. Otherwise we are stuck with “an encyclical that resembles a duck-billed platypus.” The good Benedict is lucid and moving; the bad Benedict is “incomprehensible” and marked by “confused sentimentality.” Are these the passages that refer to world governance and the common good, the strategic importance of unions, the redistribution of wealth and governmental restraints on capitalism?
One not familiar with Weigel might think the disrespect, even ridicule, is intentional. One might even think, upon reading Weigel’s analysis, that Benedict apparently has not read his own encyclical or that he has signed on to something he does not believe. Whatever the case, Weigel tells us that the pope, “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.”
So that is what Weigel thinks of this pope: He is a gentle soul who signs his name to a document that misrepresents his own theology and its application.
This is not the case. If anything, the present pope is an astute and intelligent man, not the pawn of some interest group. Rather, as was the case with Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict has an integrative vision of our faith. His notion of “gratuitousness” or “the gift” in human existence is a frontal rejection of our myths of “self-made” men and women. The gift of our shared existence as a human family is grounded, for Benedict, in the Gospel that brings all things under Christ.
“All things” means everything: our political, social, economic, personal, sexual, familial and professional worlds. Any encyclical that tries to address such integration of our faith will be complex and wide-ranging, from the far reaches of theology to the immediacy of our daily lives. Some people will reject the connections among love of the earth, the common good of all humanity, the integrity of sexuality, the Gospel imperatives concerning the use of power and money and the defense of human life at every stage. But in selecting what we want to affirm and rejecting what we do not affirm out of our own proclivities, we mutilate the Gospels and fragment the truth. Benedict himself cautions us against such selectivity, by which we lose sight of the integrated teaching.
So apply, if you must, your gold pencil to things you agree with, whether in Pope Benedict’s writings or the Gospels, and mark in red what does not fit your prejudice. You may then be pleased with yourself. But you will also be stuck with yourself.
That being said, I must admit that I let my liberal bias color where my faith leads. All the more reason for all of us to carefully consider our words and actions. Reason and compassion should be our inner guides as we weigh make ethical decisions in light of our faith.
Nice article. I have issues with other of George Weigel's views, but i'll save them for another time.
Weigel's remarks also sit uncomfortably since he has been one of the prime antagonists in defining other faithful as "cafeteria Catholics."
And whence the sense of entitlement (spiritual enlightenment?) that allows him to suggest ipsissima verba of the pope? Never mind the gnosticism implicit in such a purely rhetorical move.
But if you think Weigel has overreached, and I know many of you readers do not, you ought to take a look a the Capital Research Center's latest diatribe against the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) and its request that the bishops cut off funding for it.
Whatever he writes now represents, to many, the ramblings of a Catholic who continually rationalizes his own position by attacking the positions of other, more credible Catholics.
All of that being said, in reconciliation of our sin of hubris, let us all go out and each of us, in the next two months, organize a food drive that will yield ten thousand food items. That way, the increasing numbers of the hungry in our nation will have a little better Thanksgiving and Christmas. This will demonstrate that we are really in tune with what Pope Bendict and Jesus Christ are getting at - "Love your neighbor and Feed the hungry".
for nations and for individual men, avarice is the most evident form of moral
underdevelopment.”
Pope Paul VI, Populorum Progressio