Focusing on how much papal muscle the note can flex, however, risks ignoring what is at least an equally revealing question: Whatever you make of it, does the note seem to reflect important currents in Catholic social and political thought anywhere in the world?No doubt he is right. Given the purchase that demographic and sociological predictions have within the Catholic bureaucracy, is it possible that a new and totally different controversy over the question "what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" is in the offing? The PCJP writes:
The answer is yes, and it happens to be where two-thirds of the Catholics on the planet today live: the southern hemisphere, also known as the developing world.
It's fitting that the Vatican official responsible for the document is an African, Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana, because it articulates key elements of what almost might be called a "southern consensus." One way of sizing up the note's significance, therefore, is as an indication that the demographic transition long under way in Catholicism, with the center of gravity shifting from north to south, is being felt in Rome.
The conditions exist for going definitively beyond a 'Westphalian' international order in which States feel the need for cooperation but do not seize the opportunity to integrate their respective sovereignties for the common good of peoples.
It is the task of today’s generation to recognize and consciously to accept these new world dynamics for the achievement of a universal common good. Of course, this transformation will be made at the cost of a gradual, balanced transfer of a part of each nation’s powers to a world Authority and to regional Authorities, but this is necessary at a time when the dynamism of human society and the economy and the progress of technology are transcending borders, which are in fact already very eroded in a globalized world.
The birth of a new society and the building of new institutions with a universal vocation and competence are a prerogative and a duty for everyone, without distinction. What is at stake is the common good of humanity and the future itself.A prerogative and duty for everyone, without distinction. What is at stake is the common good. How is it possible for ordinary Catholics to carry out this task? In a secular age, no less? We hardly have the capacity to comprehend our own parishes (assuming we are lucky enough to have committed to suffer along with just one). The document as good as implies that a bureaucrat working for a United Nations that, as Sean Dailey rightly points out at Crisis Magazine, "put Saudi Arabia on its human rights commission" and pushes "abortion and contraception in every developing nation on earth" is more true to Catholic responsibility in a post-Westphalian age than any mere cultural Catholic ever could be. (Max Lindenman, you're too late!) Is it not likely that a United Nations-inspired globalization authority will lead to what James Matthew Wilson describes as "a demimonde of fragmented ethnic cultures and shadow citizenships"? Objections that Caritas in Veritate included the requirement that any such organization "promote a person-based and community-oriented cultural process of world-wide integration that is open to transcendence" (§42) will fall on deaf ears.
What does the question about the relation between Athens and Jerusalem mean now that we must be globalists? What will it mean after the Southern Wave? What will it mean when it is revealed (as it already has been by Allen himself) that the Southern Wave is no better equipped for the Secular Age than a decadent West that refuses to acknowledge the setting of the metaxy? How one longs to hear once more that it is souls that are at stake.
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- In his book The Future Church, John Allen anticipated these questions by joking that Hilaire Belloc will loudly roll over in his grave when it becomes abundantly clear that Europe is not the faith (see page 14). I didn't think it was that funny until I watched Dr. Fahey's ISI lecture on Belloc. Imagine that sort of character existing after culture.
- Rod Dreher correctly draws attention to the inevitability of questions about "global financial entities." It is important to recall Chrystia Freeland's Atlantic article on the "new global elite" in this context. Beware the imitatio plutocrat.
- Rick Garnett makes the point I tried to make in my last post on this document: "[M]any are making the mistake that was widely made with respect to the Pope's Caritas, i.e., imagining that the Church proposes a list of 'economic policy proposals' that can be conveniently lifted, to the extent they strike the lifter as attractive, without any attached moral anthropology[.]"
- Worst-case scenario: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court won't be the only reason you remember the word interdict.
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Jim Kalb in October 2010: "I went to a wedding recently in a rather beautiful Episcopalian church in an old Pennsylvania town. Instead of the Stations of the Cross on the wall, they had the stations of the UN Millennium Development Goals—gender equality, fighting HIV, global partnership, and the rest."
Message of Pope Benedict XVI for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees 2012: "Christian communities are to pay special attention to migrant workers and their families by accompanying them with prayer, solidarity and Christian charity, by enhancing what is reciprocally enriching, as well as by fostering new political, economic and social planning that promotes respect for the dignity of every human person, the safeguarding of the family, access to dignified housing, to work and to welfare."
Ronald Colombo discusses the PCJP's view of the "common good" at Conglomerate Blog: "In any event, what if the link between the liberty to pursue private self interest, and the common good, has been severed? What side would most come down on? What if economic freedom (to the extent it has been enjoyed in the West) does not best serve the common good?"
These are important questions but when the limits of the "common good" are nothing short of global they become different questions from the ones that traditionalist conservatives have been asking all along.
Was John Paul II correct (from a political and economic perspective) when he wrote: "Globalization, a priori, is neither good nor bad. It will be what people make of it. No system is an end in itself, and it is necessary to insist that globalization, like any other system, must be at the service of the human person; it must serve solidarity and the common good" (Address of the Holy Father to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences)?
Dreher questions the "intellectual honesty" of the right-wing use of the term "cafeteria Catholic." As the discussion progresses, it appears he acknowledges the basic distinction between typical left-wing and right-wing dissent but still thinks it is unseemly for conservative Catholics to use the term when they're willing to chop up encyclicals a la Weigel. That's all PR though. Liberals are generally proud of the gravity of their dissent when they think about it at all. The bite of the term is supposed to come from the idea that they are fickle rather than grave.
Anyway, there are a couple interesting comments from James Matthew Wilson (Front Porch Republic) in the same section: "Paul VI’s Populorum makes a subtle but clear point that the Church appreciates the great benefits of a dynamic global economy and wishes merely to turn it toward more unambiguously just ends. Whereas I think any financial institution larger than a small retail bank is suspect at best, and would like to see us adjust to and accept the modesty a world of small institutions and small polities would require. But on this point, I’m apparently well outside the mainstream; perhaps Benedict, therefore, is the less utopian (or rather, Arcadian) thinker."
That's an interesting point about the possibly changing meaning of "utopian." How else could the pope possibly respond to an actually existing "dynamic global economy" except by suggesting that it be "unambiguously just." The traditionalist can feel free to hope that some sort of creative destruction will restore the "little platoons." But the Vatican has to be everywhere. Of course, that doesn't justify the demand that every parishioner in every parish has to think about this stuff.
Very good discussion at Lawrence Auster's View From the Right.
And here is Bonald arguing that authoritarian Catholics shouldn't be worried because "the authority of the Church is categorically superior to that of the state" and that "nuclear arguments" (double meaning: the blast and the small societal units) objecting to this proposed instantiation of the idea of a global authority rooted in Catholic moral anthropology are only practically important.
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