Amidst the excitement of John Paul II’s beatification on May 1, the 20th anniversary of the late pope’s most important social encyclical Centesimus Annus, got a bit lost. Blessed John Paul II was not a man given to rubbing it in. Still, it is worth noting that the encyclical, which celebrated the collapse of European communism and probed the social, cultural, economic, and political terrain of the post-communist world, was dated on May Day, the great public holiday of the communist movement. It was a subtle but unmistakable reminder that, in the contest between the Catholic Church and communism, someone had won and someone else had lost.
Twenty years after it was issued, Centesimus Annus remains a hard encyclical to swallow for those whose politics require them to defend the constant growth of the welfare state, and to identify such bureaucratic and budgetary growth with compassion for the poor. The encyclical was also a sign of contradiction to those who had long insisted that Catholic social doctrine proposed some “third way” that was neither communism’s state ownership of the means of production nor the free market of the liberal democracies. By abandoning “Catholic third way” fantasies, Centesimus Annus firmly anchored the Church’s teaching on economic life in the realities of the post-industrial global economy while insisting (as the social doctrine had, all along), that economic decisions, like political decisions, are always subject to careful moral scrutiny.
What else did Centesimus Annus teach that remains urgent and relevant today?
John Paul taught that what the Church proposes is not simply the free society, but the free and virtuous society. It takes a certain kind of people, possessed of certain virtues, to make free politics and free economics work toward genuine human flourishing. Democracy and the market are not machines that can run by themselves, so a vibrant public moral-cultural life is essential to disciplining both the market and democratic politics. In fact, in the Catholic vision of the tripartite free and virtuous society—democratic polity, free economy, vibrant moral-cultural sector—it’s the latter that’s most important over the long haul. The habits of heart and mind of a people are the best defense against their allowing their political and economic liberties to become self-destructive.
John Paul also taught the Church new ways of thinking about the poor and about economic justice. In the emerging global economy, the Pope recognized, the source of wealth was less stuff in the ground than ideas and skills. Thus economic justice meant including a greater and greater number of people in the networks of productivity and exchange by which wealth was created and distributed: rather than problems-to-be-solved (as 20th-century welfare states understood them), the poor should be thought of as people-with-potential. Inclusion, not redistribution, became the paradigm of economic justice; empowerment and getting people off the dole became the measure of how well a social welfare system worked; philanthropy and the independent social welfare agencies it made possible, not just taxes and government, were the means by which the poor were to be empowered.
The encyclical’s analysis of the collapse of communism is also relevant to contemporary debates. Denying God, communism had a false view of the human person, and that was ultimately its undoing: it could not build a humane culture, politics or economics. This truth has implications for a world without communism, too. Culture is the key to making free economies and free politics work well, and at the heart of culture was religious conviction, John Paul insisted. Thus religious freedom had to be defended, not only against the hard totalitarianism of communist systems, but against softer, but nonetheless aggressive, forms of political pressure: pressures summed up in Pope Benedict’s biting (and wholly accurate) phrase, the “dictatorship of relativism.” Governments that impose political correctness through coercive state power—as, say, Canadian human rights tribunals do when they fine pastors for preaching biblical morality—are violating both religious freedom and weakening the moral-cultural foundations of democracy.
Centesimus Annus at 20 is coming into a needed maturity.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
Comments:
In my quick review of CA I would suggest one large theme is that the trade union is critical in society as clearly was demonstrated with the solidarity movement in his home country.
For example, look at section 15's discussion of unemployment. It calls for both the state and society to have responsibility for ameliorating unemployment. It also describes two approaches that have been taken in the past: policies that aim for economic growth and policies for unemployment payments and retraining. It seems to me that the phrasing--that "historically" these have been the solutions--implies that there might other, legitimate approaches that could be tried in the future, so we're not limited to one model.
Moreover, it doesn't advocate one approach over the other or demand that a particular unemployment program be followed, which is what I suspect that liberals would demand: either you increase funding for our current system or you hate poor people.
As for unions, I read it that the emphasis is on the role that unions can play or should play rather than an endorsement of particular union policies or approaches. (I'm sure something like the teacher's union boss who said he'd care about children when they started paying dues was clearly not envisioned here.) For most conservatives, I dare say, the opposition to unions isn't that they shouldn't ever exist in any form but rather that the way they currently work is destructive, although that particular argument may be expressed, out of frustration, as a general condemnation.
“Likewise, the encyclicals did not embrace capitalism”
That CA did promote free enterprise could hardly be clearer:
‘If by "capitalism" is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a "business economy", "market economy" or simply "free economy".’ [Centesimus Annus, #42].
The “uncontrolled” and “unregulated” assumption occurs when governments fail to enact sensible laws to seek and punish those who steal, cheat, swindle, and to promote competition.
Christ’s Church tells us that socialism is evil, and why. She also gives us Jesus’ Parable in which He rewards only those who are faithful, prudent and industrious with the master’s money. She promotes a free enterprise society built on justice, fidelity, prudence, industriousness, private property, subsidiarity, love and peace. Free enterprise is not “greed driven” it is common good driven for the welfare of the greatest number and dependant on consumer satisfaction and competition, dependant on the laws of cause and effect involving God-given reason, and based on a standard social principle of Christ’s Church -- subsidiarity. The crux is that Jesus did not condemn the possession of riches.
First, as he famously did in response to Caritas in Veritate, Weigel fails to examine Catholic social teaching as a whole to determine whether the claim is true. One or two sentences from CA do not make a teaching. As Pope Benedict XVI said in Caritas in Veritate, the Church's social doctrine is a whole.
"[T}here is a single teaching, consistent and at the same time ever new. It is one thing to draw attention to the particular characteristics of one Encyclical or another, of the teaching of one Pope or another, but quite another to lose sight of the coherence of the overall doctrinal corpus." (No. 12)
To support his claim, Weigel must show that a few sentences in CA are consistent with the entire corpus of Catholic social teaching. In light of the entire corpus, including the most recent social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, it is doubtful that such consistency can be shown.
Second, Weigel mischaracterizes the “third way,” creating a strawman for easy destruction. The “third way” idea did not insist that that “Catholic social doctrine proposed some ‘third way’ that was neither communism’s state ownership of the means of production nor the free market of the liberal democracies.” Rather, it is the idea that there may be a third way that is consistent with Catholic social doctrine. (Nor, for that matter, is the “third way” idea a rejection of the free market, but rather the monopolistic and de-personalizing aspects of a capitalist economy.)
It was in Sollicitudo rei Socialis, not CA, that Pope John Paul II stated: “The Church's social doctrine is not a "third way" between liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism, nor even a possible alternative to other solutions less radically opposed to one another: rather, it constitutes a category of its own.” From this and the few sentences in CA praising the results of the free market, Catholic proponents of capitalism like Weigel conclude that the Church has embraced capitalism. The reasoning goes like this: (a) The Church has condemned collectivist communism; (b) the Pope has said there is no “third way”; (c) therefore, the Church has embraced capitalism.
There exist two problems with this reasoning. First, it assumes that there exist only two options - liberal capitalism or Marxist collectivism. The assumption is unfounded. The second problem is that it misinterprets what Pope John Paul II said. By saying that the Church’s social doctrine is not a “third way” Pope John Paul II was not saying that there could never be a “third way” consistent with Catholic social doctrine, but that Catholic social doctrine itself is not the “third way” or any “way.” It is not an ideology or economic system. It belongs to the field of theology.
Therefore, contrary to Weigel’s assertion, Centesimus Annus (and Sollicitudo rei socialis) did not reject a third way, but actually left open the possibility that there could be a third way. Likewise, the encyclicals did not embrace capitalism, but left open the possibility that there could be a capitalist economy consistent with Catholic social doctrine.