Neither East nor West: On the Pope’s Radical New Encyclical

When Pope John Paul II visited the U.S. last fall, we heard from liberal partisans about how the Catholic Church fails to understand and appreciate the “American experience” — of sexual self-indul­gence. Of course, the universal Church is not in the habit of blessing national parochialisms or self-in­dulgence. If she were, who would need her? So, the Pope came, listened, and kept teaching what the Church has traditionally taught.

Now, with the issuance of John Paul’s second social encyclical, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (“The So­cial Concerns of the Church”), we are hearing from conservative ideologues about how the Church fails to understand and appreciate the “American exper­ience” — in this case, of military and economic self-indulgence. Of course, this is hardly unprecedented. Conservatives complained about John Paul’s first social encyclical, Laborem Exercens — not to mention his various social pronouncements made during his world travels, and the U.S. bish­ops’ pastorals on peace and the economy.

Nevertheless, thanks largely to our blinkered public-opinion molders, the impression persists far and wide that this Pope is a conservative. Such an impression can be promulgated only by those who regard polymorphous sexual pleasure as among the highest of human priorities. Adherence to such a sense of priorities is itself the mark of very privileg­ed persons — which is what most members of the mass media in this country are.

But if one could see life from the bottom up or the outside in — from the viewpoint of landless peasants and underemployed workers in the Third World or even foreclosed farmers and the homeless in our lovely land — one would understand this Pope in a very different light. Indeed, his Sollicitu­do Rei Socialis states that “the Church feels called to take her stand beside the poor,” particularly in their “growing awareness of [their] solidarity…and their public demonstrations on the social scene….”

What John Paul calls the Church’s “option or love or preference for the poor” is one of the bases upon which this encyclical does something quite radical: it equates Western capitalism with Eastern Communism, and condemns both even-handedly. Do the media understand how radical this is? Would Dan Rather be so bold as to adopt such a posture? Have any of the Democratic candidates for the presidency dared to say any such thing? While Catholic social teaching, taken as a whole, cannot be equated with any ideology, if this ency­clical need be “placed” on the ideological map, it comes closest to the position of the left- or neutral­ist-wing of the Socialist International.

Indicative of this encyclical’s “leftism,” our friends at the Democratic and neoliberal New Re­public, in a lead editorial, have registered their stern disapproval of the encyclical. “The liberal capitalist West,” they objected, “deserves to be de­clared superior to the East.”

For years, the New Oxford Review has been propounding the view that the East and West are moral equivalents — or more precisely, immoral equivalents. While John Paul has been suggesting this for a long while, he now says it with great clar­ity and force. So, let’s consider his logic.

It is a “centuries-old tradition of the Church,” the Holy Father tells us, that the means of subsis­tence and the goods derived therefrom are intend­ed by God to be shared by everyone. This theologi­cal premise puts the Church profoundly at odds with the survival-of-the-fittest ethos of capitalism, and it is one of the sources of what neoconservative Michael Novak calls the “Catholic anti-capitalist tradition,” of which he is so critical. This prem­ise is the base from which John Paul mounts his critique of East and West, and the division of the world into two blocs.

John Paul notes that the media of social com­munication in the Northern Hemisphere “frequent­ly impose a distorted vision of life and of man….” (Has the Pope been watching American com­mercial TV?) He also says — and this will be a shocker to most Americans — that the West, as we as the East, has “its own forms of propaganda and indoctrination.” This is a daring explanation as to why we do not see the world as it ought to be seen, and it is a bold assertion sure to infuriate Americans who are certain that our view of the world is spontaneous and objective while that of our adver­saries is manipulated and biased. (The only qualifi­cation John Paul might have added is that while the propaganda and indoctrination in the East are turgid and clumsy, in the West they are subtle, clever, and very seductive.)

Anyone interested in unvarnished truth should give the Pope a serious hearing. After all, his abode is the Eternal City, he is the guardian of 2,000-plus years of human experience and divine wisdom, and he presides over the largest and most multinational religion in the world. Sheer common sense would tell us that he is in a pretty good posi­tion to see through the rival claims and special pleading of Johnny-come-lately nation-states and blocs. From this vantage point, John Paul declares that the world views of both East and West are “in need of radical correction.” And as regards the pri­mary focus of this encyclical — poverty in the Third World — he says that both the Eastern and Western blocs harbor in their own ways “a tenden­cy toward imperialism…or toward forms of neo-colonialism.” We in the West are habituated to think only in terms of Soviet-bloc expansionism, and to worry exclusively about our own security. But there is, too, a Western-bloc or capitalist ex­pansionism, and our adversaries have their own security worries as well. According to the Pope, however, the security concerns of both East and West are “unacceptably exaggerated.”

When the East and West vie for power in the Third World, they treat the poor nations as but pawns, which is of no real help to the poor. The ri­valry between blocs, says the Pope, is “a direct ob­stacle to the real transformation of the conditions of underdevelopment in the…less advanced coun­tries.”

Because of the two blocs’ obsession with se­curity, resources which should be spent on alle­viating misery are wasted on armaments, says John Paul. The material goods of the world are divinely intended for everyone’s benefit, but not only are they wasted on the means of violence, the ad­vantaged nations hoard their wealth. In this regard, the Pope is particularly critical of the West, which, he says, is increasingly falling into “selfish isola­tion.” If the Third World suffers from underdevel­opment, the West suffers from “superdevelopment,” which consists in “an excessive availability of every kind of material goods for the benefit of certain so­cial groups.”

This situation is scandalous on two counts: (1) When hundreds of millions of people are in need, such selfishness is “a real desertion of a mor­al obligation.” (2) Superdevelopment yields a civil­ization of “consumerism,” which is a pernicious disease making us “slaves of ‘possession’ and of immediate gratification.” Consumerism generates not only “crass materialism,” but also “artificial needs,” and hence a chronic and “radical dissatis­faction.” Possessions can be like narcotics, and we have wound up with an addictive society: “the more one possesses the more one wants, while deeper aspirations remain unsatisfied and perhaps even stifled.”

Conservative dissenters from the encyclical in­terject that at least in the West there is freedom of religion, and that, if only on that basis, the Church — any church — should judge the West morally su­perior to the East. Of course, this tack is typical of conservatives: the appeal to institutional self-inter­est. But since the Second Vatican Council, the Church has been much slower to bite this deceptive bait. And with good reason. The Church is decay­ing amid the comfortable freedom of the West, whereas she has been purified and invigorated by the persecutions in the East, and her greatest visi­ble expansion is taking place amid the deprivation and adversity of the Third World.

Of course, John Paul recognizes the positive good which is freedom of religion. But he also has first-hand knowledge of the truth articulated at the Second Vatican Council: “the Church…has greatly profited and still profits from the antagon­ism of those who oppose or who persecute her” (Gaudium et Spes, 44).

No, the appeal to ecclesiastical self-interest won’t wash anymore. Indeed, John Paul says that it may be necessary for the Church to sell “super­fluous church ornaments and costly furnishings…in order to provide food, drink, clothing and shel­ter for those who lack these things.” Let’s hope prelates and priests the world over will act on this advice. In short, the Church is increasingly willing to trust her Lord, rather than her own riches or le­gal guarantees of freedom, in carrying out her mis­sion. If the security concerns of the Eastern and Western blocs have been “unacceptably exaggerat­ed,” the Church seems to be saying the same about herself. And it is the Church’s own increasing free­dom from her own security concerns that has help­ed her speak with greater gospel courage and clar­ity about the warped security concerns of the prin­cipalities and powers, and about not only the per­sonal, but also the social, dimensions of sin.

John Paul says that “not only individuals fall victim to…sin; nations and blocs can do so too.” Indeed, our divided world is “subject to structures of sin.” The structural sin of the West, he says, is the “all-consuming desire for profit,” and the East’s is the “thirst for power.” Behind Western and East­ern imperialism, says the Holy Father, “are real forms of idolatry: of money, ideology, class, tech­nology,” and these idols help keep the Third World impoverished.

However painful this encyclical has been to partisans of Western capitalism, they have been quick to praise the encyclical at one point: its con­cern for “the right of economic initiative.” But too quick! When everyone from the Socialist President of France to Mikhail Gorbachev to the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party has been extolling the spirit of initiative, it is naïve to construe the Pope’s words here as a tilt to the West.

What’s more, the right of economic initiative is not identical with the right to private productive property. Over the last century, papal commentary on the rights of private property has grown increas­ingly restrictive, to the point where in this encycli­cal we hear more about economic initiative than private property. This is most significant, and not surprising.

From Pope Pius Xl’s Quadragesimo Anno (1931) through John Paul’s Laborem Exercens, the Holy See has increasingly spoken out in favor of workers’ ownership and self-management of enter­prises. When enterprises are owned by workers, rather than private investors, and run by managers elected by the workers rather than managers ap­pointed by investors, those enterprises are no long­er “private property.” They are the collective, so­cialized property of the workers. In Laborem Exer­cens, John Paul did not speak against socialized property as such; rather, he addressed himself to the issue of when socialization is, as he put it, “sat­isfactory.” It is such, he said, when “on the basis of his work each person is fully entitled to consider himself a part owner of the great workbench at which he is working with everyone else.” Which means that property is not authentically socialized when it is merely the preserve of the state. And: “Any socialization of the means of production” must see to it that “the human person can preserve his awareness of working ‘for himself.'” Here we have the right to economic initiative, which is com­patible not only with private property but with socialized property — and one might add that it is especially important where property is socialized. In both the East (notably Hungary and China) and the West (various worker co-ops and ESOP’s [see Pete Sheehan’s “The Workers of Weirton Steel: Putting Catholic Social Teaching into Practice” in the Dec. NOR]), and in neutral countries (especial­ly Yugoslavia and Sweden), workers have been be­coming de jure and/or de facto owners of the means of production, and in the process have col­lectively assumed the rights and obligations of old-fashioned entrepreneurship. These are clear cases of what John Paul calls “satisfactory socializa­tion,” and this is another reason why upholding the right of economic initiative cannot be inter­preted as a tilt to the capitalist West.

Contrary to the biases of Western leftists, on the other hand, we may not overlook the issues of abortion, euthanasia, and birth control. Here too the encyclical is radical, but in a more generic sense. John Paul’s overarching theme in this ency­clical is a personalist one: “the dignity of the per­son.” According to the main contours of the encyclical, underdevelopment violates the dignity of the person in the Third World, superdevelopment and “crass materialism” violate it in the West, and bu­reaucratic hegemony violates it in the East — and the latter two indignities have a lot to do with the first indignity. But the dignity of the person is threatened in yet other ways.

“Peace,” says John Paul, “is indivisible. It is either for all or for none.” We cannot presume to have peace in the world when there is lethal vio­lence in the womb and the geriatric ward. The dig­nity of the preborn and the elderly may not be slighted.

Then there is the indignity of Western coun­tries’ forcing birth-control drugs and devices on Third World peoples as a condition of aid. Not on­ly does this show an “absolute lack of respect” for the sensitivities of the poor and their generosity to­ward life, but it is a not-so-veiled attempt to frus­trate the population growth of colored peoples — which John Paul frankly sees as “a tendency to­wards a form of racism.”

Does population growth retard economic de­velopment? Perhaps. But, as John Paul never tires of stressing, “the mere accumulation of goods and services…is not enough for the realization of hu­man happiness.” We need more than a one-dimen­sional view of human development. “A rigorous re­spect for…moral, cultural and spiritual require­ments” is indispensable, for without that, all ma­terial comforts “will prove unsatisfying and in the end contemptible.”

As for birth control and abortion, the Pope might have added that just as the security concerns of the East and West are “unacceptably exaggerat­ed,” similarly, the sundering of sex from its procreative dimension and the refusal to welcome new life in the womb reveal unacceptably exaggerated concerns for personal security. It is incongruous, to say the least, for those of us who would urge America’s leaders to relax in the face of Soviet mis­siles, and to open our hearts and tax coffers to the needy, to be paralyzed with fear and gripped with visions of lethal revenge in the face of ever so deli­cate and defenseless life in the womb. As ever, the answer to insecurity is ultimately love — for per­fect love casteth out fear.

As radical and demanding as this encyclical is, embedded in it is a wide-ranging implication which will really jolt the complacency of Western Chris­tians. If, as the Holy Father indicates, the West is not morally superior to the East, then is it possible for a Christian to justify certain practices of his government while condemning similar practices of his government’s adversaries? This encyclical would seem to say a clear “no.”

Consider some cases: was it right for the U.S. to send 500,000-plus G.I.s to South Vietnam to prop up a friendly, but unpopular, regime, but wrong for the U.S.S.R. to send 100,000-plus sol­diers to Afghanistan to prop up a friendly, but un­popular regime? Was it right for the U.S., through manipulation and intrigue, to terminate the Arbenz experiment in Guatemala and the Allende experi­ment in Chile, but wrong for the U.S.S.R., through manipulation and intrigue, to terminate the Soli­darity experiment in Poland? Was it right for the U.S. to invade the Dominican Republic and Grena­da and buy soldiers (the contras) to invade Nicara­gua, but wrong for North Korea to invade South Korea and for the U.S.S.R. to invade Hungary and Czechoslovakia? By the moral logic of this encycli­cal, such double standards are disallowed.

Finally, while Sollicitudo Rei Socialis is ad­dressed to “all people of good will,” it has special poignancy for Catholics. Two huge questions stand out: First, leftist Catholics, who are heartily ap­plauding the thrust of this encyclical, will likely want to browbeat conservative Catholics with it; after all, this is a papal encyclical and, as such, car­ries considerable authority. But having spent so much of their energy undermining papal authority in other areas, will they be able to do so without reeking of hypocrisy? Second, conservative (or “loyal”) Catholics have trumpeted their fidelity to the papacy in the areas of birth control, abortion, homosexuality, ordination of women, liturgical ru­brics. Church discipline, and so forth. Will they be able to manifest a similar loyalty if it must be pur­chased by sacrificing not only many of their cherished political and economic beliefs but also their reflexive loyalty to Caesar?