The recent note on the financial crisis from the Vatican’s Council on Justice and Peace offers us yet another chance to reflect on the Church’s longstanding social teaching. It is the kind of document that is meant to advance a conversation rather than settle questions, and it will no doubt take some time to absorb. But early reactions already are pouring in.
George Weigel offers a measured response:
That the specific recommendations of the document reflect what will seem to many an uncritical internationalism of a distinctly Euro-secular provenance is an interesting matter that will doubtless be discussed, vigorously, within the Catholic family for some time to come.
Tom Hoopes applauds the council’s broad approach:
I, for one, am glad that the Church’s message of solidarity tempered by subsidiarity is one of the leading voices in the ongoing debate about the global response to the international markets.
Samuel Gregg finds its economic analysis wanting:
For a church with a long tradition of thinking seriously about finance centuries before anyone had ever heard of John Maynard Keynes or Friedrich Hayek, we can surely do better.
Bill Donohue corrects its early misinterpreters:
To begin with, the text is not an encyclical, nor is it the work of Pope Benedict XVI. Much of what it says is consistent with long-standing Catholic social teaching: the quest for the common good should guide social and economic policy.
Rod Dreher says it will scare non-Catholics:
This is sinister utopianism, full stop.
Michael Brendan Dougherty eggs on the conspiracy theorists:
A statement that the world government should be empowered to deal with the most minute and far-reaching aspects of human life.
Update: More reax here.
October 25th, 2011 | 11:05 am
Excellent round-up Matthew!
Thanks!
Check these out as well.
October 25th, 2011 | 11:17 am
Very nice. Thank you, Tito.
October 25th, 2011 | 11:19 am
Thanks for the link. I’ve updated the post.
October 25th, 2011 | 12:54 pm
This document has many points of criticism open to it. One piece of enlightenment is clear: the thinking from the Vatican differs dramatically from American conservative thought. Twinned with “Truth in Love,” it reveals a lot of the Roman magisterial discourse.
As such, routine conservative discourse must be understood as standing outside the Roman Church leadership on matters of economics and social justice (and clearly war and peace). Whether such Catholic judgements are correct over the libertarian-disposed routine conservative economic approach is for God to determine. It is becoming clear: the libertarian-leaning Republican Party has social policies that lie outside the thinking of the magisterium of the Church.
October 25th, 2011 | 1:55 pm
[...] the confluence of the study of Catholic lay independence from our hierarchy and the reaction to the Vatican document on [...]
October 25th, 2011 | 2:33 pm
There’s one thing you can be absolutely sure of whenever the Vatican issues a document of any kind — there will be lots of confusion over whether it’s “official” or “infallible” and whether Catholics are obligated to believe it (or even pay any attention).
ISTM the Vatican is playing this game all wrong. They have to know that this confusion exists (they’d be idiots not to know, and they’re not idiots). So they’re playing off of it somehow. They know people will be confused, and in some weird way they think that’s an advantage.
It’s not.
They need a new communications director, and they need a very simple way to distinguish these occasional eruptions.
Just for example, they could do something like this. If they issue something in Latin, it’s ex cathedra. If they issue it in Greek, it’s binding but not necessarily infallible. (Like a change to the liturgy.) If it’s just an opinion, they issue it in French. Nobody pays attention to the French anyway.
Or they could use different colors of paper, or a big label at the top, or something.
As it is, only a very small percentage of the population is even aware of the distinctions in levels of authority of Vatican documents, and everybody else is just dazed and confused.
An even better strategy would be to quit issuing these opinion papers altogether.
October 25th, 2011 | 4:19 pm
They issued a “teaching.” It is no less confusing than say the Colorado bishops issuing voting guidelines in 2004. In fact it is less confusing.
But the virtue of thinking with the Church is not a virtue being embraced by conservatives in matters of war and peace.
It’s time to face up to that.
October 25th, 2011 | 4:35 pm
One point of reference-the world and our economy would have been a very different place had the JP2 and B16 warnings (and USCCB warnings) and peace and the Iraq War been heeded.
The same list of “reactionaries” above would be a list of prominent conservatives and Catholics (Dreher was Catholic then) who derisively dismissed advice from “the Vatican” that was not “binding” authoritatively that suggested the moral implications of that war were worrisome. JP2 suggested stronger wording.
Weigel went so far as to derive a clerical competency evaluation to attempt to dismiss US bishops on such matters and in effect tell them to “shut up.”.
As such, it may be worth rethinking how rapidly one dismisses such “liberals” just because it fails to fit neocon philosophy.
October 25th, 2011 | 6:04 pm
A few thoughts on the document.
There is no intrinsic injustice in some people being fabulously wealthy if those at the bottom have a standard of living that is commensurate with human dignity. I am in favor of some people owning business jets, mansions and businesses around the world. That creates jobs for other people and that is a good thing. There is only injustice if those at the bottom have an inhuman standard of living through no fault of their own, or if they are subjected to a denial of their inalienable human rights – even though they otherwise possess sufficient material goods – due to a misuse of the power of those at the top.
Something that is not explicitly mentioned in the document, which I think is a glaringly apparent cause of poverty and unemployment around the world and would have been entirely appropriate to mention, is this: As certainly as slavery in the Old South brought about poverty for non-plantation owning white Southerners, their labor being devalued by the cheap labor of enslaved Blacks, the exploitation of Chinese labor by the Chinese ruling class and the cooperation in this by the ruling classes of other developed nations is devaluing the labor of the world’s work force. This is a case of those at the top misusing their power by successfully lobbying for governmental policy – the normalization of trade with China in the case of the U.S. – that favors their self interest and has been devastating to the common good – and hasn’t done anything for the Chinese work force either, except to make their exploitation profitable, which isn’t exactly hastening it being brought to an end.
And one last thought – the concept of subsidiarity has long been affirmed by Catholic Social Teaching. It basically is the idea the governmental authority should be at the lowest and most local level possible. If there are issues that can only be effectively dealt with by an international governmental authority, then that is the absolute minimum they should be authorized to control. And even then there is the problem that humanity still has and will continue to have a fallen nature – the concept of subsidiarity addresses the fact that centralized power most often leads to corruption. The founders of the U.S., in their wisdom, realized that as well, and wanted the powers of the federal government to be very restricted. What makes us think that those holding power in some governmental authority with international scope will be able to resist temptations that haven’t yet been successfully resisted in the history of the world. Even the U.S., where subsidiarity was the clearly expressed intention of its founders, now has a federal government that in no way resembles that created by them. It has become everything the founders didn’t want it to be, not only because of its size and scope, but also for another, more fundamental reason: Where the founders created a government whose right to exist was bestowed upon it by humanity, which had the right and duty to alter or abolish it and institute new government as it saw was necessary for the protection of humanity’s inalienable rights – the government has now claimed for itself the authority to bestow and withdraw humanity’s right to exist by pretending to legitimately authorize taking the life of the child in the womb. That is 180 degrees from where we started. It is time for humanity to knock Caesar off his high horse and put him in his place, reminding him that it is not his to bestow and withdraw humanity’s inalienable rights; it is his only to protect them. Until that happens it is not yet time to seriously consider the establishment of some kind of governmental body with international authority.
October 26th, 2011 | 9:45 am
[...] Bill Donohue corrects its early misinterpreters: To begin with, the text is not an encyclical, nor is it the work of Pope Benedict XVI. Much of what it says is consistent with long-standing Catholic social teaching: the quest for the common good should guide social and economic policy. [more] [...]
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