The bishops & their critics:

...European manpower adjustment policies and other labor market rigidities, including the high cost of employment relative to other production factors, curtail employment growth in economic upswings and impede the growth of new business by making it very difficult- and in some cases, almost impossible-to lay off workers in economic downturns...

...Can the Catholic tradition be understood to warn against the dehumanizing pitfalls of economic and technological progress at the same time as it positively affirms and supports such progress for human ends...

...BOOKS ON THE ECONOMICS PASTORAL The bishops & their critics WILLIAM M. SULLIVAN & RICHARD MADSEN In the several years of its evolution from the first to the final draft, Economic Justice For All: Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S...

...Economic rights, however, would establish the basis for making claims upon others...

...From Max Weber on, social scientists have noted the tendency of Catholicism to resist the components of the modern project, to be too concerned about the destruction of traditional community loyalities, too suspicious of the hubris engendered by technological innovation and too skeptical of the value of material success to sustain modern rationalized economic development...

...Thus representatives of the AFL-CIO, Thoma R. Donahue and Rudolph A. Oswald, in the collection edited by Thomas Gannon, S.J., contend that the bishops are right to advocate minimum wage guarantees and that a minimum wage brings neither widespread inflation nor massive unemployment...

...Sullivan and Madsen are co-authors of Habits of the Heart (University of California Press...

...In the same volume Milton Friedman argues that a minimum wage cuts off job opportunities to many of the unemployed people the bishops would most like to help...

...Others argue that more generous provision of foreign aid by rich countries will go into the coffers of oppressive governments rather than into the communities of the poor...

...These critics help clarify the several strands of moral and political reflection that must continue to animate discussion of the appropriate Christian perspective on issues in the modern economy...

...After undertaking an economic analysis of the policies advocated by the bishops (and predictably finding those policies self-defeating) Friedman, in the conclusion of his contributions to the Gannon volume, launches into a discussion of the pastoral's "collectivist moral vision," which he finds "repellent...

...According to this view, a building cannot have a moral obligation, a 'country' cannot have a moral obligation, and a 'society' cannot have a duty...

...The books under review amply demonstrate the range of the debate...

...Issues such as these cannot be resolved by social scientific research, but only through dialogue a-bout the roots of our philosophic and religious traditions...

...Many critics fear that the specific kinds of policies advocated by the bishops will seriously harm the productivity of the American economy...

...But it is stimulating something much more important - a new, widespread, and penetrating discussion of some basic American assumptions...

...An emphasis on full employment would therefore discourage what the Business Roundtable calls the "beneficial churning" through which old firms are replaced by new firms in response to technological innovation...

...The pastoral does not seem to have occasioned much of a change in the quantity and quality of such economic and political policy debates...

...However, as Henry Briefs notes, the common good tradition, which has served as the moral basis for modern Catholic social teaching, stresses social justice as participation...

...The pastoral has stimulated a related philosophical and theological debate around the emphasis on the distribution rather than the production of economic goods...

...The economist Carl F. Christ, also writing in the Gannon volume, expresses the often heard worry that "the more progressive a tax system is, the greater the risk it will discourage productive activity...

...They assume that it would be politically unfeasible and perhaps morally wrong to enact policies that would dull the "competitive edge'' of this country and lead to a lower standard of living in the United States...

...These visions, whether of the left or the right, conceive the world as an arena of competition based on a bitter legacy of conflict...

...Manuel G. Velasquez, a philosopher specializing in business ethics, raises these economic concerns to a theological level when he writes of an "absence of an adequate treatment of economic productivity" in the pastoral...

...The political rights familiar to all Americans are rights that establish the individual's freedom from demands im-posed by others...

...Biedenkopf thinks that the Simon-Novak letter provides a more consistent effort in this direction than does the bishops...

...The tradition balances concern about distribution with concern for collective betterment...

...For still others the major question is whether the problems of the third world are due to exploitation by rich industrial nations or, as Walter Block of the Fraser Institute puts it in his book, due to sloth and disorganization...

...The bishops have sparked intense debate within the Catholic church, within other religious bodies, and in American society more broadly...

...The moral traditions on which the letter draws all emphasize these goods as against the competition and fragmentation which seem endemic to the advance of modernity...

...As Friedman, puts it,"If person A has the right to have food, then person B somewhere else must have an obligation to grow the food and provide it-the relation is one of master and slave, not mutual freedom...

...Are the bishops attempting to commend a communal, nonmaterialistic form of life or are they principally identifying Christian social ideals with more egalitarian distributions of goods and opportunities...

...that the basic entity is the individual or, more fundamentally, the family, and that only individuals can have moral obligations...

...Nearly a century since Leo XIII's opening toward the modern world and the social question, the American bishops have opened wide the door of dialogue...

...For Benne, efficiency and productivity, the technical standards of the market, are nonmoral as such, and ought to be sharply differentiated from discussion of moral and political questions...

...The bishops failed to face either of these issues...

...They affirm the need for free trade, but are concerned that it be done on a "level playing field...

...Conservatives like Block who suggest, in more or less euphemistic terminology, that the cause is sloth and disorganization, then make a case for ignoring many of the demands of third-world leaders...

...Robert Benne, a Lutheran scholar writing in the Lutz collection, faults the bishops for not recognizing the great diversity of economic arrangements that might be justified on a broadly Christian moral basis...

...What the critics put into relief is not just the incompleteness of the pastoral's efforts at analysis, but the theological, philosophical, and social science issues that ought to define future investigation and argument...

...A number of critics stress, as John Langan puts it in his sharp and helpfully critical review of this literature, that the bishops must learn "to think more consistently in structural terms...

...the "common good" tradition explained by R. Bruce Douglass...

...Or, as European Christian Democrat Kurt Biedenkopf puts it in the same volume, the "ordering of institutions, like ideas, has consequences," so that in social life "virtue" and "institutional arrangements" are interdependent and "should be the centerpiece of any effort to apply Catholic social thinking to modern industrial democracy...

...In his view, the problem with such parlance is that it assumes that society has a reality that transcends the individuals who make it up...

...He is right to-see the bishop's thinking as a fundamental challenge to that language...

...If the latter, given the nature of modern capitalist societies, then are not these new opportunities likely to expand the hold of materialism on the formerly poor, thus compounding the problem of moral unre-sponsiveness the letter sets out to address...

...The disjunction between moral norms and the directing institutions of modern life involves a long-standing argument among social and political theorists: has the differentiation of basic outlooks and norms affected by modern specialization advanced beyond a point where a coherent moral outlook encompassing the complexity of our societies is even possible...

...Together with the earlier pastoral, The Challenge of Peace, the economic letter, in the consultative process of its composition and in its substance, marks the definitive entry of Catholicism into the center of American public life...

...RICHARD MADSEN is professor of sociology at the University of California at San Diego...

...Relating moral norms to social analysis should become an explicit and central theme of the debate the pastoral has touched off...

...This is the question which the dialogue the bishops have begun must confront and seek creatively to answer...

...The bishops stress that their preferential option for the poor is meant to apply to the poor not just in the United States, but all around the globe, especially to the poorest of the poor in the third world...

...Appropriately, but perhaps surprisingly, the most rhetorically powerful and intellectually vigorous debates engendered by the pastoral have been theological and philosophical rather than economic and political...

...Are these demands strong enough to require that the United States adopt international economic policies that would lead to an improvement in living conditions in the third world at the expense of a lower standard of living in this country...

...It would also have led them naturally to a discussion of a spirituality for the modern corporate members, a spirituality that could enable the corporate member to find meaning and hope in the corporate tasks with which the working day is filled...

...That conversation includes liberation theology, as Anthony Tambasco shows...

...Full employment would inhibit progress toward ever greater efficiency in a dynamic economy...

...Economy has been, probably to a unique degree, both an ecclesial and a public document...

...The strongest point of the bishops' effort is their unequivocal argument that the patterns of our social life are essential concerns of Christian spirituality, that disci-pleship mandates critical citizenship...

...Placing the letter in the context of twentieth-century efforts to relate Christian faith to modern economics brings the bishops into an even wider and historically richer conversation...

...But they disagree on what is perhaps the thorniest economic issue facing our society: How compelling are the moral demands of global human solidarity...

...He objects to the bishops' statements that"a country . . . has a moral obligation," '' society has a duty,'' and so forth...

...If one holds to this individualistic understanding of society, one will indeed have difficulty, as do Friedman and many other critics, accepting the idea of "economic rights" central to the pastoral...

...Behind such concerns is the question of the relation of the Catholic tradition to the modern project and its commitment to unlimited economic growth and technological innovation as the primary goal of human activity...

...Many of the critics of the bishops, even those who are sym-pathetic, instinctively see the international system as an arena of competition between nation states rather than as a single human community...

...As the debate over the pastoral reached beyond church circles to the world of secular intellectuals and activists, one might have expected WILLIAM M. SULLIVAN is professor of philosophy at La Salle University...

...While strongly suggesting that the bishops' thinking, and...

...for example, full employment through government creation of jobs, an increase in the minimum wage, constraints on factory closings, progressive taxation that redistributes resources from the rich to the poor...

...There has been a great deal of such discussion, but most of it has been predictable and inconclusive...

...And though Pope Leo's current successor did not develop the point during his recent American visit, the bishops' teaching has already earned the highest commendation of a democratic society: the pastoral has become an important voice in the public argument.rtant voice in the public argument...

...that discussion of the pastoral would revolve less around the theologically grounded visions of moral ends proclaimed by the bishops and more around the social science grounding for the political and economic policies tentatively recommended by the bishops to achieve those ends...

...Friedman's understanding of the relationship between the self and society and his thinking about human rights echo the dominant moral language of American culture, the language of individualism...

...Thus the pastoral has led non-Catholic economists like Friedman to explicate the philosophical and even theological roots of their positions...

...and the Protestant Social Gospel's "Kingdom Theology," developed by Diane Yeager...

...These issues are argued by a group of respondents who question the adequacy of the bishops' linking of social analysis to their moral stance...

...These assumptions concern such matters as the relationship between the individual and society, the ultimate purposes of technological development, the relation between personal religious beliefs, moral convictions, social institutions, and the nature of human community...

...The collection edited by R. Bruce Douglass provides some promising efforts to clarify these issues by tracing the conflicts among the letter's aims to the theological and philosophical traditions on which the bishops and their staff drew...

...Catholic social thought generally, will have to take more account than they did only a few years ago, critics and respondents have provided valuable new resources and possibilities for enriching the dialogue the bishops began...

...On the other hand, dependency theorists who claim that the cause is exploitation sometimes make a case for international class struggle against imperialistic capitalism...

...Quoting from a statement by the "Business Roundtable," James E. Burke, chairman of the board of Johnson and Johnson, emphasizes in his contribution to the Gannon volume the importance of the"relative ease of job destruction" to job creation...

...Such debates have been a part of the American political landscape for a long time and will doubtlessly continue for so long as economics remains an inexact science and so long as there are contending interests between management and labor...

...The virtue of his lucid critique of the pastoral-and of many others in the same vein-is to make explicit the differences between traditional Catholic understandings of the self and society and dominant American understandings, and to enable a genuine debate about these differences to be carried on...

...The churches, claims Benne, are best at "providing a gracious context for bringing together groups and interests with divergent points of view and facilitating their conversation...

...Once beyond the naive, positivist fundamentalism which claims that discussion of value and fact must be kept methodologically separate, the complex truth is that normative and analytical discussion interpenetrate...

...The new level of engagement between the church and the wider community of public discourse is very likely to have permanent effects on both parties...

...An understanding of productivity would have enabled the bishops to analyze in depth the positive aspects of the American economy...

...Practically all their commentators agree that economic issues have to be addressed in an international context...

...In this vein, Birnbaum, while stressing interdependence among modern institutions, underscores the thinness of American moral consensus to which the bishops can appeal...

...And it addresses the productivity argument, since with modern technology, resources are not simply given but can be developed...

...The pastoral, then, is emphatically on the side of greater participation, responsibility, and integration in modern economic life...

...A number of critics illustrate this by questioning the consistency of the bishops' purpose in a way tied to the"preferential option for the poor...

...Those who hold this view do not want to see the country or the society or the government viewed as an organismic entity with moral obligations in and of itself...

...One such friendly critic, sociologist Norman Birnbaum, writes in the Gannon volume that the bishops' moral appeals to change persons and institutions underestimate "the accumulated historicity of institutions, the ways in which these capture or predetermine moral socialization" to reproduce the very attitudes the bishops seek to change...

...In it she mounts a criticism of the common good tradition's dilution of Christian content which she finds implicit in its appeal to secular reason...

...He advocates a moral view "that suggests something wholly different: that a 'country' or a 'society' is a collection of individuals...

...A final debate inspired by the bishops' pastoral centers on what might be called nationalist and internationalist visions of global human community...

...To what extent can Catholicism offer a vision of international solidarity strong enough and convincing enough to motivate efforts to overcome this legacy...

...The biblical theology of justice so important to both the "option for the poor" and for many liberation theologians stresses distribution as the great test of communal righteousness...