On June 2, Cardinal Casaroli was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Pontifical Theological Academy in Kraków. On this occasion, which followed John Paul’s two-day pilgrimage to Czechoslovakia and President Havel’s suggestion that he was witnessing a “miracle,” the cardinal defended the Ostpolitik even more directly. From the beginning of his contacts with communists, Casaroli said, he had been convinced that their “experiment” had no future, because it was utopian. The cardinal did not say that he and Paul VI had therefore regarded the Cold War division of Europe as a temporary arrangement. Casaroli gave John Paul due credit as a “powerful support” for those working to secure human rights behind the iron curtain. At the same time, the cardinal praised Mikhail Gorbachev as a man who “ran to the rescue to repair by democratic means the mortal wounds on the socio-political, moral, and economic levels inflicted on peoples during the long dictatorship”—a description of Gorbachev’s achievements and methodology that few Russian democrats would have accepted in mid-1990.83
Cardinal Casaroli quite rightly suggested that one always had to “ask if and up to what point human deeds and events, even the most marvelous ones, can have a ‘natural’ explanation, while taking place under the vigilant eye and the external action of the Lord of nature and of history.”84 But the cardinal’s rather bloodless analysis of the high politics of 1989 and his relative lack of attention to the moral revolution that had made 1989 possible missed something that President Havel’s evocation of a “miracle” seemed to catch.
Cardinal Casaroli’s state-centered analysis could not reach the far more interesting questions posed by the rapidity, style, and result of change in east central Europe in the second half of 1989. Why had this happened when it did? How had it happened through nonviolence (with the one exception of Romania)? And why had it produced, in the main, democratic regimes instead of new authoritarian ones? Havel knew why. And as he had made plain at the airport in Prague, the Czechoslovak president knew that John Paul II was the indispensable man in shaping the revolution of conscience that had preceded and made possible the nonviolent political Revolution of 1989.
NEW THINGS
John Paul II’s third social encyclical, Centesimus Annus [The Hundredth Year], was issued on May 1, 1991. Written to mark the centenary of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, Centesimus Annus gave the Church and the world John Paul’s mature reflection on the causes and meaning of the Revolution of 1989, while looking ahead toward the “new things” of the twenty-first century and creatively developing the Church’s social doctrine.
That there would be a centenary encyclical to celebrate Rerum Novarum was a given. In it, John Paul wanted to tackle questions of contemporary economics. So he had said to his classmate, Bishop Jorge Mejía of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, “Perhaps we should hear some economists.” Mejía took the hint and, to help prepare the intellectual ground for drafting the encyclical, Justice and Peace invited a group of distinguished economists of various schools to a meeting at the Vatican on November 5, 1990.85 After a morning session at the Pontifical Council’s offices, the economists were driven to the Apostolic Palace, where John Paul II hosted them at a working lunch. Bishop Mejía led the discussion, drawing comments from each of the economists invited. John Paul II questioned the scholars “very sharply, though certainly pleasantly,” Professor Robert Lucas recalled. Lucas found himself impressed with the Pope’s “intelligence and seriousness” and with his “complete lack of ceremony and pomposity.”86 After their luncheon discussion with the Pope, the economists returned to the Pontifical Council to continue the debate.
In due course, a “synthesis” to guide the drafting of the centenary encyclical was developed by the Pontifical Council.87 John Paul studied this and circulated it among his intellectual interlocutors, including the Italian philosopher Rocco Buttiglione, who had known Cardinal Wojtyła in Kraków and had published the best study of John Paul’s pre-papal intellectual project, the 1982 volume, Il Pensiero di Karol Wojtyła [The Thought of Karol Wojtyła]. Out of these conversations, John Paul decided that the new encyclical should make more use of the personalism central to his philosophical studies than the curial “synthesis” had, and ought to reflect more closely the empirical realities of today’s world economy. It then became clear that these two concerns could be combined, so that the encyclical’s moral analysis of the economy would emerge out of John Paul’s philosophy of moral action. The result was an encyclical that did not deal with economics from the top down, in terms of macro-aggregates, but from the bottom up. It would attempt a description of “the economic person” as one dimension of “the acting person,” the moral agent created with intelligence and free will, both of which must have something to do with economic life. John Paul had not read deeply in technical works of economics, nor did he think it the Church’s business to prescribe technical solutions to economic issues. He was an accomplished philosopher of the human person, though, and the conversations that led him to write Centesimus Annus in his distinctively personalist fashion clarified the linkages among the Church’s social doctrine, his own philosophical work, and the world of the twenty-first century.88
What Happened?
Centesimus Annus begins with a tribute to Pope Leo XIII, whose creative application of Catholic moral principles to the social, economic, and political “new things” of the late nineteenth century created what John Paul calls “a lasting paradigm for the Church.”89 Rerum Novarum’s principal themes—the dignity of work and workers; the right to private property and the responsibilities that entailed; the right of association, including the right to form trade unions; the right to a just wage; and the right to religious freedom—remained a part of the Church’s intellectual heritage.90 Leo XIII had also made a “surprisingly accurate” forecast about the collapse of socialism, which both he and John Paul regarded as inevitable because of socialism’s “fundamental” error about the nature of the human person.91 That “anthropological” error, compounded by atheism, had led to immense human suffering.92
With this analysis as background, John Paul turns to the question of why 1989 had happened, when it did and how it did. As he had argued on many previous occasions, culture—not economics, and not superior material force—was the engine of history. That was the truth that explained the why, the how, and the when of 1989.
There were other factors, to be sure. One was “the violation of the rights of workers” by a system that claimed to govern in their name. Resisting “in the name of solidarity,” working people had “recovered and, in a sense, rediscovered the content and principles of the Church’s social doctrine,” which had led them to resist “by means of peaceful protest, using only the weapons of truth and justice.” This, too, was another refutation of the Marxist creed, for “while Marxism held that only by exacerbating social conflicts was it possible to resolve them through violent confrontation,” the Yalta division of Europe was overcome by the nonviolent commitment of people who “succeeded…in finding effective ways to bear witness to the truth,” rather than by another war.93
Economic inefficiency was another key factor in the crisis of real existing socialism, and reflected socialism’s “violation of the human rights to private initiative, to ownership of property and to freedom in the economic sector.” Marxists who thought that economics explained culture ended up destroying the economies they built. Subordinating culture to economics meant suppressing the most urgent questions in life, and this could only lead to social disintegration.94
The deepest cause of socialism’s collapse, however, was the “spiritual void” it created. Marxism had tried to “uproot the need for God from the human heart.” What it had demonstrated was that this couldn’t be done “without throwing the heart into turmoil.”95
Christian humanism, which reflected the permanent truths built into human nature, could speak to the turmoil in the human heart that atheistic humanism had created. In doing so, it had given people back their authentic cultures. W
hen enough people had recovered enough conscience to say “No” to the communist lie, the lie, and communism, crumbled. That, John Paul suggested, was what had happened in 1989—and why.
The Free Economy
John Paul did not attempt to outline a “Catholic economy” for the post–Cold War world, explicitly stating that the Church’s social doctrine “has no models to present.”96 Rather, Centesimus Annus explores the questions one might have expected from the author of Person and Act and Laborem Exercens: What kind of person uses the free economy? How does that activity contribute to the economic common good? How does it serve the human good? Person and Act had analyzed the basic structure of moral action. Laborem Exercens had explored the experience of work in depth. Centesimus Annus achieved a real breakthrough in Catholic social thought by applying these analyses to the “free economy,” considered as an expression of human creativity and an arena of moral responsibility. In that sense, Centesimus Annus “institutionalized” the moral insights of Person and Act and Laborem Exercens.97
From Rerum Novarum through Populorum Progressio, Catholic social doctrine had focused primarily on the just distribution of wealth—because all wealth comes from the earth, one moral issue is how to distribute it justly. John Paul reaffirms that, because God had given the whole earth to all its inhabitants, the earth’s goods had a “universal destination.”98 Now, however, there is a new kind of wealth: in developed countries “the possession of know-how, technology, and skill ” has more to do with wealth than natural resources do.99 Catholic social doctrine, the Pope implies, had not taken sufficient account of this important “new thing.” Moreover, there was the question of the human economic actor and what he or she brought to the mix. “Value” and “wealth,” John Paul argues, are the products of human work, human creativity, human initiative.100 If work, creativity, initiative, value, and wealth define what an economy is, the first responsibility of the Church is to encourage men and women to make good use of their creativity in order to create wealth and value. The “wealth of nations” resides not so much in the ground as in the human mind, in human creativity.101
Because John Paul II’s personalism and his theory of moral action made him empirically sensitive to what was actually happening in contemporary economic life, Centesimus Annus made a decisive break with the materialism that had characterized some aspects of prior Catholic social doctrine. That, and John Paul’s “culture-first” approach to analyzing public life, also meant that, with Centesimus Annus, Catholic social doctrine abandoned any quest for a “third way” between or beyond capitalism and socialism. Socialism was dead, and there were many forms of capitalism in the world (another insight that John Paul brought to Catholic social doctrine). The questions for the future were what kind of “free economy,” based on what kind of understanding of the “acting person”? The encyclical’s moral evaluation of capitalism read as follows:
Can it perhaps be said that, after the failure of Communism, capitalism is the victorious social system, and that capitalism should be the goal of the countries now making efforts to rebuild their economy and society?…
The answer is obviously complex. If by “capitalism” is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of busiess, 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.102
In the wake of Centesimus Annus, defenders of “Christian socialism” tried to argue that “Capitalism A” existed only in textbooks.103 That was both empirically and textually implausible: empirically, because examples of “Capitalism A” could be found in various Western European and North American countries; textually, because John Paul II had clearly drawn on those examples of “real existing capitalism”—no one of which seemed to him completely sufficient, to be sure—in framing his endorsement of “Capitalism A.” By the same token, it is simplistic and misleading to say that Centesimus Annus endorses capitalism, period. The encyclical, for example, cannot be taken to endorse libertarianism. John Paul clearly believes that the energies unleashed by the market should be tempered and channeled by law and by the public moral culture of a society. Centesimus Annus, while marking the end of “real existing socialism,” offers a profound challenge to all forms of “real existing capitalism.”
The Free and Virtuous Society
Centesimus Annus also pushed forward the Church’s analysis of the complex texture of the free society.
In a striking innovation, John Paul teaches that “society,” like the individual, has a “subjectivity.” That subjectivity expresses itself in voluntary associations—“various intermediary groups, beginning with the family and including economic, social, political, and cultural groups which stem from human nature itself and have their own autonomy.”104 Nurturing voluntary associations is a crucial part of developing and maintaining the free society. The “subjectivity of society” is one of the most potentially fruitful concepts in the encyclical, and one hopes that Roman Catholic and other intellectuals will develop it further.
The encyclical’s positive attitude toward the “free economy” was another reflection of the Pope’s “culture-first” approach to Catholic social doctrine. The “modern business economy,” John Paul writes, “has many positive aspects” for its “basis is human freedom exercised in the economic field, just as it is exercised in many other fields.”105 The actual functioning of a successful business is one paradigm for the Pope’s stress on solidarity as a crucial social virtue. For a successful business requires “the ability to foresee…the needs of others and the combination of productive factors most adapted to satisfying those needs.” It also requires “the cooperation of many people working towards a common goal.” “Initiative and entrepreneurial ability” are essential in identifying a need, planning and organizing a business to meet it, and taking prudent risks—and all of those qualities must be affirmed in a culture if a modern economy is to succeed.106
The “free economy” is not only to be shaped by culture, but must be directed by law—which means by the State. But there are limits to what the State can do in setting the legal framework for the “free economy,” and those limits have to do, again, with the freedom of the human person. The State, for example, “could not directly ensure the right to work for all its citizens unless it controlled every aspect of economic life and restricted the free initiative of individuals.”107
Centesimus Annus also challenges stereotypes about poverty and the poor. Poverty in the modern world, John Paul argues, is primarily a matter of exclusion from the world of productivity and exchange.108 We should think of the poor, the Pope urges, in terms of their potential, and justice demands that their potential be given the opportunity to fulfill itself.109 In the free society, John Paul writes, it is primarily the task of culture to promote “trust in the human potential of the poor and consequently in their ability to improve their condition through work or to make a positive contribution to economic prosperity.”110 Welfare systems that promoted dependency were clearly excluded by such a moral principle.111
Centesimus Annus, it must be emphasized, is not an “economic encyclical,” but an encyclical about the free and virtuous society. No existing society exemplifies the comprehensive vision John Paul II lays out. It is beside the point to argue whether this is an encyclical about the American system, although Centesimus Annus did intend to open a new papal dialogue with the United States. It is, in fact, a challenge to all.
Truth and Democracy<
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Atheistic humanism may have been a dead letter, but John Paul detected on the horizon a new secularist ideology that posed a serious threat to the future of freedom. The caution he raised on this front gave rise to another controversy about Centesimus Annus, and set the context for the Pope’s commentary on the post–Cold War world throughout the 1990s.
In John Paul’s comprehensive view of the human condition, questions of “ought”—moral questions—emerge at every juncture. That conviction put John Paul on a collision course with theorists of democracy for whom democratic politics was by definition value-neutral. The Pope did not avoid the confrontation, stating his position unambiguously, even bluntly.
If democracies believed themselves so vindicated by the collapse of communism that they could ignore their own moral-cultural foundations, they were in serious danger, not from without, but from within. One finds, the Pope notes, frequent suggestions that “agnosticism and skeptical relativism are the philosophy and the basic attitude which correspond to democratic forms of political life.” Those who believe that they know the truth are sometimes suspect as democrats, for they “do not accept that truth is determined by the majority, or that it is subject to variation according to different political trends.” Concerns about democracy’s future are better directed elsewhere, John Paul argues, for if “there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power.” Twentieth-century history, he concludes, had shown how “a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.”112
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