When Pope Francis was first
elected on March 13 of this year, some of the early media reports
about the largely unknown Argentine cardinal painted a dire portrait
of a man with shadowy connections to a military dictatorship, a man
whom rumor described as conspicuously silent during the
government-sponsored murder of priests preaching liberation theology.
But in recent days, in the wake of the compelling interviews with
America and
La Reppublica, many of these same voices
have discovered a new Pope Francis, one who is tolerant, open-minded,
anti-establishment, and perhaps even supportive of some forms of the
liberation theology he was once accused of persecuting.
Readers of papal encyclicals
on politics and economics, broadly called Catholic social thought,
often walk away with a similarly double image: commentators on John
XXIII’s Mater et Magistra, John Paul II’s Centesimus
Annus, and Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate have
claimed and counter-claimed each document as a certain and final
victory for democratic capitalism or state-run socialism, depending
on the commentator’s predilections.
Asking the Right
Questions
All too often, questions
about the Church’s politics end up like the trompe-l’oeil
images that vex freshman philosophy students. Is it a duck or a
rabbit? An old lady or a young girl? Is Pope Francis a fascist or a
Marxist? Is Catholic social thought capitalist or socialist? Is it
all in the eye of the beholder?
These questions do not have
a satisfying answer because they are the wrong questions. In
his new book Papal Economics: The Catholic Church on Democratic
Capitalism, from Rerum Novarum to Caritas in Veritate,
Maciej Zięba (pronounced Zhiemba) sets out to introduce the
right questions to ask about the Church, man, economics, and the
State.
Zięba’s personal
background certainly influences his perspective: a physicist in
Communist Poland whose career was ruined by helping to edit a paper
for the Solidarity movement, he became a Dominican priest and a major
thinker on the theological dynamics of politics and economics,
closely tied to intellectuals like George Weigel, Michael Novak, and
of course, John Paul II. From 1991 to the present day he has lectured
at the Tertio Millenio Institute for the Free Society’s summer
seminar, guiding students from Central Europe and America in a
thorough, contextualized reading of John Paul II’s Centesimus
Annus— a document he sees as the Church’s definitive
statement on social thought.
With such a background,
Zięba wisely does not attempt a pose of interpretive neutrality on
political and economic issues; instead, he seeks to provide a
consistent theological reading of papal writings on social thought,
using Centesimus Annus as a lens through which to see the
past, present, and future (Worth noting here is that the book’s
subtitle is something of a stretch: Centesimus Annus is the
clear focus of the book, with other documents serving as background
to it). This is not the only possible option; others have chosen the
more progressive document Populorum Progressio of Paul VI as
the interpretive lens for these questions. Yet with these
acknowledgements duly made, Zięba makes a persuasive case that
Centesimus Annus is the essential lodestone for Catholic
social thought.
Zięba’s concern about
using other documents as a foundation for a perennial social thought
is that they tend to be too particular, too focused on the conflict
of the great economic systems of their day, and tend to address
theoretical problems only on an ad hoc basis. As long as
debate remains at the level of capitalism versus socialism or
democracy versus statism, ecclesiastical pronouncements on economics
and politics remain mired in the specific partisan problems of
contemporary states, which is what leads to the perpetual double
vision of their interpretation; for instance, socialists concerned
about the legacy of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Latin America read
Mater et Magistra as an anti-fascist embrace of socialism,
where free-market economists concerned about communism in the USSR
and Asia read it as an anti-communist embrace of capitalism.
Humanity, Society, and
Culture
But John Paul II proposes a
different starting point for thinking about problems of economics and
politics in Centesimus Annus: man himself. He contends that
before we consider specific ramifications of how man is to live in
the world, we must first understand who he is and the dignity that is
his. Two basic realities emerge: man is a person, who has a
transcendent dignity that is his by nature, but that also requires
human, moral, and spiritual formation to come to full flowering; and
man is a social being, whose personhood is expressed most
completely in giving himself to others. Man is thus never just an
individual nor just part of a collective—his personhood and social
nature must be realized in each other, not one at the expense of the
other.
From this attention to the
human person, John Paul II turns to the next-order concern, which is
human culture. Zięmba describes the pope’s notion of culture as
the
process
by which individuals and groups—in particular the family and
society—maintain and develop identity, a process driven by the
subjectivity inherent in the dignity God bestows on man to pursue the
true and the good in dialogue with others.
As a person, man strives to
realize by his action who he is, in concert with others who discover
the same by mutual work and involvement, in family structures,
voluntary organizations, mores, art, study, religion, etc., not as
totally undetermined endeavors but in their most meaningful
expressions as a pursuit of the true and the good. Here the pope
gives key ground for legitimate differences among human cultures
while precluding a value-free relativism: the reality of truth and
goodness, ultimately grounded in God’s unchanging nature, is the
purifying fire of all man’s cultural practices.
The pope’s dynamic vision
of culture as the efflorescence of man’s personal dignity realized
on a social scale entails a high regard for human freedom. In fact,
this process of human maturation and flourishing is precisely what we
mean by freedom: that the person is able to develop the full
potential of his nature, living out the dignity that is his as a
creature made in the image of God. This vision of freedom is notably
different from the contemporary Western conception of freedom as
radical indeterminacy, a freedom from all norms of truth. The
pope is clear that this false vision of freedom leads only to
tyranny: “In a world without truth, freedom loses its foundation
and man is exposed to the violence of passion and manipulation, both
open and hidden.” A just social order, then, must enable man to
pursue his free development as a search for the truth, protecting him
from stunted notions of human life, whether externally constructed or
self-imposed.
Only with these
anthropological principles in place can we now move on to consider
more precisely what sort of social order, in its economic and
political dimensions, will enable man to live out his dignity most
fully. In the economic order, man needs a system that recognizes the
dignity of his work as a vital component of who he is, enabling him
to flourish as a person and a member of a community, and that
encourages his free, creative action. In the political order, he
needs a structure that protects the rights inherent in his dignity,
while ensuring that he lives up to their obligations, limiting fallen
man’s tendency toward exploitation, manipulation, and excessive
concentration of power.
The Church and Politics
So what does this look like,
concretely? Zięba is at his most deft when he answers this question.
Firstly, we must recognize that the Church will not and cannot ally
herself fully with a single mode of economic or political life. As he
puts it, “a conscious faith can never provide an exhaustive
explanation of reality, and thus there is an immanent tendency to
de-ideologize all systems and values.” Because “the Kingdom of
God cannot be built on the Earth,” the Church must necessarily
provide an “antimodel” in sociopolitical life, a term that means
the Church does not propose a positive model of its own in these
questions, either by allying itself with socialism, capitalism, or a
hypothetical “third way;” while maintaining her commitment to the
nature of man and the truth given by God, the Church is fundamentally
pluralistic in its economic and political positions. The Church can
“point where the discussion should lead,” but she will not
“insist on an ultimate solution.”
The word “antimodel” is
key here: the Church does not offer one single path as the way humans
must walk to build a kingdom of justice on the Earth, but instead she
must continually remind the world of man’s true dignity, offering
criticisms and warnings about failings in contemporary practices and
delineating boundaries within which economics and politics must
function. She is to be a nobler version of Socrates in Athens, acting
as a gadfly that provokes society to a continual re-examination of
its principles and purification of its practices.
This, then, is John Paul
II’s project in Centesimus Annus. Having established the
true nature of man, with all it implies for human society, and faced
with the gross abuses of economics and politics in the twentieth
century, he outlines certain minimum boundaries in which a state must
function. As Zięba puts it:
The
border is constituted, on one hand, by the state's aspirations to
totalitarianism (to some extent even the welfare state abuses its
prerogatives) and, on the other hand, by political and economic
mechanisms acting on their own accord.
Neither the state nor
the economy can be given free rein over man, for either of these
options begins to depersonalize and dehumanize social life: a
totalitarian state suppresses all intermediary institutions between
the individual and the state and reduces the person to a mere servant
of the state’s needs, while unbridled economism reduces man to a
quantity of production and consumption, whether that is realized in
communist or capitalist modes.
Reflecting on these
conditions and boundaries of sociopolitical life, Zięba concludes
his lengthy analysis of Centesimus Annus and its criticisms of
twentieth-century economic and political systems by arguing that “the
system that meets the demands of Catholic social teaching (which is
not to say that it is the sole acceptable possibility) is a
democratic state of law and a socially sensitive, free economy.”
Throughout his work Zięba provides lengthy argumentation from
Centesimus Annus and the rest of the Catholic social thought
tradition to maintain that all forms of totalitarianism, communism,
and socialism are absolutely precluded by papal teaching.
That
being said, we should not caricature his conclusion as a simple
endorsement of Western capitalist democracies: his claim is simply
that the democratic state with its rule of law and the free economy
provide the widest potential for man to develop in accord with his
dignity, as long as the state and the economy are made subservient to
that dignity and held in check by the legitimate demands of the human
person.
Zięba’s book is not a
how-to guide for state-builders, and does not provide concrete
solutions to the serious problems that vex contemporary economic
practice. He does not provide easy answers for sorting out the
constructive and destructive aspects of globalization, credit
structures, fiscal policy, health care, social services, or any of
the other issues that confront us today. Nor should he. In
explicating the teaching of Centesimus Annus and the legacy of
Catholic social thought, Zięba gives citizens, businessmen, and
politicians tools with which to analyze their practice and create
concrete solutions out of their own free creativity.
Papal Economics is
not the final word on Catholic social thought, but Fr. Zięba does the public
a great service by overturning the double-vision problem that many
commentators bring to the Church’s politics. Trying to squeeze Pope
Francis into American political categories is doomed to fail, as are
the eager attempts to claim social encyclicals for one ideology or
another. Catholic social thought will always be an antimodel, a
gadfly spurring men to more honest reflection about our economic and
political life. The Church reminds us to begin not with a war of
ideologies, but with the basic facts about man, his dignity, and his
desire for God. This is the truth on which our society must be
grounded. And it is only in the truth that we can be free.
Papal Economics: The
Catholic Church on Democratic Capitalism, from Rerum Novarum
to Caritas in Veritate
by Maciej Zięba
ISI Books, 2013
Hardcover; 239 pages
