Pope Francis Is Not A Communist . . . He's A Catholic

The other day, in one of his impromptu in-flight press conferences, Pope Francis assured the reporters on his plane that he was not a socialist, but was indeed a Catholic, and offered to recite the Creed as proof.  Perhaps more to the point, he explained that he wasn't saying anything new about economics, but was simply restating what his recent predecessors had said.  I suppose he must be reading my blog, because that's just what I conclude in this Throwback Thursday post from February 2014:
   

  Pope Francis certainly makes things interesting.  Aside from keeping former kremlinologists employed trying to discern the intent behind his appointments, he can’t seem to help saying things that get people in an uproar.  The most notorious case was an interview with Italian journalist Eugenio Scalfari, in which the Pope seemed to be endorsing a rather generous (i.e., relativistic ) concept of conscience.  As it turns out, however, Scalfari, who is an atheist, did not record his discussion with the Pope nor did he take notes; the “interview” was actually his own recollection of the conversation (link).  He eventually admitted “some of the Pope’s words I reported were not shared by Pope Francis.” Oops.  The Vatican removed the interview from its website.  The Pope, it appears, is learning to be more careful.

Don't point the finger at Pope Francis . . . 

     More surprising (perhaps) is the uproar over a statement in the Pope’s Encyclical Gaudium Evangelii (Joy of the Gospel) that seemed to be a condemnation of Capitalism . . . at least that’s the way the press reported it, and considering the great gaudium sinistri (Joy of the Left) that accompanied it, how could they be wrong?  

     Easily, as it turns out.  We’ll get to that in a moment, but we need a little context for the Church’s teaching on matters economic.  Let’s start with four stipulations:

-1. The Magisterium of the Church in general, and the Pope (any Pope) in particular, claims no particular competence in economics.

 -2. The Magisterium and the Pope do, however, have the competence to teach authoritatively on moral principles that Catholics are to apply in their economic life.

-3. Since Leo XIII’s Encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891 the Popes have been developing a body of Magisterial teaching on said principles.

-4.  A pope cannot simply reverse prior magisterial teaching, even in a formal proclamation such as an encyclical letter (and of course, he can’t say anything authoritative at all in a newspaper interview).

     Given that, the proper way to evaluate what Francis said about the free market economy is to consider his remarks in the context of the existing teaching.  A good place to start is Pope John Paul II’s 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, issued one hundred years after Rerum Novarum (hence the name: “hundredth year”), in which he looks back at Leo’s encyclical, Pius XI’s1931 encyclical QuadrigesimoAnno (“The Fortieth Year” – do you see a pattern here?) and the economic events of the twentieth century.  While the scope of Saint John Paul’s encyclical is too vast to explore here, we can at least get a glimpse at what he has to say about socialism and capitalism.      

     Pope John Paul tells us, first of all, that the “guiding principle of Pope Leo's Encyclical, and of all of the Church's social doctrine, is a correct view of the human person and of his unique value, inasmuch as ‘man ... is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself”’ . . .and  “his essential dignity as a person.” (Centesimus Annus  5) These are not the concerns of socialism.  John Paul quotes from Rerum Novarum, which criticizes the socialists because they "encourage the poor man's envy of the rich and strive to do away with private property” and  

their contentions are so clearly powerless to end the controversy that, were they carried into effect, the working man himself would be among the first to suffer. They are moreover emphatically unjust, for they would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the State, and create utter confusion in the community. (Rerum Novarum 99) 

All of which proved true on the occasions when socialism was put into practice during the twentieth century. This is not to say, however, that the Church favors an unfettered free market: 

There is certainly a legitimate sphere of autonomy in economic life which the State should not enter. The State, however, has the task of determining the juridical framework within which economic affairs are to be conducted, and thus of safeguarding the prerequisites of a free economy, which presumes a certain equality between the parties, such that one party would not be so powerful as practically to reduce the other to subservience. (Centesimus Annus 15). 

The state’s role should be determined by the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity: 

. . . according to the principle of subsidiarity, by creating favourable conditions for the free exercise of economic activity, which will lead to abundant opportunities for employment and sources of wealth. Directly and according to the principle of solidarity, by defending the weakest, by placing certain limits on the autonomy of the parties who determine working conditions, and by ensuring in every case the necessary minimum support for the unemployed worker. (Centesimus Annus 15) 

The meaning of solidarity should be evident in the passage above; subsidiarity is described by Pius XI in Quadrigesimo Anno 79 as follows:

[I]t is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them . . .

Pope John Paul also says: 

It would appear that, on the level of individual nations and of international relations, the free market is the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs . . .  But there are many human needs which find no place on the market. It is a strict duty of justice and truth not to allow fundamental human needs to remain unsatisfied, and not to allow those burdened by such needs to perish. It is also necessary to help these needy people to acquire expertise, to enter the circle of exchange, and to develop their skills in order to make the best use of their capacities and resources. (Centesimus Annus 35) 

Notice that the Pope is not describing a particular system, but putting forward certain principles that should under gird the system: a relatively free market, a state that protects property and ensures the rule of law, protects the weak from exploitation, and in the process respects the appropriate freedom to conduct their own affairs that everyone possesses as part of his innate dignity as a human being made in the image of God.   The market (note well: properly regulated) is the best means of producing the most prosperity for everyone; as Christians we need to find ways to include everyone in its benefits.

     Which brings us back to our starting point.  No system can take the place of the “unique value” of each human person.  In the matter “of overseeing and directing the exercise of human rights in the economic sector”, for instance "primary responsibility in this area belongs not to the State but to individuals and to the various groups and associations which make up society.” (Centesimus Annus 48)  As John Adams said of the U.S. Constitution: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other”, so can we say of the market economy. No system can be truly just apart from the free choices of those who populate it.  As Pope John Paul says in another place: 

It is not therefore a matter of inventing a "new program". The program already exists: it is the plan found in the Gospel and in the living Tradition, it is the same as ever. Ultimately, it has its center in Christ himself, who is to be known, loved and imitated, so that in him we may live the life of the Trinity, and with him transform history until its fulfillment in the heavenly Jerusalem.  (Novo Millenio Ineunto 29) 

     Pardon the lengthy excursus into papal documents, but this is the backdrop against which we need to look at Pope Francis’ remarks on economic systems.  In Evangelii Gaudium 54 Pope Francis says, according to the official English translation:

In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably  succeed in bringing about greater justice and  inclusiveness in the world. 

Catholic blogger extraordinaire Fr. Z rightly points out (link) that the Spanish phrase por mismo, translated “inevitably” above, is more accurately rendered “by itself”.  That is an important distinction, although even with the less accurate translation any objective observer can see that what New Model Pope Francis is saying is completely consistent with the teaching of the rigid, right-wing, authoritarian, pre-Vatican II neo-Torquemada John Paul II in Centesimus Annus: The system can’t do it alone, no system can, it can at most provide the opportunity.  In fact, the system is only as just as those people who animate it, who can only find true justice in the Good News of Jesus Christ.

     So, what’s all the uproar about?  The key lies in the phrase “objective of observer.”  As I pointed out in an earlier post (link), those on the left, both in the Church and in the secular world, need to protect their worldview at all costs, and will often cite in their own support authorities who, on even cursory inspection, don’t support them at all.  I once knew of a high school campus minister who had previously been a 100% pro-abortion state legislator, but nevertheless would brandish (I mean physically brandish) a copy of John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae when arguing against capital punishment.  She seemed unaware (or maybe she just didn't care) that abortion comes in for much harsher treatment in that document.

     That’s the story here.  The secular press and their religious counterparts will continue to snatch up and loudly trumpet any remarks by this Pope that can even remotely be construed to support their heterodoxy.  So if you want to know what the pope really said, go to a more sober source.

"If they do not rise to meet that challenge, they will lose their civilization”

It's never really safe to be a Christian

It’s never completely safe to be a Christian in this world.  In my recent Sunday Snippets post [here] I briefly discussed the plight of Christians in Iraq, who are facing brutal persecution at the hands of ISIS, an armed movement embracing a particularly virulent strain of radical Islam. I illustrated the post with the Arabic “N”, with which ISIS terrorists target Christian homes, and which has since become an emblem of solidarity and a badge of honor for Christians around the world.

The Fall of Rome

     That explicit identification as Christians, and with other Christians, is vitally important. I made the point the week before [here] that radical Islam would pose little threat to “a Christendom united in Faith and fortified with Prayer”. Unfortunately, what had been Christendom is rapidly de-Christianizing, which creates a twofold threat, both from within and from without.  The external threat, a radicalized and aggressive Islam, still looks fairly distant to those of us in the United States; it looks a lot more formidable in Europe.  There, a growing, poorly assimilated, and increasingly alienated and hostile  Muslim population is combining with the forces of societal destruction under the guise of “multiculturism” to attack the very basis of historic (which means, essentially, Christian) European culture, as described by Joseph Pearce in a piece that is appearing on Life Site News [here].  The article is well worth reading in its entirety; the best summation of Pearce’s point comes in a quote from actor John Rhys-Davies, who played the dwarf Gimli in the screen adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.  Rhys-Davies says: “I think that Tolkien says that some generations will be challenged, and if they do not rise to meet that challenge, they will lose their civilization”.  Since the actor first spoke these words several years ago, the concrete evidence of their truth has been rapidly multiplying, and so although the multi-culti wrecking ball pounds on, an increasing number of Europeans are starting to see multiculturalism for the civilizational suicide that it is.

"If we falter and lose our freedoms, 

it will be because we destroyed ourselves" -Abraham Lincoln

     To those of us in the United States, events in Iraq can seem very far away, especially now that there are no longer many of our countrymen serving there under arms.  The incidence of jihadism here can be seen as sporadic, with only a few serious incidents (9/11, the Fort Hood Massacre), and the local Muslim population is still quite small and has shown only scattered signs of radicalization – so far.  The heedless dismantling of our culture from within, however, proceeds apace.  I’ll provide just two recent examples.  First, the College Board, which through the content of its Advanced Placement (AP) exams determines the curriculum of thousands of high school classes around the country, has come with a new AP American History [article here] course that omits great Americans such as Benjamin Franklin and Martin Luther King, jr.  Instead it emphasizes impersonal “historical forces” - and not so much those familiar to earlier generations of students like the development of democratic institutions and religious tolerance.  From the Fox News article: 

“ . . . you’re not going to find Thomas Jefferson and the House of Burgesses and the cradle of democracy either,” said Larry Krieger, who retired in 2005 after more than three decades in the classroom.  And finally, you’re not going to find Benjamin Franklin and the birth of American entrepreneurialism . . . what you’re going to find is our nation’s founders portrayed as bigots who developed a belief in white superiority . . .”

The article adds that students will find, overall, “a narrative laden with tyranny and subjugation.”  As if it’s not enough that individual classes are convincing young people that their country is and always has been irredeemably corrupt, we now have entire schools dedicated to the purpose – at your expense.  We now have “social justice” charter schools [here], government schools funded with taxpayer money.  And while the term social justice has an honorable origin in Catholic social teaching, it has long since been hijacked by the left.  No, the students at these schools won’t be studying Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, they’ll be training in “social activism”, a.k.a. leftist political agitation.  All of which means that in certain localities in the United States we’ll have the curious phenomenon of the government expending public funds to set up public schools dedicated to training young people to tear it all down. 

"The Church of the Living God, the pillar 

and the foundation of the Truth." -1 Timothy 3:15

     Tearing it all down is the program of the cultural and political left, whether we’re talking about multi-culturalism, the redefinition of marriage, revisionist history, or Robin Hood economic activism.  They don’t even pretend anymore to have a coherent positive vision of what might replace all the institutions they seek to eradicate.  Not that it would help much if they did: every attempt to destroy a society that had developed over time in response to the real needs and experiences of human beings and construct on its ruins a society hatched in the brains of men (e.g., the French Revolution, Soviet Communism) has been a disaster; bloody, inhuman disaster, such as is still playing out in North Korea.  In similar fashion, the man-made religion of Islam has had a track record over the past millennium and a half of spawning anti-human horrors such the one currently on display in Iraq.
     The most profound and radical revolution in human history, on the other hand, was the transformation of the Greco-Roman civilization by the unlikely spread of Christianity.  It was no mere human idea, but the revelation of God himself in the person of Jesus Christ that subdued “the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome” (props to Edgar Allan Poe).  And notice that the Church didn’t destroy and replace the institutions of the Roman Empire, but rather “baptized” them and made them the bulwarks of a more humane culture [for more on that, see here and here].  When Rome did fall to invaders from the North, the Church worked the same transformation on the newcomers.

     And now here we are in a society that wants to do away with both the Church of Jesus Christ and the institutions passed on by our ancestors.  Do we really think that the empty shell that will be left can stand against the legions of the New Caliphate, or any other motivated and determined conqueror from without or within?

(This Throwback was first published on 12 August 2014)

    

Hidden Law, Society and Catholic Teaching

(An earlier version of this post first appeared in March 2014. Please visit the linkup for Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com, and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com)

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure . . . 

Bl. Mother Theresa of Calcutta and St. John Paul II

     I’ve heard it said that once you need to pass a law prohibiting something, it’s too late.  In other words, it is better if less formal, more personal factors like family, religion, custom, etc. prepare people to want to do the right thing beforehand, rather than having the state or some other external authority come in to clean up the mess afterwards.  

     This seems to be the thesis of a discussion by columnist Jonah Goldberg about (among other things) what he refers to as “Hidden Law” [link].   He describes it as the intricate complex of customs, attitudes, prohibitions, licenses, etc., that arise from culture, family, and shared experience that shape, and are shaped by,  the vast majority of our interactions with each other.   It is not imposed (directly, anyway) by any official authority, particularly not the state, and is far more effective than any formal laws or statutes for maintaining an orderly and prosperous society.  Leftists are particularly prone to deny or try to override this law, but such recklessness is by no means limited to the left.  Goldberg is arguing (as I have in other places, here for instance, albeit using different language) that we disregard this Hidden Law at our peril.

The Dignity of the Human Person

    Jonah Goldberg is a secular commentator, and I do not share all his views or concerns.  I take serious issue in particular with a passage he quotes from Jonathan Rauch that uses assisted suicide as an example; I may be naïve, but I’m not convinced that there was a long tradition of doctors “helping people to die”, at least not in the sense he seems to mean.  Also there is a huge (decisive, in fact) difference between letting someone die and causing them to die (and let me add that letting them die by withholding food and water is in fact causing them to die). 

     Having said that, it’s very helpful to understand, in a particular way for Catholics, this idea of the Hidden Law.  It illuminates not only much of Catholic teaching, but also helps us to understand some important ways in which God interacts with His creation.  The concept of the Dignity of the Human Person, for instance, is inseparable from our gift of Free Will, and from our right to exercise it within appropriate bounds, which we see formulated in the importance of Conscience, in the Principle of Subsidiarity, the right to form associations such as labor unions and fraternal groups, and so on [link].  We can see that the Church has long recognized in the working out of all sorts of individual human decisions something very similar to what Goldberg means by Hidden Law (with the important addition, in the Catholic understanding, of the importance of God’s Grace).

"The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27)

     One thing that comes through, both in Catholic teaching and the secular understanding of this unwritten law, is an emphasis on human individuals, not on things, institutions, or programs; it relies on people, properly prepared to conduct their own lives and to order their relations with each other.  I see a correspondence in the way God is revealed both in Sacred Scripture and in His Church.  God always seems to act through individual people, doing their human best (in most cases) under His guidance. In fact, he Bible is all about people, that is, individual persons, starting with Adam and Eve, through Noah, Abraham and the other Patriarchs, David and the other kings, Elijah and the prophets up through the God-Man himself, Jesus, with whom we are explicitly called to have a personal relationship.  Jesus (born of a woman, Mary) chooses to act through his Apostles, whose names are all carefully preserved, and whose authority has been personally handed on to their successors, the Bishops.  A constant feature of the formal passing on of authority from the earliest days has been the laying on of hands, one man physically touching another.  Furthermore, a very large part of Catholic practice has always been the Cult of the Saints, whose individual lives are held up for emulation and who are called upon, individually and by name, to intercede for us with the Father.  It amazes me how many people I know personally who have met Saint John Paul II or Blessed Mother Theresa (very often they have met both), and this in a church of one billion people.  Isn’t it interesting that the Catholic Church, probably both the largest and oldest existing Institution in the world, depends so much, and focuses so much, on individual human beings?

     It’s for this reason that I have become increasingly distrustful of a reliance on programs and structures, and of those who put their faith in man-made solutions rather than the action of God’s Grace working  through those who love him.  There is certainly a place for such things, but in a supporting role, not a leading one.  Jesus says: "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27).  If it's true that it's an inversion of right order to give a Divine Institution such as the Sabbath precedence over people, how much more so it must be of merely human institutions.