Editorials
CONTENTS Volume CXVIII, Number 11 Correspondence 354 Editorials 355 Bland secularism?: RaymondA. Schroth 357 Lighten up, guys: David R. Carlin, Jr. 358 Civility revisited: Abigail McCarthy...
...On the Gradgrind side of the political spectrum, Richard John Neuhaus, the National Review, and others embraced the encyclical's endorsement of market economies as a veritable lightning bolt from heaven...
...The process of truth-seeking, not truth itself, is the basis of individual freedom in the West, where a respect for pluralism forecloses the appeal to "absolutes...
...But what it proposes--an embrace of modem knowledge and skills without a loss of moral absolutes--goes to the very heart of modemity's moral ambiguity...
...Still, Centesimus's warnings against secularism and atheism may sound anachronistic to American ears...
...Letters should not exceed 250 words and are subject to editing for clarity and space limitations...
...One thing is certain: what Catholicism has long called spiritual, the modem world may yet come to understand as a practical necessity...
...It presents an ambitious and frequently brilliant defense of human dignity that places economic and political life against a deeper, transcendent perspective...
...Though the constitutional ground of Western democracies draws on this Christian tradition, today's political conversation usually does not admit of such a transcendent possibility...
...Which means that they want a job in this part of the country and can tolerate the ideals of their employer...
...Similarly, Centesimus advocates the reinvigoration of intermediating social units such as the family, communities, and trade associations...
...If it criticizes the welfare state, it does so on behalf of the dignity of the poor, not to justify the moral irritation of the well-to-do...
...Classical liberalism's materialistic philosophy and secularizing politics were also judged deficient...
...What can be said in capitalism's favor, however, is that human beings are made for freedom, and that an essential part of that freedom must be economic...
...But a more generous acknowledgment by the pope of the economic and political achievements of liberalism or even democratic socialism would have helped lay the ground for alternatives to such "American" temptations...
...As professional schools, they have moved generations of Catholics out of the anti-intellectual ghetto of the immigrant church into the nation's courtrooms, legislatures, operating rooms, city rooms, and stock markets...
...Catholicism's opposition to Marxism and state socialism is hardly new...
...You have nothing to lose but your chains---or is it your presuppositions...
...Does anyone really think the American bishops have been in cahoots with these sinister forces...
...There are many human needs which find no place on the market...
...A society is alienated if its forms of social organization, production, and consumption make it more difficult to offer this gift of self and to establish this solidarity between people...
...But today, how are these schools different...
...Your renewal habits will be monitored...
...Moreover, the church puts forward a welcome case for human rights based on faith in revealed truth about the transcendent nature of human life...
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...Above all, though this effect is hard to measure, they have taught many of their graduates that the love of learning and the desire for God can often be the same experience...
...To the donees, a warning...
...and have thus sent out "inner-directed" men and women who make both good graduate students and servants of the community...
...But solidarity with the poor and marginalized demands a conversion of the heart that the very logic of freely exercised self-interest rebels against...
...Neuhaus even declared, in the Wall Street Journal (May 2), that the encyclical sanctioned capitalism as "the economic corollary of the Christian understanding of man's nature and destiny...
...Our mass culture, which has elevated reason and individual choice to a nearly infallible status, relativizes all so-called "natural" allegiances, increasingly leaving the individual alone before the concentrated power of the state or unrelenting economic forces...
...The nature of wealth and power changes--and Centesimus has interesting things to say about our information age--but conditions of "inhuman exploitation" continue to exist...
...ET CETERA GO THOU AND DO LIKEWISE We have received a magnificently brilliant communication from the brilliantly magnificent academic vice-president of a pre-eminently foremost East Coast Catholic university...
...I live in a student residence hall...
...HOW TO KEEP THE FAITH he Catholic college, America's leading bellweather Catholic theologian, Rev...
...Even prior to the logic of a fair exchange of goods and the forms of justice appropriate to it, there exists something which is due to man because he is man...
...So much for the magic altruism of the Invisible Hand...
...If my own university's identity is to have any meaning at all, it must not be simply that it is "personal" or "caring" or "urban" or even dedicated to "peace and justice...
...Charity, in the most obvious sense, may be the easier response...
...That is the lesson the pope draws from Eastem Europe's miraculous victory over communism--the lesson he would like us to draw in the West in our own battle against indifference, depersonalization, and alienation...
...But that is perhaps a cultural deficiency of our own...
...But modem, postindustrial society, by its very thmst toward efficiency and uniformity, can be at war with such autonomous structures...
...Telephone: (212) 732-0800...
...Centesimus annus is provocative...
...Avery Dulles, S.J., has warned us in the New York Times (May 1), is on "the slippery path" from strong religious identity it possessed at its founding to the bland secularism of state and Ivy League universities...
...And that the New York Times has noticed in a front-page story what Catholic educators have been talking to themselves about for over twenty years may well be a sign that it's too late to do anything about it...
...Indeed, Centesimus encourages the bishops' advocacy of economic justice, and celebrates the church's social doctrine as a "valid instrument of evangelization...
...My best wishes to you...
...Display advertising correspondence should be sent to Ruth E. Taylor, 11 Graffam Rd., So...
...It may be...that the controlling assumptions of the American bishops' pastoral letter, Economic Justice f o r All, must now be recognized as unrepresentative of the church's authoritative teaching," he wrote...
...THE CHARACTER OF CATHOLIC COLLEGES BLAND SECULARISM...
...What the encyclical grants to market mechanisms it does not take away from its witness to injustice or defense of the poor...
...In religious studies departments, for example, the last generation of the broadly educated humanists may be the priests and ex-priests in their fifties, trained in philosophy and the classics as well...
...Centesimus identifies "a crisis within democracies themselves, which seem at times to have lost the ability to make decisions aimed at the common good...
...And to you, our optimal blessings...
...He is right...
...Its praise for the freedom and efficiency of market economies doesn't prevent it from denouncing the marginalization and impoverishment advanced economic systems impose on the peoples of the third world and the economically disenfranchised close to home...
...Today's 1 June 1991:357...
...Indeed, a more realistic appraisal of secular values and achievements will be needed if a truly democratic vision of the common good is to prevail...
...Even for unbelievers the hermeneutical value of the doctrine of Original Sin should be evident...
...But where does one go for breathable air without forfeiting modernity's real achievements along with its excesses...
...POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Commonweal, 15 Dutch St...
...New York, N.Y...
...This is followed by a list often names with addresses, tastefully arranged on the page...
...In this context, the pope alludes to the "suffocating" power of Western materialistic assumptions...
...The trouble is that--largely as a result of the hyper-professionalization of higher education and what Page Smith describes as the cult of "scientific" objectivity which has virtually purged the professor's moral judgment from the classroom--the Christian humanist as a species is almost extinct...
...The church's celebration of human freedom may seem naive when contrasted to the radical contingency at the heart of modem consciousness...
...Excerpts: "I am following up on our recent phone conversation and am enclosing the names of ten graduating seniors...that I am requesting you enroll as subscribers for one year...
...If the Catholic college, as a distinct American educational force, were to disappear, what would be lost...
...Centesimus affirms market economies oriented to the common good, warns against the spiritual dangers of consumer culture, and advocates new international structures devoted to peace and to development in the third world...
...In taking up all these issues, Centesimus offers an inflated view of Leo's influence and his prescience in opposing state socialism...
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...Centesimus has a great many necessary things to say about unregulated capitalism's failure to protect human dignity and about the limits of the market...
...By the same moral measure, economic life is not an end in itself, and if treated as such leads to social disorganization and decay...
...Here and elsewhere, candidates for faculty and staff positions asked to comment on a goals and mission statement, say they "have no problem" or "find it compatible...
...Over on the reconstructed left, the Nation read Centesimus with smirking disbelief, and then warned hysterically of Rome's theocratic ambitions...
...Though definitive judgments about particular market structures are beyond its authority, the church's traditional understanding of the principle of subsidiarity is offered as the best practical guarantee of social values and human rights...
...The real problem is not the unending string of side-show controversies--homosexual or pro-abortion speakers, clubs, and student newspaper editorials at Fordham, Georgetown, Boston College, or Marquette--that raise ecclesiastical eyebrows, but much deeper: a lack of shared intellectual values for the institution to pass along...
...358 Civility revisited: Abigail McCarthy 359 An imperfectly just war: John Langan 36 l Poetry: John Cavadini 362 Sandra lnskeep-Fox 374 An infamous victory: Gordon C. Zahn 366 Freedom to resist coercion: Francis X. Winters 369 Screen: Richard Alleva 372 Stage: Gerald Weales 373 BOOKS The Greatest-Ever Bank Robbery: John Feffer 375 The Distancing of God: Luke Timothy Johnson 376 Traffic and Laughter: Paul Elie 378 Reading Freud: Eugene Taylor 379 STAFF Editor: Margaret O'Brien Steinfels Managing Editor: Patrick Jordan Associate Editor: Paul Baumann Production Editor: Jacqueline Dowdell Senior Writer: Robert G. Hoyt Movies: Richard Alleva Stage: Gerald Weales Poetry: Rosemary Deen Columnists: John Garvey, J. Bryan Hehir, Abigail McCarthy, David R. Carlin, Jr...
...Centesimus strongly supports labor unions, the provision of economic necessities to the needy, fair wages, full employment, and decent public services...
...Historically, Catholic colleges and universities have done two things well: As denominational liberal arts colleges, they have helped keep alive what Page Smith calls in Killing the Spirit, the "classical Christian consciousness," the conviction that we are governed by natural laws which mirror the mind of the creator...
...Imagine how the doors of purgatory have been flung open upon hearing this news...
...They are very much of a piece...
...It must nourish, criticize, create, and communicate a "truth," an intellectual vision not available next door...
...The church has no models to offer," the pope cautions...
...Indeed, it is through the free gift of self that man truly finds himself...
...Moreover, while acknowledging the developmental nature of papal social teaching, Centesimus seems tone deaf to the sometimes jarring dichotomy between its own defense of human rights and the church's historical record...
...A plurality of interests and competing rights checks both the state and the coercive tendencies of commercial life...
...And here's the topper: "High among the desired outcomes of this little exercise is that the graduates will become lifelong readers of Commonweal...
...Furthermore, the encyclical calls forcefully for sacrifices from developed nations and for new international structures for economic development...
...This pope's first-hand tes356: Commonweal timony on the evils of totalitarianism and his mostly clear-eyed understanding of the contradictions inherent in secular democracies carry authority...
...Centesimus warns IF 1 June 1991:355 against utopian schemes that attempt to eliminate self-interest, arguing that such arrangements misunderstand the nature of the human person and inevitably lead to tyranny...
...Even the decision to invest in one place rather than another," the pope writes, "is always a moral and cultural choice...
...But can an institution where only a small minority of the faculty embrace rather than merely tolerate the institution's goals give a both catholic and Catholic education to young men and women...
...For those called upon to uphold Christian values in pluralistic, essentially secular societies, Centesimus is hardly a tidy package...
...Then, our almost favorite sentence: "Would you kindly bill me for $360...
...Along this line, the pope's analysis of the sources of alienation in modem consumer cultures is as penetrating as his condemnation of totalitarianism...
...What specific steps can be taken to further these goals remain vague, however...
...Centesimus marks the centennial of Rerum novarum, Leo XIII's encyclical on the economic and social upheavals surrounding the "industrial system," the replacement of land by capital as the source of wealth, and the subsequent transformation of traditional culture and notions of authority...
...It does not, for example, come fully to terms with how the free markets it extols and the liberal doctrine of individual rights it now embraces have come in the last several decades to be shaped by almost purely consumerist assumptions...
...Economic creativity and initiative must have space in which to flourish...
...COMMONWEAL After communism E ncyclical readers of the world unite...
...While the state does not have unlimited authority to intervene in the operations of the economy, neither does the market have unlimited power to dictate the conditions of political and social life...
...04106 (207) 799-4387, classified advertising correspondence to 15 Dutch St...
...Or so the partisan reaction to John Paul's new encyclical Centesimus annus (The Hundredth Year) might prompt the wistful to remark...
...Maybe that's enough...
...Staff: Harriette Balsky, Carmen Alava, Pamela Quatse Advertising Manager: Ruth E. Taylor Publisher: Edward S. Skillin Commonweal welcomes letters on subjects treated in its pages...
...Most radically for the privileged West, Centesimus calls for a "concrete commitment to solidarity and charity...
...Advanced nations are not likely to surrender power or reduce their standard of living on the basis of sentiment alone...
...I look out my window in the morning and see Tulane University, literally ten yards away...
...Recently, a candidate for academic dean here, asked in an open forum what he saw as distinctive about Catholic and Jesuit education, replied that "education is education...
...A person who is concerned solely or primarily with possessing and enjoying, who is no longer able to control his instincts and passions, or to subordinate them by obedience to the truth, cannot be free," he writes...
...Most fair-minded observers would agree that these are hard sayings...
...Commonweal, [ISSN 0010-3330] A Review of Public Affairs, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, is published biweekly, except monthly Christmas, New Year's and July and August, by Commonweal Foundation, 15 Dutch St., New York, N.Y...
...Material goods are intended for the benefit of all, not for a small minority...
...Portland, Me...
...Some, most notably Peter Hebblethwaite in the National Catholic Reporter (May 10, 1991), greeted the pope's wide-ranging discourse on human dignity and economic theory, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, and the plight of the third world petulantly...
...This absolute respect for human dignity challenges the consumerism of the West as much as it exposes the historical crimes of communism...
...Leo condemned socialism while promoting trade unions and the right to private property...
...With a less charitable flourish, Neuhaus suggested that Centesimus was a rebuke of the economic ideas of America's bishops...
Vol. 118 • June 1991 • No. 11
