| by Dr. Tobias Winright According to Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh, in their The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (Blackwell, 2003), political theology involves “the analysis and criticism of political arrangements” from a theological perspective (1). Given the timing of the release of Pope Benedict XVI’s social encyclical Caritas in Veritate on 29 June 2009, the eve of the G8 economic summit in Italy, it should not come as a surprise that this document’s contents pulsate with things both theological and political—an observation further underscored when this theologian-turned-pope gave Barak Obama a copy of the encyclical several days later and just prior to the President’s departure for Africa. Six months have passed since the encyclical’s promulgation, and now when one enters “Caritas in Veritate” in a Google search, there are nearly 40 million results. Across the so-called “liberal” to “conservative” spectrum, in blogs and on-line journal articles, Catholics and others have apparently found much that is noteworthy in this third encyclical of Benedict’s papacy. Indeed, I have noticed that Caritas in Veritate is now being quoted and cited in recent articles and editorials in popular Catholic periodicals such as America, Commonweal, and First Things here in the U.S., as well as internationally, for example, in the U.K.’s The Tablet and Zambia’s The Challenge Magazine. I am, moreover, already aware of many scholarly papers on the encyclical that will be presented in the coming year at academic conferences for professional organizations such as the College Theology Society. Its increasing traction in the tradition is even evident in other recent Vatican and papal statements, including Benedict’s 1 January 2010 World Day of Peace Message, “If You Want to Cultivate Peace, Protect Creation,” which was published in December to coincide with the international climate summit in Copenhagen. The Catholic social encyclical tradition began in earnest with Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”) in 1891, which addressed the condition of the working classes during the period of industrialization. Nearly every subsequent pope has issued an encyclical dealing with the social (economic and political) issues facing the world at large in his day, including Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (1931), John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra (1961) and Pacem in Terris (1963), Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio (1967), and John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens (1981), Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), and Centesimus Annus (1991). The Second Vatican Council also contributed Dignitatis Humanae and Gaudium et Spes (both 1965). Benedict’s Caritas in Veritate continues this venerable tradition, although as I will briefly try to note, paraphrasing the Oldsmobile ad campaign from the late 1980s, this is not your father’s social encyclical. In what follows I will highlight just a few elements of the encyclical that I think stand out as especially significant, though there is much in this document that I suspect will be mined and quoted for years to come. To begin, Benedict intends in this encyclical to honor, revisit, and extend the teachings on “integral human development” that Pope Paul VI set forth in Populorum Progressio, which focused on the global economy and development forty years ago (#8). A generation later, the world even more “is becoming progressively and pervasively globalized” (#9). It is also at risk of being perversely globalized in 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” (ibid.; italics here and in other quotes from the encyclical are in the original). Key here is that word “truly.” Peppered throughout the encyclical are constant appeals to “true” or “integral” human development. Pivotal in this connection is Benedict’s belief “that the social question has become a radically anthropological question” (#75). Of course, here the pope is indebted to and builds on the work of his predecessor, John Paul II, for whom, as Charles Curran observed in The Moral Theology of Pope John Paul II (Georgetown University Press, 2005), the “truth about the human person” is foundational (203). Thus Benedict calls for a “true,” “transcendent,” and “Christian” humanism—involving a “holistic understanding and a new humanistic synthesis” (#21)—as the world seeks to address globalization and the current economic crisis. The truth about the human person stands in stark contrast to other anthropologies that are presupposed even by well-intentioned efforts to foster development, namely a “reductive vision of the person” that sees human beings as “merely the fruit of either chance or necessity” (#29) or “a mere cultural statistic” (#26). The true picture of the human person instead revolves around our “transcendent dignity” and our “innate yearning to ‘be more’” (#29). We are finite creatures possessing a transcendent capacity, an ability to receive truth and love that “can only be received as a gift” (#52)—indeed, we are “made for gift, which expresses and makes present” this transcendent dimension of being human. Accordingly, the truth about humans is that we are made for love, for giving, and for communion. In much of the Catholic social encyclical tradition, explicit reference would have been made by now to natural law; however, as Curran noted concerning the social encyclicals of John Paul II, there was a “significant absence not only of a development of natural law but even of references to natural law…” (203), and Benedict XVI appears to be continuing this trajectory here in this present encyclical. Indeed, like his predecessor, our current pope’s writing is noticeably more theological. The transcendent view of the human person just described, whereby truth and love can be received, made present, and expressed as gift, has as its “ultimate source…God, who himself is Truth and Love” (#52). In other words, “the God of the Bible, who is both Agápe and Lógos: Charity and Truth, Love and Word” (#3), and who is “pure relationality” as a Trinity of “three divine Persons,” exudes love as a gift or grace (cháris) given to us so that we too may be incorporated “into this reality of communion as well” (#54). That is who God is, and because we are made in God’s image, we are called to be “instruments of grace, so as to pour forth God’s charity and to weave networks of charity in society (#5). Remember, this is a social encyclical, and Benedict is making the stunning theological claim that caritas is the “heart of the Church’s social doctrine” and the “principle not only of micro-relationships (with friends, with family members or within small groups) but also of macro-relationships (social, economic and political ones)” (#2). Any theologian reading this who is at all indebted to Reinhold Niebuhr will certainly raise an eyebrow here; nevertheless, Benedict warns about the “danger” in dismissing caritas in “the social, juridical, cultural, political and economic fields…as irrelevant for interpreting and giving direction to moral responsibility” (ibid.). Such charity requires justice, which is “inseparable from charity and intrinsic to it” (#6), and both require efforts to protect and promote the common good (#7). In the face of the global economic crisis, therefore, Benedict offers an alternative view of who we are and how we ought to be and act in all spheres of life. What is needed is a sustained commitment “to promote a person-based and community-oriented cultural process of world-wide integration that is open to transcendence” (#42). Hence, much of the document is devoted to calling for “an economy of gratuitousness and fraternity,” where reference is made to new hybrid commercial entities that aim not at profit as an end itself but are instead “based on mutualist principles and pursuing social ends…” (#38). In this connection, a number of commentators have highlighted as concrete examples the Focolare Movement and the Mondragón Cooperative Corporation. However, not only are economics and business treated (including unemployment, the widening gap between rich and poor, labor, unions, outsourcing, etc.), so too are the problems of hunger, high infant mortality rates, abortion, terrorism, population growth, migration, technological advances, reforming the United Nations, threats to religious freedom, and issues in bioethics. Indeed, while it neglects to employ the term “consistent ethic of life” that the late Cardinal Bernardin introduced in his Gannon Lecture in December 1983 at Fordham University, Caritas in Veritate “forcefully maintains this link between life ethics and social ethics” (#15), referring here not only to Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio but also to his Humanae Vitae (1968) and John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae (1995). Reference was made earlier to Benedict XVI’s latest World Day of Peace Message, which is devoted to the environment. He has spoken on this subject often, and he now is being referred to as the “Green Pope.” Creation, in his view, also ought not be reduced materialistically or mechanistically, for even “the natural environment is more than raw material to be manipulated at our pleasure; it is a wondrous work of the Creator containing a ‘grammar’ which sets forth ends and criteria for its wise use, not reckless exploitation” (#48). The pope links the environmental problems we have been causing and are currently facing with war, economics, and the other issues addressed in the encyclical: “The way humanity treats the environment influences the way it treats itself, and vice versa” (#51). Although John Paul II also treated the environment in a World Day of Peace Message twenty years ago, Benedict XVI seems to be integrating this concern more into the Church’s social teaching. In closing, Curran noted that the encyclicals of John Paul II exhibited an “optimism that Christians in union with others can overcome the social injustices of our world” (203). Caritas in Veritate, I think, can be viewed in this way, too, and this connects back to my earlier remark about Niebuhrian or other realists who, I suspect, will have more to say on this social encyclical. This, though, brings me to my final observation. At the same time that I read and reread Caritas in Veritate, I read and reread Catholic theologian William T. Cavanaugh’s recent book, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Eerdmans, 2008), and I was struck by some notable areas of confluence between the two, including their mutual emphasis on communion, an economics of communion, the self-giving and kenotic life of the Trinity that invites us to participate also in mutual giving and receiving. While there are, of course, also some differences, both offer a thoroughly theological vision of economics and politics—and I think this is a significant development to take note of at this time. Tobias Winright is Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics at Saint Louis University. |
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