Taking on the super-rivals:
Hehir, J Bryan
J. Bryan Hehir
TAKING ON THE SUPER-RIVALS
REACTIONS TO THE POPE'S LATEST ENCYCLICAL
John Paul IPs latest encyclical, The Social Concern of the Church, has raised hopes and hackles. The latter are...
...The latter are much in evidence on American op-ed pages, prominently voiced by William Safire, William Buckley, and-more gently-by Michael Novak...
...The purpose is less to condemn than to invite us to a profound change in behavior...
...Students of the social teaching will find the discussion of "structures of sin'' and their relationship to personal sin a starting point for further analysis...
...It is precisely this equation of East and West as bearing joint moral responsibility for the slow progress of development in the Southern Hemisphere which has drawn the fire of Messrs...
...Carter open to devastating criticism...
...The tone of Mr...
...The truth contained in the statement was overwhelmed by its absolute and unidimensional character...
...Buckley's idiosyncratic view that the papacy should provide the ideological defense for the Western economic system...
...Three examples of the encyclical's catalytic potential can be adduced...
...The counterpoint to the Carter extreme has been the equally unidimensional East-West grid imposed an all issues in the Reagan era...
...Seen in this way the present division of the world is a direct obstacle to the real transformation of the conditions of underdevelopment in the developing and less advanced countries...
...Not one of the authors cited above seems up to it...
...policy debate they find the pope a fellow-traveler with the heresy of "moral equivalence," i.e., the notion that the superpowers share similar responsibility for the arms race, the injection of superpower rivalry into regional disputes, and the failure to respond to the human needs of the poor of the world...
...The extensive use of the category of interdependence and its relationship to an ethic of solidarity is a step beyond The Development of Peoples...
...In John Paul II's view none of these issues is being adequately addressed...
...There is in this philosophical-theological mix the potential for movement on several fronts...
...In the last decade, U.S...
...Similarly, one hopes that not too much of the post-encyclical discussion will be focused on Mr...
...While he draws heavily upon Paul VI's earlier letter, this analytical approach goes significantly beyond The Development of Peoples...
...J. Bryan Hehir TAKING ON THE SUPER-RIVALS REACTIONS TO THE POPE'S LATEST ENCYCLICAL John Paul IPs latest encyclical, The Social Concern of the Church, has raised hopes and hackles...
...the debt problem and its stranglehold on development...
...trying to tie the label to someone of John Paul II's life experience and documented record on human rights is an unenviable task...
...There is reason to find many parties responsible, and the superpowers are targeted in this encyclical with particular clarity...
...In 1977 President Carter argued that the East-West perspective was anachronistic and the new agenda of world politics would be the interdependence issues of North and South...
...A more interesting and more serious effort would be to press the papal linkage of East-West and North-South issues to a more detailed level of specificity...
...Familiar papal themes reappear: the arms race and the arms trade fit in the description of structures of sin...
...Safire and Buckley...
...Novak is a different story...
...they add little to a serious discussion of the document...
...It is simpler to cite the errors in formulation than to strike a balanced analysis of these two dimensions of world politics...
...There are several reasons for this condition, but the one to which the pope returns continually in the letter is the effect of the "East-West" political and ideological competition on the "North-South" problem: "The tension between the two blocs which began at the end of the Second World War has dominated the whole of the subsequent forty years...
...as a persistent and provocative student of Catholic theology, his voice will and should be heard as part of the sorting out of the encyclical's several themes...
...Safire's response can't be excused but its complaints should be dismissed...
...As he has done before, John Paul II has combined the philosophical resources of Catholic teaching with a more explicit biblical-theological reflection than one finds in classical social thought (including The Development of Peoples...
...The pope's discussion of the "right of initiative" will enrich both the teaching on private property and on subsidiarity...
...The hopes raised by the encyclical derive from its scope and substance...
...Pressing for more attention to the problems of the South was altogether in order, but ignoring the centrality of the U.S.Soviet competition left Mr...
...It is a broad-based assessment of the interna-tional horizon from a pope whom George Will has described as "the most fascinating figure on the world stage today...
...the centrality of human rights-political and economic-for authentic development and legitimate government...
...The scope of the letter guarantees a vigorous debate...
...The content of the moral analysis in the new encyclical will be an invitation to theologians and others with particular interest in Catholic social teaching...
...indeed its primary value may be the arguments which it will initiate in the secular disciplines of politics and economics and in the normative disciplines of theology and ethics...
...In the language of the U.S...
...John Paul II sets out to assess the state of development two decades later and finds that "the hopes for development . . . today appear very far from being realized...
...The moral equivalence charge is the language of the American political right...
...Somehow it just doesn't seem appropriate to reduce the papal teaching to a public relations effort for the NATO countries...
...It is filled with concrete policy discussions...
...This method of joining the East-West analysis to the North-South dimensions of world politics has been a prominent idea in John Paul's teaching...
...First, the framework of analysis which pervades the letter: the occasion for The Social Concern of the Church is the twentieth anniversary of Paul VI's encyclical, The Development of Peoples...
...Most, but not all, of the issues flow from the pope's assessment of the impact of the "blocs" on the developing countries...
...Finally, those who would contain the church's social teaching to general principles alone will find this letter troublesome...
...A solid Lenten message.enten message...
...The value of the papal critique of the superpower role is that it is also an invitation to scholars and politicians to weigh the distinct elements in each set of issues and to probe the intersection of East-West and North-South anew...
...policy has been cast in two extreme modes, neither of which is politically or morally adequate to the reality of international life today...
Vol. 115 • March 1988 • No. 6
