The Politics of Pope
Francis
Perhaps
America and this pope can learn from each other.
Sept. 21, 2015 7:17
p.m. ET
Pope Francis arrives Tuesday on his first visit to the
United States, and the welcome event illustrates his unique and paradoxical
appeal. The Argentine pope is being celebrated more for his embrace of
progressive economics than for the Catholic Church’s moral teachings.
Millions of American
Catholics will of course welcome the pope as a spiritual messenger and the head
of a religion of some 1.2 billion world-wide. As a pastoral shepherd he has set
a Christian example that Americans of all faiths might emulate with his modest
life-style and manifest concern for the poor and least powerful. His public
American itinerary—to a Harlem school, a Philadelphia prison—reflects this
pastoral mission. He is a man of God who avoids the ostentatious trappings of
man.
Yet the pope will also
visit the White House and speak to Congress, and this is where his tour takes
on an extra-religious resonance. Pope Francis has overtly embraced the
contemporary progressive political agenda of income redistribution and
government economic control to reduce climate change.
President Obama, who shares both ambitions, is
therefore giving the pope the kind of hearty embrace we can’t imagine him
giving to his predecessor Pope Benedict. Secular progressives who
disdain the Catholic Church’s teaching on abortion, same-sex marriage and
divorce are ignoring all of that catechistic unpleasantness and claiming the
pope as an evangelist for their agenda. You might call them
cafeteria progressives, after the old line about Catholics who are selective in
which church teachings they follow.
There is some risk for
the pope and his church in this progressive bear hug. One is that the pope will
come to be seen as a seeker of political popularity more than a speaker of hard
and eternal truths. Another is that politicians may use the pope to serve their
own political and cultural needs, as with the official White House guest list
to meet the pope.
The Journal reported
last week that the Vatican was upset that the presence of prominent dissenters
from Catholic teaching will make it appear that the pope endorses their views.
We doubt the White House intended any offense, but the oversight reveals how
little secular liberal elites understand about traditional religious mores. You
can bet the protocol office would not make such a mistake with a Muslim cleric
of similar importance.
Our own hope for the
papal visit is that he has a chance to better understand America and the
capitalist roots of its prosperity. Like many Argentines of the left, Pope
Francis seems given to suspicion about American wealth. But liberty and not
coercion is the source of our strength and of the wealth that has lifted
millions out of poverty.
Cuba, where Francis
arrived this weekend, has denied its people economic freedom—and religious
freedom—for the six decades of its revolution and remains poor and unable to
develop the “new technologies” that Pope Francis has said should be available
for all.
The U.S. has prospered
by respecting property rights and relying on the voluntary decisions of
individuals. The rule of law here means that unlike in countries such as
Argentina, an American can build a large, successful business even if no one in
the government likes him. And unlike in Argentina, capitalist success creates
millions of jobs that allow men and women without political connections to
support their families and live in dignity.
In Washington, D.C.,
the pope will visit a homeless program run by Catholic Charities. But he should
know that Catholic Charities can do its good work because of the contributions
from lay Catholics who succeed in a capitalist economy. The pope may also be
surprised to learn that individual Americans voluntarily do far more than any
government to assist the world’s poor.
A 2013 report from the
Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Prosperity found that nearly $31 billion
of annual U.S. government aid to developing countries was eclipsed by $39
billion of private charity, plus another $108 billion of private capital flows.
Americans also sent more than $100 billion of remittances to the developing
world, often from immigrants working in the U.S. Nobody goes to Cuba to earn
money to support relatives in America.
As for the environment
and climate change, Pope Francis is sometimes given to an almost Malthusian,
anti-modern pessimism. In his recent encyclical, “Laudato Si,” Francis wrote
that “the earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense
pile of filth.”
Well, he should have
seen East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the air in Beijing
today. Coercive governments are the worst befoulers of the environment. Democratic
capitalism has created the wealth and electoral consent to clean the air and
water, and only continued economic growth will create the resources to deal
with climate change if it does become a serious threat to the Earth.
Catholics understand that while the pope
speaks for God on matters of faith and morals, his infallibility does not
extend to his economics or environmentalism. We hope he enjoys his visit to the
land of the free, and that the education goes both ways.”
Comments:
Blogger: Pope Francis, as successor to Peter as rock that stands on the cornerstone that is Christ, is speaking the social doctrine of the Church when he speaks on political and economic issues. And the social doctrine of the Church speaks the person as made in the image and likeness of God and revealed in the Person of Jesus Christ.
Blogger: Pope Francis, as successor to Peter as rock that stands on the cornerstone that is Christ, is speaking the social doctrine of the Church when he speaks on political and economic issues. And the social doctrine of the Church speaks the person as made in the image and likeness of God and revealed in the Person of Jesus Christ.
From John Paul II's Centesimus Annus
#41 - “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. Nor is it an ideology, but rather the accurate
formulations of the results of a careful reflection on the complex realities of
human existence, in society and in the international order, in the light of
faith and of the Church’s tradition.”[1]
To speak
specifically, “the complex realities of human existence” means the human person
understood as image of the divine Person of the Son as pure and total self-gift
to the Father which is His identity. Conceptually and semantically, Vatican II
formulated this divine/supernatural dynamic as “finding self by the sincere
gift of self.”[2]
Hence, Pope Francis is totally
coherent with himself when he opposes an anthropocentrism that uses technology to
dominate and control reality for the purposes of the self, and an economy that
is built on profit for self. He sees this as the hallmark of modernity that has
it roots in a decayed Christianity and “Christian anthropology [that] gave rise
to a wrong understanding of the relationship between human beings and the world.”[3]
Go no further than
Centesimus Annus where John Paul II writes that “the Church cannot abandon humanity,
and that ‘this human person is the primary route that the Church must travel in
fulfilling her mission… the way traced out by Christ himself… This, and this
alone, is the principle which inspires the Church’s social doctrine.” [4]
It
would be valuable in the light of the Pope’s visit to refresh ourselves in the
mind of John Paul II concerning the meaning of capitalism and socialism as ideological models that
replace the human person as a structure rather than a dynamic.
The Meaning of Capitalism and Socialism:
[Centesimus Annus]
The answer is obviously complex. 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." But if by "capitalism" is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality and sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative.
The Marxist solution has failed, but the realities of marginalization and exploitation remain in the world, especially the Third World, as does the reality of human alienation, especially in the more advanced countries. Against these phenomena the Church strongly raises her voice. Vast multitudes are still living in conditions of great material and moral poverty. The collapse of the Communist system in so many countries certainly removes an obstacle to facing these problems in an appropriate and realistic way, but it is not enough to bring about their solution. Indeed, there is a risk that a radical capitalistic ideology could spread which refuses even to consider these problems, in the a priori belief that any attempt to solve them is doomed to failure, and which blindly entrusts their solution to the free development of market forces.
43. The Church has no models to present; models that are real and truly effective can only arise within the framework of different historical situations, through the efforts of all those who responsibly confront concrete problems in all their social, economic, political and cultural aspects, as these interact with one another.[84] For such a task the Church offers her social teaching as an indispensable and ideal orientation, a teaching which, as already mentioned, recognizes the positive value of the market and of enterprise, but which at the same time points out that these need to be oriented towards the common good. This teaching also recognizes the legitimacy of workers' efforts to obtain full respect for their dignity and to gain broader areas of participation in the life of industrial enterprises so that, while cooperating with others and under the direction of others, they can in a certain sense "work for themselves"[85] through the exercise of their intelligence and freedom.
The integral development of the human person through work does not impede but rather promotes the greater productivity and efficiency of work itself, even though it may weaken consolidated power structures. A business cannot be considered only as a "society of capital goods"; it is also a "society of persons" in which people participate in different ways and with specific responsibilities, whether they supply the necessary capital for the company's activities or take part in such activities through their labor. To achieve these goals there is still need for a broad associated workers' movement, directed towards the liberation and promotion of the whole person.
Notice how the mind collapses into the abstract ideological model rather than confronting and staying with the existential working person as the reality and dynamic from which both individual and social dimensions flow (becoming self, finding self, by the dynamic of mastering and owning self in order to make the gift of self to others). It is so much easier to collapse into the ideology where freedom and identity are lost.
[1]
John Paul II, “Of Social Concern.”
[2]
Gaudium et spes: “man, the only earthly being God had willed for itself, finds
himself by the sincere gift of himself.”
[3]
And this error was seen to arise in the late middle ages with Duns Scotus and
William of Occam
[4] John
Paul II, Centesimus Annus, #53.
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