Person-Centeredness

Just a very brief observation, one that may be obvious to everyone, but one that needed making in a conversation I had today.

When Pope Benedict XVI talks about the need for an ethical framework to surround, or a healthy moral culture to undergird both the economy and our thinking about the economy, he is not talking about an externally-imposed superstructure or a kind of foundation from which economic activity might be separated.

Rather he is calling our attention to a fact: the economy is nothing other than the aggregate of energies directed to production and exchange of goods and services; those energies, however, are at their origin human energies - human beings engage in economic activities, and human beings are inherently, even essentially moral actors, so that human activity as such has a constitutive moral component.

LD

Gift: where did Pope Benedict take it from?

I found convincing indications on where theoretical imputs on chapter III of the encyclical came from.

I read in an interview to the german catholic philosopher Otto Kallscheuer (in the Italian opinion newspaper Il Foglio, of 7-9-09), that "the theme of gift and its gratuitousness is fruit of the teem work realized in the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences by Stefano Zamagni, speaker for the economy of brotherhood, by Alain Caillé, critic of the utilitarian paradigm and founder of the MAUSS (Mouvement anti utilitariste dans les sciences sociales), by the Nober prizes Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, even though the latter was not present".

It sounds convincing because Alain Caillé is author of a book on gift, Le tiers paradigme, in whic he declairs himself directly inspired by Marcell Mauss (to the point of makng anacrostic of his name).

However, in the pages Benedict signed there is an insight that goes beyond what I found in Caillé's book. Or at least that is what I read in it with the interpretation I gave of gratuitousness.

The ground inspiration might simply be the archetype of the good business man, as we can find in an old Hollywood movie. In Sabrina, Humphrey Bogart, businessman of great consequence, is organizing the marriage of his brother to launch a new enterprize. Asked why he does it, not for money nor for poweer, which he already has, he answers that he does it for its own sake, no other reason than the pleasure of building things and creating wealth. The answer, with its purely gratuitous motivations, sounds good to me, and it remains valid also after that he leaves behind everything for a more perfect gift, the gracious love of the girl Sabrina (a splendid Audrey Hepburn).

Who knows, Joseph Ratzinger might even have seen it.

An Encyclical Conversation...

I was involved in a conversation with some folks regarding the right way to read Caritas in veritate, in which one interlocutor suggested that George Weigel’s “gold and red” reading were tantamount to, or tat least tending toward the sort of doctrinal, “cherry picking” of which “conservative Catholics” often more or less rightly accuse “liberal Catholics”.

What follows is a response, or the synthesis of the conversation.

Weigel offered some very good insights. He is wrong about the relative importance of the idea of gift, but he is right about the literary inconsistency of the document. It must be said that he offered his reflections less than 24 hours after the release of a 28k+word document that is theologically weighty, to say the least. Indeed, it is so densely written that it will take weeks, if not months to unpack.

Interlocutors raised the question of the relative weight of an Encyclical, and whether it might be dangerous to suggest, as I had, that an Encyclical might be read with a critical eye toward what are what lawyers call the operative parts, and what are dicta. The question whether such readings might be hypocritical is discussed…

While an Encyclical Letter is a very high form of Papal writing, and while the whole of the Encyclical is issued in the Pope's name, the present Encyclical does indeed present the reader with some peculiarities, most of which are rooted in and stem from the topic of the Encyclical, itself, i.e. "integral human development in charity and truth".

Said simply, this is a social encyclical, and the Church does not have power to bind consciences in opinable matters regarding the pursuit of the common good, which call for an exercise of prudential judgment on the part of competent actors.

The Church does have a divinely inspired tradition of thinking about social problems, one that has stood the test of time and continues to be valuable in our day.

Pope Benedict is a better, and a more "ecclesial" thinker that the PCJ&P, which is to say he is better at thinking with the mind of the Church than is the Pontifical Council.

So, one need not attribute GW's attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were, to hypocritical cherry-picking. It might simply be, indeed I think it is, that George would not see the Pope's Letter co-opted by those who would like to put the Papal seal of approval on their policy stances, on the one hand, and on the other, that he genuinely wants to help people think with the mind of the Church, by parsing the authentically Benedictine parts and offering those for our more leisurely rumination.

If it is not absolutely necessary to paint someone with the brush of hypocrisy, then to do so is inappropriate.

First, as regards the Church's understanding of its competence to speak to and on social matters: the Church can teach on basic questions - matters of fundamental importance to social order, e.g. the structure of marriage and the rights to life and liberty, esp. in religious expression.

The controlling canon is 747.2: "It belongs to the Church always and everywhere to announce moral principles, even about the social order, and to render judgment concerning any human affairs insofar as the fundamental rights of the human person or the salvation of souls requires it."

Questions regarding the right way of achieving the essential ends of society are prudential, and fall to citizens and their competent representatives. As Benedict is at pains to remind us in the new Encyclical, "The Church does not have technical solutions to offer and does not claim “to interfere in any way in the politics of States.”

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."

There are two end-notes in this pair of sentences, which come from paragraph 9.:

Cf. Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium et Spes, 36; Paul VI, Apostolic Letter Octogesima Adveniens (14 May 1971), 4: AAS 63 (1971), 403-404; John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus (1 May 1991), 43: AAS 83 (1991), 847.

[11] Paul VI, Encyclical Letter Populorum Progressio, 13: loc. cit., 263-264.

I think it is generally good practice to interpret Encyclical Letters in light of the changeless Magisterium, e.g., in light of ecumenical councils. Pope Benedict certainly rests himself on the II Vatican Council in this regard, even citing GS, a document about which he is known to have concerns.

This is a highfalutin way of saying that the Divine command to feed the hungry does not make us farmers, hunters, fishermen, grocers or cooks.

At this point, it was suggested that the desire to separate the binding parts of this or any teaching document might be less than generous...

I agree that it can seem less than generous, and probably is, sometimes.

Not necessarily, though: esp. in the area of social doctrine, lots of folks just want to figure out whether they have to modify their existing prudential judgments, policy positions, etc., or whether they are free to persist in their opinions.

Sometimes, as when there is a Papal statement that might be construed, or is publicly interpreted by some commentator or another, and sometimes by someone with some pretense to authority, to condemn a given opinion, the holder(s) of that opinion will seek to explain why their opinion is consistent with sound doctrine.... Read More

That is their right, and even, in a certain sense, their duty to their own consciences and to the body of the Church, to whose members no legitimate liberty of opinion is to be denied.

Gift and Gratuity: the heart of Caritas in veritate

My partner in blogging, the Humbly Presumptuous one, has observed that the idea of gift is at the center of Pope Benedict XVI's Encyclical Letter, Caritas in veritate.

Having been through the letter several times, I can say that my blogging partner, my friend and mentor philosophicus, is right on the money, notwithstanding George Weigel's dismissal of the language in which the Encyclical discusses of gift as:

[S]o clotted and muddled as to suggest the possibility that what may be intended as a new conceptual starting point for Catholic social doctrine is, in fact, a confused sentimentality of precisely the sort the encyclical deplores among those who detach charity from truth.

I admire George Weigel greatly, and I think he is right about there being a palpable difference between the Benedictine and the Curial sections. Nevertheless, I disagree very strongly with this dismissal, which is perplexing to me, given Weigel's renowned ability to parse the language of Romanitas.

The most sustained theoretical discussion of gift in the Encyclical is found in the opening section of the 34th paragraph - the opening paragraph of the third (and, it is beginning to appear to this commenator, central) chapter of the Letter:

Charity in truth places man before the astonishing experience of gift. Gratuitousness is present in our lives in many different forms, which often go unrecognized because of a purely consumerist and utilitarian view of life. The human being is made for gift, which expresses and makes present his transcendent dimension. Sometimes modern man is wrongly convinced that he is the sole author of himself, his life and society. This is a presumption that follows from being selfishly closed in upon himself, and it is a consequence — to express it in faith terms — of original sin. The Church's wisdom has always pointed to the presence of original sin in social conditions and in the structure of society: “Ignorance of the fact that man has a wounded nature inclined to evil gives rise to serious errors in the areas of education, politics, social action and morals.” In the list of areas where the pernicious effects of sin are evident, the economy has been included for some time now. We have a clear proof of this at the present time. The conviction that man is self-sufficient and can successfully eliminate the evil present in history by his own action alone has led him to confuse happiness and salvation with immanent forms of material prosperity and social action. Then, the conviction that the economy must be autonomous, that it must be shielded from “influences” of a moral character, has led man to abuse the economic process in a thoroughly destructive way. In the long term, these convictions have led to economic, social and political systems that trample upon personal and social freedom, and are therefore unable to deliver the justice that they promise. As I said in my Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi, history is thereby deprived of Christian hope, deprived of a powerful social resource at the service of integral human development, sought in freedom and in justice. Hope encourages reason and gives it the strength to direct the will. It is already present in faith, indeed it is called forth by faith. Charity in truth feeds on hope and, at the same time, manifests it. As the absolutely gratuitous gift of God, hope bursts into our lives as something not due to us, something that transcends every law of justice. Gift by its nature goes beyond merit, its rule is that of superabundance. It takes first place in our souls as a sign of God's presence in us, a sign of what he expects from us. Truth — which is itself gift, in the same way as charity — is greater than we are, as Saint Augustine teaches. Likewise the truth of ourselves, of our personal conscience, is first of all given to us. In every cognitive process, truth is not something that we produce, it is always found, or better, received. Truth, like love, “is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings.

In this section, the Holy Father accomplishes three things:

• He uses the idea of gift to tie his present reflections to those he offered in Spe salvi;

• He further ties his reflections on the virtue of Hope to his earlier reflections on Charity, making the notion of gift the thread that ties the thought of his three Encyclicals together;

• He grounds his reflections in a densely expressed anthropological vision that has gift as its focal point, making the essential openness to gift the lynchpin that unites the human being in mundane existence to the divine transcendent source of all that is.

In the section immediately following the one quoted above, the Holy Father clarifies that the gift that is constitutive of the deep unity of the human race is the gift of charity in truth, which comes from God the Father. It is received by everyone - first, in our creation, our nature as creatures capable of community with the Divine and therefore with one another - and then, clearly enough for those who would understand (though he does not quite say it, not yet), in our ability to receive and respond with loving gratitude to the fullness of Divine Revelation in the true religion, founded by Christ.

"The logic of gift," writes Pope Benedict, "does not exclude justice, nor does it merely sit alongside it as a second element added from without." The Pope goes on to say that, in order to be authentically human, "[D]evelopment... needs to make room for the principle of gratuitousness as an expression of fraternity."

The principle of gratuitousness is not moon-struck sentimentalism, nor is it a foundation of the utopian dream of bohemian star children. It says that we are capable of giving, because and according to the measure which we have received.

A social order built on the idea that we are not capable of such giving, will always be one that constrains us to give what is due.

A social order built with every one of its parts explicitly justified in terms of more or less direct reference to this principle, however positiviely articulated, will likely be so cumbersome, so bulky and lumbering, as to stifle human invention.

A social order built by people who are aware of the operational presence of this principle in themselves, has some chance of reasonable success, so long as the people remember also the wounds in their nature.

By recalling us to the idea of gift, to the principle of gratuitousness, Pope Benedict XVI is helping us to find the right way of thinking about society. We do well to listen.

LD

Fr Thomas J Reese, SJ, gets it wrong again?

The reliably liberal Jesuit theologian, Thomas J. Reese, has issued a knee-jerk reaction to the Encyclical Letter Caritas in veritate of Pope Benedict XVI.

Fr. Reese does not treat the Encyclical, so much as he proof texts it, or almost: he says what the Pope is “for”, and on Fr. Reese’s view of things, the Pope is for everything that Fr. Reese is for.

Par for the course.

Catholics to the right of the political spectrum do the same thing – it is simply part of the game.

But there is a point beyond which rhetorical selectiveness becomes disingenuous, and before which it were simply sloppy.

While Fr. Reese is not disingenuous in his proof-texting, he is sloppy.

His mistake is one that many on the left make, and that too few on the right ever notice or seek to correct.

Specifically, Fr. Reese takes the Pope’s condemnation of any economic practice based on the theory that the economy itself is essentially amoral, and either confuses or conflates it with a more or less critical embrace of government regulation.

By way of illustration, consider the following remark from Fr. Reese:

The pope disagrees with those who believe that the economy should be free of government regulation. “The conviction that the economy must be autonomous, that it must be shielded from ‘influences’ of a moral character, has led man to abuse the economic process in a thoroughly destructive way,” he writes. “In the long term, these convictions have led to economic, social and political systems that trample upon personal and social freedom, and are therefore unable to deliver the justice that they promise.”

Fr. Reese sets up his quotation by noting the Pope’s disagreement with an imaginary policy stance that is a gross mischaracterization of a classically conservative position (I mean his caricature of conservatives’ wariness of regulation - don’t I?).

So, we would expect the Holy Father to criticize the conservative understanding of the market – right?

Wrong.

When Pope Benedict writes about the deleterious effects of the conviction that, “[T]he economy must be autonomous, that it must be shielded from ‘influences’ of a moral character,” he is writing about the theoretical underpinnings of scientific socialism.

Let's see how this breaks down:

Fr. Reese makes his statement - entirely unobjectionable, although of the "Sun rises in the East" variety, to the effect that the Pope disagrees with opponents of all regulation.

Then he offers this quote from the encyclical:

The conviction that the economy must be autonomous, that it must be shielded from “influences” of a moral character, has led man to abuse the economic process in a thoroughly destructive way.

But listen to what Benedict says right before that (the sentence Reese does not quote):

The conviction that man is self-sufficient and can successfully eliminate the evil present in history by his own action alone has led him to confuse happiness and salvation with immanent forms of material prosperity and social action.

Reese even omits a very telling, "Then" from the front of his 1st quotation.

Reese's second quote is:

In the long term, these convictions have led to economic, social and political systems that trample upon personal and social freedom, and are therefore unable to deliver the justice that they promise.

This sentence immediately and directly follows the first quoted sentence from the passage, so that "these convictions" are the convictions of scientific socialists, not radical free marketers.

In fact, the first radical free market thinkers thought the only necessary (or at any rate viable) correctors for the market were the restraints common morality placed on actors in the marketplace.

If you doubt this reading of things, look to the second sentence, which traces a direct correlation, indeed a causal link between the exclusion of morality from the conduct of economic life, and the rise of economic, social and political systems that are inimical to and destructive of personal and social freedom.

Recall the central tenet of Marxism: man is entirely conditioned by his economic circumstances. According to the scientific socialist, the very language of classical morality is an instrument of oppression, and liberation from the constraints of morality is the first step in the creation of class warriors.

The point is not that all those who favor heavier government regulation of the economy are secret Marxist revolutionaries. The point is that the more government is involved in economic life, the more government tends to be involved in economic life. As government involvement increases, so must the government’s strength increase, and so must the scope of its power expand, until every aspect of our life is regulated – not as a matter of design, but, as the inevitable result of the great leviathan’s natural growth.

In any case, Fr. Reese, while there are some dyed in the wool opponents of any and all government regulation, the majority of market conservatives believe there should be as little regulation as is absolutely necessary to ensure the market does not behave in a way that is destructive of the end it serves, which is human flourishing.

They have this in common with Pope Benedict, who explicitly bases his own reflections on the understanding of authentic progress as integral human development, which Paul VI articulated in Populorum progressio. “Paul VI,” writes Pope Benedict, “had a keen sense of the importance of economic structures and institutions, but he had an equally clear sense of their nature as instruments of human freedom.” Only when development is free, “can development be integrally human; only in a climate of responsible freedom can it grow in a satisfactory manner.”

There is certainly room for discussion of the important questions as to what constitutes responsible freedom, and whether enacting regulations is an exercise in it.

Though She can help us think through these questions, “The Church does not have technical solutions to offer, and does not claim ‘to interfere in any way in the politics of states.’ (Cv i.9.)”