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In new encyclical, Pope Benedict continues the social tradition of the Church
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As the G-8 summit begins this week in Italy, the various leaders face a new encyclical by Pope Benedict XVI in which the Holy Father takes the global economy to task. In Caritas et Veritate ("Charity in Truth"), Benedict condemns the growing economic divisions in the new economy. He denounces outsourcing, praises labor unions and argues that the economy has drastic effects on society including less people marrying and having children. American conservatives will be less than pleased to read Benedict calling for giving international organizations like the UN more power over the economy and greater environmental protection. Liberals will ignore Benedict's condemnations of abortion and stem cell research.
It is almost impossible to portray the Catholic church in American political terms despite the media's best efforts to do so. On some issues, the Church is to the left of Jesse Jackson while on other ones the Church can be found to the right of Jesse Helms. This leads to the often bewildering array of opinions that American Catholic pundits and intellectuals hold. Catholic neocons George Weigel and Michael Novak have been two leading figures calling for more religious authority in the public square but are conspicuously silent when the Pope disagrees with them. Weigel and Novak both supported the American invasion of Iraq; both John Paul the Great and Benedict XVI did not-and so the neocons ignored the papacy in the public square despite all their previous arguments.
In Caritas et Veritate, Benedict insists that Christian values trump economic ones. Benedict argues that the dignity of the human person, which leads the Church to oppose abortion, the death penalty and euthanasia, also demands a humane economy. Over the last 120 years, the Church has attempted to stake a middle ground between unlimited freewheeling "survival of the fittest" capitalism and a tyrannical state run Marxist economy. The Church attempted to define this middle ground in a number of papal encyclicals: Leo XIII's teachings in Rerum Novarum in 1891, Quadragesimo Anno by Pius XI in 1931 and Paul VI's Populorum progressio in 1967.
A number of Catholic writers and intellectuals have also attempted to flesh out this position. Some of the finest critics of modern capitalism and socialism can be found in the works of the Distributists, a collection of mostly English writers from the first half of the 20th century. While some of them, namely G.K. Chesterton and Hilarie Belloc, remain famous today, most of them have been forgotten. "Too much capitalism," argued Chesterton, "does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists." Chesterton and the other Distributists argued that many men, not just a few companies or the government, need to hold property. They believed the way to ensure this was with a small scale localized economy. These arguments would be also be made in America by the Nashville Agrarians in I'll Take My Stand and Who Owns America? during the 1930s.
These thinkers have been making something of a comeback in recent years and, with the economy currently in the tank, their popularity continues to grow. IHS Press in Virginia continues to reprint various works by Chesterton and the other Distributists so their works are in circulation for the first time in years.
In Caritas et Veritate, Benedict continues the Catholic tradition in trying to establish an economic system where people and Christian values actually matter. With people having no faith in either Wall Street or the government, the Church points to another option and one whose time might be here. At the very least, Benedict has given both left and right important points to ponder even if they do not agree with much of his encyclical.
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