Faith and Morals?!
Well, it appears some people think “economics” is not a moral issue; that’s why the Church shouldn’t speak on it, as this article, “Can Catholics Be Capitalists?” suggests (unless, of course, the Church is criticizing the idol of communism, then I am sure it is fine). From it, I learned that Jesus would be a “libertarian.” Why? Well, why not?
This piece to me represents not why the Church shouldn’t be speaking about economics, but why it is a must. Once a field of study is seen as independent from all other considerations, it is then when that field of study is ripe for abuse. It’s the same reason why the Church shouldn’t be silent with the moral issues surrounding any science. Ideology blocks morality and justifies the abuses which come out of its practice. And one of the most prevalent ideologies around is the dualism between nature and the supernatural — manifested in all forms of materialism which wants no direction from the spiritual principles of society. This is what Pope Benedict is confronting.
It is clear that the priests of the capitalism are in a panic. Their idol has been put in the spotlight. What looked beautiful in darkness is revolting in the light of truth, the light of love. The only question is – will the people of the world look and take down the idol, or turn their back so as to be blind to the monster they serve?
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Obviously, when you read the article, after it chides the Pope for engaging economics, the author tries to say “capitalism is the best way to make this happen!” Sickening. Saying the best way to help people is to give them the capitalistic opportunity to make something of themselves — saying anything else is like giving a bottle of alcohol to an alcoholic. Sick. Very bad analogy. But from that I gather Jesus shouldn’t have forgiven sins, because we know sinners will likely sin again. What was he thinking?
When attempting to click on to the Atlantic article, I was redirected to the story below. Might we hear from some writer about the Catholic understanding of the dignity of labor and how our educational system seems directed towards the 25% of students who will earn a college degree? What of the other 75%?
http://ideas.theatlantic.com/2009/07/give_manual_labor_more_respect_and_emphasis_in_schools.php
Yeah.
Say, were you planning to credit Pope Benedict XVI in your sidebar entitled: PAPAL SOCIAL TEACHING?
I’m pretty sure his new encyclical Caritas in Veritate is a social teaching document.
Perhaps the HTML code has been mailed to you and is being carried by horse and buggy?
Maybe you’re just messing with him a bit, you know, being pope and everything.
Not cool.
Then He said to them, “Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s.”
It always amazes me when people take this to be some kind of definitive statement on the relationship between religion and the state. It was, after all, the answer to a trick question (“Then the Pharisees went off and plotted how they might entrap him in speech”). This is not to say there is not a lot to be gleaned from the story. It just seems foolish to me to cite it as the basis for a position about government and religion.
Church social teaching has to emerge from the reflection of the whole church in its concrete social situations worldwide. Episcopal conferences would be outlets for such social thinking at a highly reflected level. But the Vatican have done everything in their power for 30 years to undercut the teaching activity and teaching authority of episcopal conferences. Instead we have Popes issuing additions to the “doctrinal corpus” of social teaching, usually in commemoration of previous papal documents (Sollicituo Rei Socialis and Caritas in Veritate as commemorations of Populorum Progressio; Centesimus Annus as commemoration of Rerum Novarum, already commemorated in Quadrgesimo Anno and Octagesimo Adveniens). The narcissistic exercise has become an embarrassment. I believe a once-worthy theological bookshop close to St Peter’s now has become a wall-to-wall display of publications by and on the present Pope — set of mirrors for his vanity! This is making a joke of the Church as a witness to the Gospel.
It always amazes me when people take this to be some kind of definitive statement on the relationship between religion and the state.
Indeed.
I like what Dorothy Day said about the passage: When you give to God what belongs to God, there is nothing left for Caesar.
David
As you are probably aware (but some readers may not), the classic key to interpreting that Scripture passage is the often-overlooked question Jesus counter-poses: Whose image is imprinted on the coin? When one remembers from the first chapter of Genesis whose image is imprinted on the soul of each human being, Jesus’ counter-response that follows becomes searingly clear (as it would have been to his intended audience) and much less merely clever.
But are Catholic countries so non capitalist and so non consumerist that they in fact fail to support the UN financially as much as non Catholic capitalist countries do…. which UN is mentioned with affirmation in the new encyclical.
The US and Japan added together pay 41% of the UN’s bills and Catholic countries add up to 20% and that’s only achieved by calling France Catholic…otherwise Catholic countries pay only 14% of the UN’s bills with more people than the US and Japan…. since SA has 382 million alone without the Phillipines, Ireland, Italy etc.
In short, are non Catholic capitalists supporting the Pope’s beloved UN better than Catholic countries are. And shouldn’t he be noticing this and commenting on it. China and Russia…allegedly leftist….pay 2.005% and 1.1% respectively and yet are on the Security Council and Japan is not.
If historian Trevor-Roper was correct, South America is poor partly because two Catholic countries invaded it,robbed it as at Pitosi and left it with Catholicism plus the plantation economy of the encomienda wherein several rich families own the best arable land and the rest are peasants even still in central america.
Non Catholic capitalists may be waiting for us and a Pope to admit that this in part is part of the problem.
Liam,
As the NAB points out, Jesus asks the Pharisees to show him the Roman coins, which they are clearly carrying. “[T]heir readiness in producing the money implies their use of it and their acceptance of the financial advantages of the Roman administration in Palestine.”
Also, the image of Caesar on the coin was a “graven image,” forbidden to Jews, and some Jews would not use such coins. So the fact that the Pharisees were carrying the coins would have been a mark against them to some other Jews.
There are many facets to the story, and to reduce it to a command to keep religion and government separate is to misuse the story.
The new encyclical says that the Church does not “interfere in any way in the politics of States” (quoting Populorum Progressio), but rather bears witness to the Truth.
The trouble is that this discourse on Truth sounds hopelessly abstract: “She does, however, have a mission of truth to accomplish, in every time and circumstance, for a society that is attuned to man, to his dignity, to his vocation. Without truth, it is easy to fall into an empiricist and sceptical view of life, incapable of rising to the level of praxis because of a lack of interest in grasping the values — sometimes even the meanings — with which to judge and direct it. Fidelity to man requires fidelity to the truth, which alone is the guarantee of freedom (cf. Jn 8:32) and of the possibility of integral human development. For this reason the Church searches for truth, proclaims it tirelessly and recognizes it wherever it is manifested. This mission of truth is something that the Church can never renounce. Her social doctrine is a particular dimension of this proclamation: it is a service to the truth which sets us free. Open to the truth, from whichever branch of knowledge it comes, the Church’s social doctrine receives it, assembles into a unity the fragments in which it is often found, and mediates it within the constantly changing life-patterns of the society of peoples and nations.”
When the Church teaches that doctors should not perform abortions, because abortions cause the intentional death of a fetus, and doing that is wrong, there are two parts to the statement:
Part 1: Abortions cause the intentional death of a fetus;
Part 2: Causing the intentional death of a fetus is wrong.
Part 1 is a statement made by scientists and doctors, within their field of expertise. Part 2 is a moral teaching, within the Church’s field of expertise (and in fact her charism of infallibility).
Now the Church does not disagree with scientists and doctors about Part 1. But if she did disagree with them, she would be on the same level as they in that debate, for it would be a debate about material observable science.
It is the same with economics.
There are moral concerns in economics: Of course! But when a two-part statement is made, in which the Church is teaching within her charism of infallibility in one part, but is dangerously out of her depth in the other, then one must separate the two parts in order to be faithful to the Truth; that is, to Christ.
For example, any time a bishop says, “We ought to implement universal health coverage at the federal level, to create a more just and compassionate society and alleviate the strain on the poor,” I hear the following two-part statement:
Part 1: Implementing a federal program to provide universal health coverage will (a.) solve the health care problems of the U.S. and (b.) not produce unintended side effects which are worse than doing nothing;
Part 2: It would be wrong of us not to undertake an action which we knew would solve the health care problems of the U.S. and have no deleterious side effects.
Now, Part 2 is a moral judgment and falls within the Church’s charism, and if the Pope utters it I’ll take it as God’s truth, especially since I already believed it anyway. (Who doesn’t?)
But Part 1 is a job for economists, especially those who study the long-term impacts of systems of incentives in decision-making bureaucracies where the decision-makers are isolated from feedback that would hurt them if they made the wrong decision. The Pope is a brilliant man, but that just isn’t his field of study, and as it’s not his ordained authority either, I am free to assume he knows as much about it as every other talented dilettante who proffers an opinion.
Unless, of course, he orders it as a discipline. In that case, I can think he’s wrong (as some do, in the matter of celibate clergy in the Latin Rite) but I am still required to do it because he’s in authority, and it’s a matter of discipline.
But the Pope hasn’t said, as a matter of discipline, that we must support bad economic or labor or health care policy.
So I am free to strongly oppose Federal programs while welcoming local ones and feeling ambivalent about county and state ones, in accordance with Catholic ideals about subsidiarity, not to mention the U.S. Constitution, Amendment 10.
In so doing, I am in accord with the Pope in all his teachings in matters of faith and morals. If I disagree with him on a matter of economics, then perhaps that’s not so different from Copernicus disagreeing with a Pope on a matter of pure astronomy?
Good analysis, Excelsior!
Excelsior,
Yes, economics is a “science” of human behavior just as criminology is a science of human behavior. However, documenting human behavior under either science does not necessarily mean approving of the behavior.
People talk about economic laws and economic realities all the time as a way of justifying what amounts to their own bad behavior resulting in the advancement of their own interest.
As a practical matter, at times we need to recognize this or that “economic reality” in public policy; people are what they are, after all, i.e., sinful and often self-interested and greedy. On the other hand, as Catholics we can point to and encourage better behavior and also government policies aimed at blunting the bad effects of “economic realities.”
Part 1: Abortions cause the intentional death of a fetus;
Part 2: Causing the intentional death of a fetus is wrong.
Actually, what the Church says is that abortion is the intentional killing of a human person, and and intentionally killing an innocent person is wrong. Doctors and scientists do not necessarily agree that a fetus is a human person, and philosophers do not necessarily agree, based on the data from scientists, that the fetus is a human person.
Excelsior,
On the one hand, why in the world does any pope, then, “pontificate” on matters of the science of economics in an encyclical — the most authoritative document he can issue — if Catholics are free to ignore him? Isn’t it pointless? It is as if someone writing the majority opinion in a Supreme Court decision on the Second Amendment digressed from constitutional issues and included a long discourse on which guns are best suited for particular purposes, with instructions on how to how to use them, clean them, and store them when they are not in use. That is what I see as a problem in your analysis.
On the other, the virtue of it is that it seems to me to be applicable to the Church teaching that abortion must be against the law (which I do not agree with). Every country is different. Every government is different. The Church should not be in the business of telling governments how to deal with the issue of abortion. It should be saying that governments have an obligation to minimize abortion, and leave the strategy to each country and government to determine for itself.