Valuable lessons
In a recent article on the website Word on Fire, Henry T. Edmondson III argues that Pope Benedict’s encyclical Deus Caritas Est offers us “valuable lessons” about the nature of Catholic social teaching. That’s a fairly innocuous claim. It’s also a relevant one because, as Edmondson points out, the new Pope has taken the name “Leo” largely on honor of Pope Leo XIII who inaugurated modern Catholic social teaching with his encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891. So what does Edmondson think Pope Benedict has to tell us in this encyclical about the nature of Catholic social teaching?
Chiefly, it turns out, that the Church should focus on charitable activity, proclamation of the Word, and celebration of the sacraments, and avoid directly engaging issues of public policy. Edmondson clearly recognizes that this conflicts with the entire tradition of the social encyclicals, which often do in fact take quite specific stands on public policy issues, beginning with Pope Leo’s pronouncement that employers were bound in justice to pay a high enough wage “to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner.” (Rerum Novarum 45)
Somebody is not pleased
Edmondson doesn’t want to attack Rerum Novarum itself, but he does brush aside the rest of the encyclical tradition, remarking judiciously that “not all have been pleased with the quality of CST in the nine or ten encyclicals since Rerum Novarum.” Those who have not been pleased have objected to such things as “lack of philosophical rigor, confusion over the proper division of Church and State, a misuse of the concept of ‘justice,’ and a failure to unequivocally condemn Marxism.”
That’s quite a bold move for a Catholic layman to make. Rerum Novarum, apparently, is fine (Pope Leo’s meddling with the iron laws of capitalist economics goes unmentioned). Deus Caritas Est is just lovely and will set everything straight by telling the Church to focus in love and stay in its lane. But all the others? People Who Know Better have found all kinds of problems with them so I guess we can basically leave them in the Vatican archives.
Benedict against Benedict?
Edmondson doesn’t tell us just which encyclicals have all these problems. As his own argument for “Deus Caritas Est” as a social encyclical shows, there’s no formal list of which are social encyclicals and which aren’t. (This is a point where I agree with him. All Church teaching is connected so no part of it is without implications for society.) However, this list claims to include “all the social encyclicals,” and it certainly lists the most obvious candidates. And it includes ten items, which corresponds to Edmondson’s “nine or ten.” But it includes three encyclicals written after “Deus Caritas Est”: two by Pope Francis but also Pope Benedict’s own “Caritas in Veritate.”
This encyclical, written four years after “Deus Caritas Est,” focuses much more heavily on the social teaching of the Church. It includes commentary on all kinds of political and economic matters. Here, for example, is Benedict talking about economics (46):
When we consider the issues involved in the relationship between business and ethics, as well as the evolution currently taking place in methods of production, it would appear that the traditionally valid distinction between profit-based companies and non-profit organizations can no longer do full justice to reality, or offer practical direction for the future. In recent decades a broad intermediate area has emerged between the two types of enterprise. It is made up of traditional companies which nonetheless subscribe to social aid agreements in support of underdeveloped countries, charitable foundations associated with individual companies, groups of companies oriented towards social welfare, and the diversified world of the so-called “civil economy” and the “economy of communion”. This is not merely a matter of a “third sector”, but of a broad new composite reality embracing the private and public spheres, one which does not exclude profit, but instead considers it a means for achieving human and social ends.
And here he is explicitly advocating for a strengthened United Nations and indeed a form of world government (67):
In the face of the unrelenting growth of global interdependence, there is a strongly felt need, even in the midst of a global recession, for a reform of the United Nations Organization, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth. One also senses the urgent need to find innovative ways of implementing the principle of the responsibility to protect[146] and of giving poorer nations an effective voice in shared decision-making. This seems necessary in order to arrive at a political, juridical and economic order which can increase and give direction to international cooperation for the development of all peoples in solidarity. To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority, as my predecessor Blessed John XXIII indicated some years ago.
So yes, in “Deus Caritas Est” Benedict warned against the Church usurping the role of the state and trying to dictate public policy directly. But unless he changed his mind radically in four years, he was not in the least rejecting the kind of specific statements about the implications of Church teaching that had been found in previous social encyclicals.
Nobody really knows?
But Edmondson didn’t just suggest that the entire social encyclical tradition is deeply flawed. He also suggested that the concept of “social justice” is hopelessly vague. He claims that Benedict “avoids the word ‘justice’ as long as he can because justice has become faddish by secular and ecclesiastical writers alike.” That’s a rather odd way to describe the fact that sections 26-29 of an encyclical about charity are devoted to the relationship of charity to justice.
Benedict never suggests that he finds the term “faddish,” though he does criticize the Marxist idea that voluntary charity is harmful because it gets in the way of establishing justice. But right after doing that, he says: “It is true that the pursuit of justice must be a fundamental norm of the State and that the aim of a just social order is to guarantee to each person, according to the principle of subsidiarity, his share of the community’s goods. This has always been emphasized by Christian teaching on the State and by the Church’s social doctrine.” He then goes on to cite the the seven social encyclicals from Rerum Novarum through Centesimus Annus, culminating in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church.
Edmondson admits that justice “is a crucial Aristotelian-Thomistic virtue,” but thinks the term has become “overused and now means different things to different people.” “What is social justice?” he asks rhetorically. “Nobody really knows, but it sounds full of cachet.” As I’ve shown, this has nothing to do with Benedict’s discussion of justice. Edmondson is making up this supposed difficulty about the meaning of the term and ascribing it to the late Pope. Henry Matthew Alt has done an excellent job of refuting the claim that no one knows what the Church means by “social justice.” But, of course, the concept does have its critics, inside and outside the Church, just as, for instance, Catholic sexual doctrine does.
So who exactly wasn’t pleased?
Back to that mysterious “not all” in Edmondson’s piece. He helpfully gives us a link to a symposium on Catholic social teaching hosted by the libertarian publication Law and Liberty, consisting of four articles illustrating the criticisms he’s referring to. The four pieces vary in their perspective. Samuel Gregg offers cautions about the Church offering overly specific applications of Catholic social teaching, offering Quadragesimo Anno’s advocacy of “corporatism” as an example of an attempt to make specific recommendations which has largely been abandoned. While I have a very different perspective on Catholic social teaching from Gregg, and suspect there’s more to be said for Quadragesimo Anno’s corporatism than he’s willing to grant, he doesn’t say anything too outrageous.
Leah Libresco Sargeant’s piece is excellent and I have no problems with it. Rachael Lu questions whether Catholic social teaching is coherent and points out the “quaintness” of some of Leo XIII’s specific ideas. She suggests that Catholic social teaching “lacks the kind of internal cohesion that we sometimes glimpse in, for example, Scholasticism,” and that the Compendium can’t be seen as a “political catechism.”
Confetti
However, the piece that most fully exemplifies the criticisms Edmondson alludes to is Nathaniel Peters’ “Recovering Catholic Social teaching.” The slug in the URL has the more provocative, and telling, title “Make Catholic Social Teaching Great Again.” (I wonder if the editors made him change that as the official title.) Peters argues that “Catholic pronouncements on contemporary social issues have become increasingly incoherent.” He cites a lecture by Russell Hittinger arguing that with the abandonment of a Thomistic philosophical framework after Vatican II, CST has become a “confetti of principles.” Modern Popes address “all people of good will” instead of bishops and thus try to articulate principles that will make sense in a secular world, leading to a loss of internal coherence.
Peters (following Hittinger, I presume) illustrates this critique by pointing to the two-part definition of the “common good” in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church: (164)
The principle of the common good, to which every aspect of social life must be related if it is to attain its fullest meaning, stems from the dignity, unity and equality of all people. According to its primary and broadly accepted sense, the common good indicates “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfilment more fully and more easily”.[346]
The common good does not consist in the simple sum of the particular goods of each subject of a social entity. Belonging to everyone and to each person, it is and remains “common”, because it is indivisible and because only together is it possible to attain it, increase it and safeguard its effectiveness, with regard also to the future. Just as the moral actions of an individual are accomplished in doing what is good, so too the actions of a society attain their full stature when they bring about the common good. The common good, in fact, can be understood as the social and community dimension of the moral good.
Peters argues that these two definitions fit poorly with each other and that the Compendium doesn’t try to synthesize them. The first one comes from Gaudium et Spes, and the second, Peters says, is rooted in the “Leonine” tradition. He seems to approve of the second more than the first. For what it’s worth I do too. But I don’t see the incoherence he sees. The second qualifies a possible misunderstanding of the phrase “sum total” in the first.
Is Vatican II the problem?
Peters criticizes modern Popes for sounding like “NGOs.” Pope Francis of course comes in for this criticism, but so does Pope Benedict. Since this is the article of the four most clearly corresponding to the criticisms Edmondson summarizes, it’s striking that Peters is under no illusions that Benedict is somehow free from the flaws he finds in the modern encyclical tradition. (He also marks Vatican II as the point where the problems started, reflecting perhaps a more “traditionalist” outlook than that of Edmondson or the other authors in the symposium.)
In short, Edmondson’s strongest support for the generalized criticisms he makes comes from an author who doesn’t seem to like Vatican II and is (rightly) quite willing to lump Pope Benedict together with other modern Popes. But of course that doesn’t help us deal with the basic argument. Is Catholic social teaching coherent?
Bricks and straw
My answer would be, “as coherent as anything else.” The coherence of the Catholic tradition as a whole is a dynamic, contentious, constantly renegotiated coherence. It’s not the coherence that comes from logically developing conclusions from principles but the coherence that comes from trying to express all the truth we see in the best terms we have at any given time. We seek to make everything fit together, and we avoid blatant contradictions. But the seams always show because ultimately we’re trying to express the infinite in finite terms. I don’t see this as a “bug” but as a “feature.”
Both Lu and Peters contrast CST with the allegedly coherent and systematic scholastic tradition. Yes, Aquinas created a lovely system, but he never finished the Summa and at the end of his life described it as “straw.” He might almost, perhaps, have called it “confetti.” And the history of medieval scholasticism, at least, is one of constant conflict to the point that the Protestant Reformers embarked on their work in the quaint delusion that they were going to bring order and unity to a Church hopelessly divided by quarrelsome theologians.
Modern Neo-Scholasticism encased Thomas’ radiant straw in a cathedral of brick, but the cathedral collapsed and the straw remains one of our most precious treasures. Clearly I differ from Peters, and probably Lu, and maybe Edmondson in my evaluation of the Neo-Scholastic tradition. And I admit that I find it generally so dreary that I have not worked through much of it, so it’s possible I’m judging it unfairly. (I’m still working on Thomas himself, and there’s enough there to last a lifetime.) But generally the fruit of attempts to put the brick cathedral back together don’t impress me.
How Far Does the Incoherence Go?
Let’s look at other aspects of Catholic teaching in the same way Peters breaks apart the concept of the common good. Does John Paul II’s personalist account of the mutual self-giving of marriage cohere comfortably with the traditional understanding of marriage as primarily procreative? Does the “distinct but equal” view of gender found in modern Papal teachings fit well with the older view that women are less rational than men and find it harder to be virtuous? (Yes, this is what Thomas and many, many other people taught, though plenty of Catholics will try to deny it.) What of abortion, where the Church is still coy about just when ensoulment occurs while insisting that an embryo should be treated as a person from conception on?
Perhaps these issues could be “solved” by rejecting Vatican II (or interpreting it in the most limited way possible) and returning to Neo-Scholasticism. Not only would that raise questions about the authority of the Church during the past sixty years, but the issues don’t stop there.
The Straw of the Manger
What about Eucharistic theology, which we continue to express in terms of an Aristotelian terminology which we do not regard as, in itself, dogma? Or, going back further, isn’t our Christology a rather ad hoc edifice constructed in the course of several Councils shaped by political concerns and attempting to mollify first one then another faction within early imperial Christianity? What about the fact that our most official Creed calls the Son, but not the Spirit, “homoousios” with the Father, due to a (bitterly contested) compromise with Arian holdouts in 381?
For that matter, one of the biggest problems for a true devotee of coherence is the nature of the Bible itself. It’s a hodge-podge of books written by many authors over a long period of time. We have four Gospels that often differ. Our most extended theological texts within the canonical corpus are letters written on specific occasions to specific communities by a mad Hellenistic mystic. The attempt to create a nice, smooth, entirely “coherent” teaching out of Christianity is an uphill battle at every step. That’s why Thomas’ recognition that his writings are “straw” neither discredits him nor needs to be explained away. It’s all straw, but it’s the straw of the manger where God Incarnate lies.
(For more on this, see my series of posts responding to David Bentley Hart‘s Tradition and Apocalypse.)
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