So, I know that any headline that begins with “Pope” is going to be divisive–either you’re on the bus or off right away. But I think the new encyclical “Caritas in Veritate” ( “Charity in Truth”) should be of great interest to many, Catholic or not, because it calls for an end to capitalism as we know it.
Given the documents’s unabashed criticism of the greed, avarice and economic disparity fueled by capitalism, the NY Times and the Washington Post had little to quarrel with. Both papers covered it in a sympathetic way, a departure from the usual editorializing found when they cover Papal news.
Many politically conservative Catholics are up in arms over the “Social Justice-y” cant of the encyclical, seeing the call for a more ethical and equitable distribution of wealth as caving to the Social Justice camp within the Vatican. No surprise that conservative Catholic intellectual George Weigel, Pope John Paul II’s official biographer, came out with both barrels blazing at the National Review online.
Damian Thompson, blogging for the Telegraph of London, has some nice insights on George Weigel’s furor here:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100002538/george-weigels-intemperate-attack-on-benedicts-incoherent-encyclical/
My favorite line from the news coverage so far is this one from the New York Times:
There are paragraphs that sound like Ayn Rand, next to paragraphs that sound like ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ That’s quite intentional,” Vincent J. Miller, a theologian at the University of Dayton, a Catholic institution in Ohio, said by telephone.
Ayn Rand, not so much. But Grapes of Wrath? Sign me up. The timing of this encyclical is uncanny for me. I’m in the process of re-reading Weber’s work on the connection between the Protestant ethic and capitalism, as well as a barn burner of a book called The Fear of Beggars by Kelly S. Johnson. All of this will show up somehow in my new book.
Allen Strouse
July 27, 2009
I first heard of the encyclical in an alert from the ALF-CIO: folks in the U.S. labor movement were very pleased that the Pope not only stressed the need for workers organizations, but in some sense also gave a nod to the Employee Free Choice Act (now being deliberated by the Senate). At the union local where I work, the news came in with all the other news and quickly disappeared.
What strikes me as odd about these reactions to the encyclical is not—pardon me—that people are "on the bus or off right away." Rather, Catholics are criticizing it, and atheists at the Times are eager to praise it—though ordinarily we'd expect Catholics to want to learn from it, and 'liberal' journalists to bash anything that comes out of the Vatican. So there's not a clear Catholic/secular divide.
Rather—and it isn't at all an original observation–there are plenty of individuals who make their living by creating controversies. And here there are people doing polemics rather than thinking deeply. Where the Pope's letter is thoughtful, helpful, and (of all things, in our age of sound bytes) written in actual paragraphs—the content becomes for practically every op-ed writer just a chance to write pro or con—without paying any heed to what's being said. In a word, the reactions are irreverent and self-serving, almost all of them.