A new era of social teaching

...J. BRYAN HEHIR cial tradition...

...Looked at from this perspective, On Human Work lies close to the beginning of a new period...

...This is the kind of frontier where critical commentary on the social teaching is needed...

...The needed critical commentary will find this growing edge and its relationship to recent theological thought on property, social systems, and injustice the most fertile area for exploration...

...and involve a recurring description of how the personal dimension of work is related to national, international, and religious issues...

...The social teaching from Pius XII through Paul VI had a different focus...

...But there are emphases and openings which give a new edge to the tradition...

...As the scope of the social question expanded, so did the categories of Catholic social thought: in 1961 John XXIII spoke of the "international common good...

...At the point where international and transnational forces meet, political scientists use the concept of linkage...

...The issue from the 1940s into the 1970s became economic justice among the nations or, as the 1971 Synod described it, international social justice...

...The reponse to them will be a major contribu tion to the growing edge of Catholic so cial tradition...

...The 1970s saw the emergence in a qualitatively new way of both transnational actors and transnational problems on the international scene...

...It describes the way in which foreign policy decisions feedback into domestic politics...

...The theme which dominated the social teaching for the first half of this century was the achievement of economic justice within a nation...

...In its principal affirmations about these topics, the encyclical is a familiar document...

...These transnational questions are just below the surface of the recent encyclical...

...These questions take him into a commentary on liberal and "socialized" forms of ownership...

...Ninety years is a young tradition as Catholicism measures its history, but there are clear points of development in the tradition thus far...

...The national issues of economic justice did not disappear: the farm workers of Texas and California and the textile workers of the South will find John Paul's ringing endorsement of unionization as relevant as Polish workers will find it...

...An ancient concept was given new substance to meet anew range of problems...

...neither has provided detailed moral norms for the transnational level which one finds in Catholic thought for national issues of social justice...

...J. BRYAN HEHIR...

...In the confines of a column, I will concentrate on the changing historical context reflected in the latest of the social encyclicals...

...Neither the new actors nor the new problems dissolved the reality of the nation state...

...This is at least an implicit invitation to practice what I have preached...

...In doing so, he uses his distinctively personal style, weaving through the long document the central theme of the human person as the core value in the world of work and in the range of economic questions which surround work today...

...The "social question" for Leo XIII (1891) A new era of social teaching J. Bryan Hehir and Pius XI (1931) was the impact of industrialization on the dignity and rights of workers...

...At a time when the poor countries are caught between high oil prices, depressed markets for their products and inadequate food production, the Reagan administration seems intent on installing supply side economics at the World Bank, limiting the developing countries' access to the International Monetary Fund, and reconsidering the U.S...

...This development from national through international to transnational issues is a cumulative process...

...The new encyclical, written to commemorate the ninetieth anniversary of the first social encyclical, Rerum Novarum, provides ample content for analysis...

...The historical setting for Rerum Novarum was the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the United States...

...The former were symbolized by the multinational corporations and the latter included problems of hunger, population, and environment...

...The pope sets out to review and extend the Catholic social tradition...

...In addition to these two dimensions of the social question, however, there are new characteristics sufficiently important to mark a new period of development...

...The "North-South" question is highly visible in the teaching of John XXIII, Paul VI, and Vatican II...

...produce a tight explanation why property rights are relative not absolute claims...

...role in the International Development Association (the global version of the safety net for the truly needy...

...Nor, to cite the obvious, has the international social question even approached resolution...

...Paul VI and John Paul II both recognized the change these new forces introduced into international relations...

...The second stage, or international period, of the social teaching yielded in turn to a third stage of transnational issues which appear for the first time in Paul VI's apostolic letter, The Eightieth Year (1971), and are prominent themes in On Human Work...

...The immigration question is an example of a linkage issue...

...evoke the strongest affirmation of support for unions yet found in Catholic teaching...

...The same calculus appears in the relationship of a liberal trade policy (providing market ac cess for developing countries) and un employment in vulnerable sectors of the domestic economy...

...This problem is further complicated by the way multina tional companies can move productive capacities from high-wage unionized lo cations to developing countries where unions are restricted or outlawed...

...to accept new immigrants is to touch a range of domestic policy questions...

...Paul VI caught the spirit of the development in his statement that the social question had become a worldwide phenomenon...

...Pope John's concept of the international common good is designed to allow for a weighing of these linkage questions in moral as well as political terms...

...Both, however, placed new constraints on the state and posed new problems for it...