Quote of the Week: Pope Benedict XVI
Today’s international economic scene, marked by grave deviations and failures, requires a profoundly new way of understanding business enterprise. Old models are disappearing, but promising new ones are taking shape on the horizon. Without doubt, one of the greatest risks for businesses is that they are almost exclusively answerable to their investors, thereby limiting their social value. Owing to their growth in scale and the need for more and more capital, it is becoming increasingly rare for business enterprises to be in the hands of a stable director who feels responsible in the long term, not just the short term, for the life and the results of his company, and it is becoming increasingly rare for businesses to depend on a single territory. Moreover, the so-called outsourcing of production can weaken the company’s sense of responsibility towards the stakeholders — namely the workers, the suppliers, the consumers, the natural environment and broader society — in favour of the shareholders, who are not tied to a specific geographical area and who therefore enjoy extraordinary mobility. Today’s international capital market offers great freedom of action. Yet there is also increasing awareness of the need for greater social responsibility on the part of business. Even if the ethical considerations that currently inform debate on the social responsibility of the corporate world are not all acceptable from the perspective of the Church’s social doctrine, there is nevertheless a growing conviction that business management cannot concern itself only with the interests of the proprietors, but must also assume responsibility for all the other stakeholders who contribute to the life of the business: the workers, the clients, the suppliers of various elements of production, the community of reference.
– Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, 40.
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These are also impressively compelling:
“Some non-governmental Organizations work actively to spread abortion, at times promoting the practice of sterilization in poor countries, in some cases not even informing the women concerned. Moreover, there is reason to suspect that development aid is sometimes linked to specific health-care policies which de facto involve the imposition of strong birth control measures. Further grounds for concern are laws permitting euthanasia as well as pressure from lobby groups, nationally and internationally, in favour of its juridical recognition.
Openness to life is at the centre of true development. When a society moves towards the denial or suppression of life, it ends up no longer finding the necessary motivation and energy to strive for man’s true good. If personal and social sensitivity towards the acceptance of a new life is lost, then other forms of acceptance that are valuable for society also wither away[67]. The acceptance of life strengthens moral fibre and makes people capable of mutual help. By cultivating openness to life, wealthy peoples can better understand the needs of poor ones, they can avoid employing huge economic and intellectual resources to satisfy the selfish desires of their own citizens, and instead, they can promote virtuous action within the perspective of production that is morally sound and marked by solidarity, respecting the fundamental right to life of every people and every individual.”
“In order to protect nature, it is not enough to intervene with economic incentives or deterrents; not even an apposite education is sufficient. These are important steps, but the decisive issue is the overall moral tenor of society. If there is a lack of respect for the right to life and to a natural death, if human conception, gestation and birth are made artificial, if human embryos are sacrificed to research, the conscience of society ends up losing the concept of human ecology and, along with it, that of environmental ecology. It is contradictory to insist that future generations respect the natural environment when our educational systems and laws do not help them to respect themselves. The book of nature is one and indivisible: it takes in not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations: in a word, integral human development. Our duties towards the environment are linked to our duties towards the human person, considered in himself and in relation to others. It would be wrong to uphold one set of duties while trampling on the other. Herein lies a grave contradiction in our mentality and practice today: one which demeans the person, disrupts the environment and damages society.”
It is about time. How does he see it working out in reality.
Does he see a connection between the present and past business practices as being a part of the culture of death?
Don’t know the connection, but here is part of the answer:
“76. One aspect of the contemporary technological mindset is the tendency to consider the problems and emotions of the interior life from a purely psychological point of view, even to the point of neurological reductionism. In this way man’s interiority is emptied of its meaning and gradually our awareness of the human soul’s ontological depths, as probed by the saints, is lost. The question of development is closely bound up with our understanding of the human soul, insofar as we often reduce the self to the psyche and confuse the soul’s health with emotional well-being. These over-simplifications stem from a profound failure to understand the spiritual life, and they obscure the fact that the development of individuals and peoples depends partly on the resolution of problems of a spiritual nature. Development must include not just material growth but also spiritual growth, since the human person is a “unity of body and soul”[156], born of God’s creative love and destined for eternal life. The human being develops when he grows in the spirit, when his soul comes to know itself and the truths that God has implanted deep within, when he enters into dialogue with himself and his Creator. When he is far away from God, man is unsettled and ill at ease. Social and psychological alienation and the many neuroses that afflict affluent societies are attributable in part to spiritual factors. A prosperous society, highly developed in material terms but weighing heavily on the soul, is not of itself conducive to authentic development. The new forms of slavery to drugs and the lack of hope into which so many people fall can be explained not only in sociological and psychological terms but also in essentially spiritual terms. The emptiness in which the soul feels abandoned, despite the availability of countless therapies for body and psyche, leads to suffering. There cannot be holistic development and universal common good unless people’s spiritual and moral welfare is taken into account, considered in their totality as body and soul.”
Has Michael Novak retreated to his bunker yet?
I don’t think so given my reading so far.
I LOVE THIS ENCYCLICAL
“Lowering the level of protection accorded to the rights of workers, or abandoning mechanisms of wealth redistribution in order to increase the country’s international competitiveness, hinder the achievement of lasting development.” CIV no. 32
I’m about halfway done reading it:
36. Economic activity cannot solve all social problems through the simple application of commercial logic. This needs to be directed towards the pursuit of the common good, for which the political community in particular must also take responsibility. Therefore, it must be borne in mind that grave imbalances are produced when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution.
Reading the encyclical through once, I am struck by Benedict’s development and application of the theology of the gift–the primary gift being of course caritas itself–to economic practice. This passage is taken from paragraph 37:
“Economic life undoubtedly requires contracts, in order to regulate relations of exchange between goods of equivalent value. But it also needs just laws and forms of redistribution governed by politics, and what is more, it needs works redolent of the spirit of gift. The economy in the global era seems to privilege the former logic, that of contractual exchange, but directly or indirectly it also demonstrates its need for the other two: political logic, and the logic of the unconditional gift.”
This extension of the logic of the unconditional gift to the practice of business and economics seems to me to provide a theological development and clarification of JPII’s notion of the “free economy,” as that concept was articulated in Centesimus Annus. Too often interpreted as broadly espousing the logic of contemporary capitalism, JPII’s insistence on the importance of “free” structures, when read through the theology of Benedict’s current encyclical, is clearly seen for what it always was: a reference to the Communio school’s interpretation of freedom as response to gift, to be pursued in relationality. I suspect that Benedict’s contribution to Catholic Social Thought will be seen to consist in precisely this theological consideration of the gift as a tool for thinking about social and economic life.
In relation to this first point, I am very interested in Benedict’s call in this encyclical for a rethinking of business practice itself, and of the development of legislation and structures to support businesses that are not aimed primarily at profit. This seems to me to constitute a much more radical critique of the status quo than that articulated in CA.
I’ve been reading it, too, and to the degree that I believe I understand what he’s saying, it’ll put Catholicism WAY outside the mainstream of current American poltico-economic thought to the extent that there’ll be no possible alliance with either the right or the left in America.
This seems to me to be REAL counter-cultural thought in America, and to be aligned with a type of “conservative” social democratic thinking that is only found in Europe, and, there, even on the fringes of political movements. This is almost utopian, but it is quite beautiful and inspiring.
Here is a sly observation from John Allen:
One interesting twist to Caritas in Veritate is that Benedict XVI managed to pen a 144-page reflection on the globalized economy without once using the term “capitalism.”
WJ the reason for the word Captaliism not being used is explined at the Vatican News Conference
http://blog.acton.org/archives/11033-caritas-in-veritate-highlights-from-the-vatican-press-conference.html
I have just read George Weigel’s transparently ideological account of the encyclical, which proceeds first by an attack on the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, follows with a misrepresentation of John Paul II’s Centesiums Annus, and then proposes–incredibly–that we can separate Benedict’s “thought” in the new encyclical from the pernicious influence exerted on his “gentle soul” from the Justice and Peace crowd. The intellectual pomposity of Weigel reveals itself in his cavalier appropriation of subtle points made by the encyclical in order to support what he already thinks he knows about global politics. And I suppose this is to be expected. But it seems to me that what transforms his reading into a parody of itself is his simultaneous insistence on the importance of the concepts of “charity” and “giftedness” for understanding the encyclical along with claims he makes NOT TO UNDERSTAND how these concepts could apply to economic life. Writing about one of the Peace and Justice-influenced passages (Weigel just gets to decide, apparently, which sections of the encyclical are in keeping with Benedict’s true thought and which are the result of the Peace and Justice bureaucracy), he complains:
Some of these are simply incomprehensible, as when the encyclical states that defeating Third World poverty and underdevelopment requires a “necessary openness, in a world context, to forms of economic activity marked by quotas of gratuitousness and communion.” This may mean something interesting; it may mean something naïve or dumb. But, on its face, it is virtually impossible to know what it means.
Weigel’s juvenile dismissal of the passage in question proceeds by abstracting a small part of a larger paragraph, in which the Pope is decrying the bifurcation of all social reality into terms made available by the Market, on the one hand, and the State, on the other. Given this context, I challenge anyone *not* to understand what the Pope is here talking about, which, as he goes on TO EXPLICITLY STATE IN THE NEXT SENTENCE, involves “economic forms based on solidarity, which find their natural home in civil society without being restricted to it, build up society.” So the Pope is articulating how solidarity should become intrinsic to economic practice, and he is developing that point by recourse to his communio theology. One might not AGREE with his claim, but to argue, as Weigel does, that this passage not only is not intelligible but is NOT PART OF THE “REAL” ENCYCLICAL is preposterous at best and sinfully manipulative at worst.
Yes, I said sinful. In reading Weigel’s mischaracterization of the encyclical I am hard pressed not to believe that, at least at some level of his being, he *knows* he is misrepresenting the Pope in the service of his own ideology. That he has such a platform to do so in dangerous both for himself and the Church.
I believe many will be reading with ideological blinders in the next few days. They will be on both sides of the fence. It will include those with communio theology in mind. That’s because this encyclical seems to transcend any theological box. As dig says, it seems almost utopian if anything.
This is so clear, there’s no way to spin this one.
Distributive justice? Redistribution of wealth? Isn’t that what Obama was attacked for? Same words that Benedict uses.
Wj,
Do you have a link for Weigel’s “article”? I REALLY hope my husband doesn’t read it… He will have a heart attack. We were talking during lunch how it is that these guys are going to spin this encyclical and Weigel’s account definitely wins the award so far!
Thanks for making my point.
Philip,
I disagree strongly with the assertion that “this encyclical seems to transcend any theological box.” In any case, I’m not sure what that claim would mean, anyway. Several aspects of the encyclical point to a reading of it as informed by communio theology: the references to Vatican II, and especially Gaudium et Spes, the development of the “relationality” of the person articulated through an interpretation of the communality of the Trinity, the insistence that all *true* development include Christ and his Church, the claim that charity is intrinsic to justice and not just super-added from the outside, and, more than any of these, the application of the theology of the gift to social, economic and business life. This last, actually, seems to be (on a first reading) the clearest theological development in the encyclical. It will require a rereading of the prior encyclicals through Benedict’s analysis of gratuitous grace and its importance for understanding social and economic life.
I agree of course that there will be liberals who misrepresent the encyclical as being in agreement with the economic and environmental policies of Obama (I think Gibson over at Commonweal has already said as much)–and they deserved to be criticized as well.
Thanks for noting the distortions of the left that are already occuring.
I think my point is that, in spite of theological influences, Benedict would be the first to point out that this Encyclical seeks to transcend specific theological perspectives. Rather, it would seeks to express the movement of the Holy Spirit working through the Church to discern the signs of the times. Of course such discernment will take place through, possibly flawed, economic, social and historical understandings of the moment. It will also occur through, limited even at their best, theological schools of understanding God and man.
Katerina,
The Weigel piece can be found here: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTdkYjU3MDE2YTdhZTE4NWIyN2FkY2U5YTFkM2ZiMmE=
I would advise your husband to stay away from the First Things blog over the next couple of days as well, which is currently offering a bevy of predictable absurdities from Novak, Bottum, etc.
wj,
Thanks a lot! This is entertaining!
Some of these are simply incomprehensible, as when the encyclical states that defeating Third World poverty and underdevelopment requires a “necessary openness, in a world context, to forms of economic activity marked by quotas of gratuitousness and communion.” This may mean something interesting; it may mean something naïve or dumb. But, on its face, it is virtually impossible to know what it means.
Maybe Weigel should talk to one of hundreds of people involved in running businesses on the basis of Focolare’s economy of communion. (Which, by the way, is very difficult to research on the internet. If anyone has links, please post them. Thanks.)
Weigel:
“Indeed, those with advanced degrees in Vaticanology could easily go through the text of Caritas in Veritate, highlighting those passages that are obviously Benedictine with a gold marker and those that reflect current Justice and Peace default positions with a red marker. The net result is, with respect, an encyclical that resembles a duck-billed platypus.”
Hahahaha
Phillip,
Actually, according to Weigel, this statement is incorrect: “Rather, it would seeks to express the movement of the Holy Spirit working through the Church to discern the signs of the times.”
You see, this new encyclical is really about the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace trying to score ideological points after having been “routed” by JPII’s Centesiums Annus.
It is one thing for liberals of all persuasions to read the encyclical through glasses colored by their own policy preferences. It is quite another to DENY THAT LARGE PARTS OF THE ENCYCLICAL ITSELF ARE IMPORTANT AT ALL, and to attribute them to a shadowy conspiracy of Justice and Peace bureaucratic machinations. Weigel does not merely distort the encyclical, as he did with CA; he actually REFUSES TO TAKE SERIOUSLY THOSE PARTS WITH WHICH HE DISAGREES. This is much worse than a liberal who says: “Yes, the Pope denounces abortion here, but I disagree with him for the following reasons…” THis is rather like a liberal who says, “The Pope’s condemnations of abortion in the encyclical bear the mark of a small cadre of extreme conservative ideologists who inhabit the corridors of the Vatican, and so need not be taken seriously.”
thanks, wj, for almost making me throw up my lunch! My God, Weigel has really done it this time…
I had been hoping that Weigel would not live down to his stereotype; he’s capable of good analysis (for example, on Pope John Paul II’s important role in the non-violent nature of the fall of the Eastern Bloc), but he’s rather selective in his reading of magisterial documents on economics and, to a lesser extent, just war. But his essay on this encyclical so far wins the palm for the Pope Really Agrees With Me prize. It will be interesting if Fr Z follows suit; so many people appear to have reinforced their talking points at the recent Acton University conference last month that it resembles the Senate GOP’s Tuesday talking points method.
MM,
It’s bad. Really bad. I just called my husband and told him. He just laughed. That’s all we can do at this point. What Weigel has is called desperation. He is making this so easy for us who think he lost his credibility A LONG time ago.
All we can do at this point? Oh, no, I think not… hee hee. getting ready for a response..
Liam,
I agree. I mean, granted he may not agree with some parts of the encyclical, but at least make a substantive argument to not agree with those points instead of undermining its authority. Regardless of whether Cardinal Martino threatened to kill Pope Benedict if he did not insert his agenda into his encyclical, it doesn’t matter. Caritas in Veritate is signed and promulgated it stands as a papal encyclical of the Catholic Church until the end of the ages!
Liam and Katerina,
Your charity is instructive. I too was hoping that Weigel would be able to receive the encyclical with an openness that is befitting of his intellect and some of his really good work. Part of my exasperation with him is that I just think he *must* know better. But in any case, it is wrong of me to pronounce upon his interior disposition, and I want to retract my claim that his misrepresentation is deliberate and sinful.
Actually, while I am at it, can we talk? About the whole “talking points” method in media, that is.
While political leaders have been trying to manage news since before Day 1, the modern era of talking points seems to date back to David Gergen in the Reagan White House: message management on a daily basis to exploit the ebbs and flows of the daily, weekly and seasonal media news cycles. The Democrats under Clinton got with the program, and well, and the GOP under Bush perfected it yet further.
One sees at St Blog’s the use of blogs in this fashion: coteries of blogs assemble their talking points, pre/during/post event, diversifying the message somewhat to evidence both ersatz and real differences in shades of opinion, but all with the effect of RALLY! THE! BASE! EVERY! DAY!
Novak’s shot across the bow late last month was but the most recent version of this, echoing in other websites.
I for one find this method corrosive in a Catholic context. I found it corrosive when I encountered it from radical Catholics in a former local community of mine, and I find it even more corrosive on a wider scale (normally, it’s conservatives who most typically employ it, since groups like CTA, VOF, WATER, et cet. are a shadow of their former selves media-wise, which is not a bad thing in my opinion).
Anyway, I just want to raise self-awareness of this dynamic on this day the encyclical is issued.
Best reaction of the day, from the NYT
“In many ways, the document is a somewhat puzzling cross between an anti-globalization tract and a government white paper, another indication that the Vatican does not comfortably fit into traditional political categories of right and left”
It is also true that Weigel needs to have not written what he did, b/c it’s embarrassing.
However, I’m not quite sure what Minion is so gleeful and giddy about. I’m about halfway through at the moment, but there is plenty of stuff for conservative Catholics to point to, like where he positions abortion and contraception as the core issues of any Catholic conception social justice.
Perhaps the Pope had Weigel in mind when he warned:
“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[21].” (From paragraph 11.)
Benedict signs things he doesn’t believe into official Church teaching to avoid awkward moments at Vatican summer BBQ. Tell me again why Walter Kasper wasn’t notified about lifting the excommunications of the SSPX bishops? Talk about awkward . . .
George, you have outdone yourself.
It’s pretty disappointing that so many aren’t reflecting on this encyclical, but rather are attempting to reshape it into an ideological tool to hammer their political enemies with.
I haven’t yet absorbed the whole thing yet. So I think I am going to attempt to, and–as best I can–reflect on what I can do to make my own life and thought reflect the teaching presented. Using it only to reflect on where others are failing seems to ignore the concept of development set out in the letter.
I understand what he’s saying, it’ll put Catholicism WAY outside the mainstream of current American poltico-economic thought to the extent that there’ll be no possible alliance with either the right or the left in America.
That would be unfortunate, I think. Better it somewhat influence both the right and the left than be totally outside of mainstream thought.
I’m about halfway through at the moment, but there is plenty of stuff for conservative Catholics to point to, like where he positions abortion and contraception as the core issues of any Catholic conception social justice.
Abortion and contraception are not conservative-Catholic-issues-only my friend! He speaks for the whole Church!
Katerina:
I agree, though I think some don’t see it that way. It is true that conservative Catholics have been the more determined voices on those issues (not the only voices) whereas liberal Catholics seem to have problem with the issues-in the same way that conservative Catholics seem to have problems discussing free-market economics in light of Catholic teaching.
I hope this encyclical will bring those two factions together into a strong united Church.
Phillip,
I read your reply to my statement. Another question comes to mind in response to the Pope’s statement about understanding the human being from a psychological perspective and that leading into a neurological reductionism which results in “…man’s interiority is emptied of its meaning and gradually our awareness of the human soul’s ontological depths, as probed by the saints is lost. The question of development is closely bound up with our understanding of the human soul, insofar as we often reduce the self to the psyche and confuse the soul’s health with emotional well-being. These oversimplifications stem from a profound failure to understand the spiritual life and they obscure the fact that the development of individuals and peoples depends partly on the resolution of problems of a spiritual nature…since the human person is a unity of body and soul, born of creative love…The human being develops when he grows in the spirit, when his soul comes to know itself and the truths that God has implanted deep within when he enters into dialogue with himself and his Creator.”
Does he explain his understanding of the psyche which is the interplay of soul, interpersonal neurobiology, genetics, attachment history, social conditioning, and that the soul is given this hardware to relate to other embodied souls. Does he understand that the soul suffers first and foremost in its relationship to other human beings and this creates suffering within the metaphysical realm of existence which is body and soul.
In human reality there is no spirituality without the senses otherwise we are angels. The senses and the psyche are the soul’s guidance system to find the way to God through the search for love first on a human level and then finding God in that mystery and struggle within all of human and physical creation. I also see where he misunderstands sentimentality and denigrates it to something less than love.
I must get a copy of this in order to have a better understanding of his thinking.
Here. I found something on the economy of communion which Weigel seems to find so incomprehensible.
http://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2009/07/caritas-in-veritate-the-economy-of-communion.html