In 1848, Karl Marx opened the Communist Manifesto with the now famous sentence, A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. Reflecting recently on the challenges facing the Church in the United States today, I realized that many of our problems can be summarized by paraphrasing Marx: Two spectres are haunting the Catholic Church — the spectres of communism and racism. In the original, spectre meant a ghost, a phantom or phantasm, an apparition. It was, like the... Read more
This post is my final set of comments on Pope John XXIII’s encyclical, Mater et Magistra. Previous posts are at Part I, Part II and Part III. After a break, my reading group is going to start reading his next social encyclical, Pacem in Terris. In our last session we discussed paragraphs 185-264, the end of the document. But our discussion took us much further afield and much of our discussion was retrospective–an attempt to really understand what Catholic social... Read more
In this post I consider my reflections on Mater et Magistra, the first social encyclical of Pope John XXIII. The first two parts of these reflections can be found in Part I and Part II. Links to earlier ruminations on Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno can be found in Part I. Our discussions this past week went on a temporary digression as I was looking for the answer to a question that had come up in a discussion on social... Read more
This is the second post on my thoughts on Mater et Magistra, based on the discussions of my reading group. You can find Part I here. This week we read a bit less, paragraphs 70-121, but this was a very rich selection. This section continued the discussion of the fundamental principles of Catholic social teaching as laid out in RN and QA, but reinterpreted and expanded for the current time. Following up on a point raised in our previous meeting,... Read more
With this post, my ruminations on Catholic social teaching continue. Last week, my reading group moved on to the first post WW II encyclical, Mater et Magistra, by Pope St. John XXIII. You can find links to the discussion of Quadragesimo Anno here, and to the discussion of Rerun Novarum here. Mater et Magistra, published in May 1961, came at a significant moment in the life of the Church. The war and its aftermath had had a substantial, even traumatic,... Read more
This post is the fourth and final part of my ruminations on Quadragesimo Anno, Pope Pius XI’s major contribution to Catholic social teaching. You can can read the earlier reflections here: Part I, Part II, Part III. It follows up on earlier blog posts on Rerum Novarum by Leo XIII. Next week, we move on to reading Mater and Magistra by Pope John XXIII. Our discussion started off by returning to some of the terms I mentioned in the coda... Read more
This article first appeared in the Summer 2020 Newsletter of the Brothers and Sisters of St. Francis Region of the Secular Franciscan Order, and is reproduced here with permission. It is specifically addressed to Secular Franciscans, but I think the underlying ideas should be relevant to all Catholics, particularly in an election year. To avoid formatting issues, I reproduce here an earlier, slightly different version. At my first meeting of the regional executive council last February, a big item on... Read more
This is the third in my series of ruminations on Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, the second great papal encyclical on Catholic social teaching. Follow these links to find Part I and Part II. This week we read paragraphs 76 to 110, which includes discussions on social organization and the state, and then a brutal denunciation of what I have come to term real existing capitalism–i.e., the global capitalist system that had arisen the in 19th century and by... Read more
In this post I continue my ruminations on Quadragesimo Anno (QA), by Pope Pius XI. You can read the first part here. This past week we read paragraphs 40-75. (Actually, we also read 31-39, but those paragraphs, about workers associations in Rerum Novarum (RN) link more naturally to the material discussed previously.) This is the beginning of a very dense section where Pius XI begins to expand and update the basic argument from RN. He first begins in paragraphs 40-43... Read more
My reading group, having finished Rerum Novarum (see Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV) has moved on to the second great encyclical of Catholic social teaching, Quadragesimo Anno (hereafter QA), written by Pope Pius XI in 1931. Though expressly building on the arguments made by Leo XIII, this is a very different encyclical in many ways. One of the first things we noted is that the world had changed considerably since 1891. The industrial revolution, while having been... Read more
