A wealth of notions

...GEORGE ORWELL ANONYMOUS & ESSENTIAL rare impulse to throw things out came over me one snowbound Sunday afternoon last winter, and I wandered through rooms filled with accumulations, rummaging in drawers and clothes closets, thrusting the leftovers of my life into leaf-bags...

...The first is simply verbal overload...

...So why not give a subscription to Commonweal--a magazine where thought really counts...

...In America, however, the immigrant, working-class Catholic masses generally stayed deeply loyal to their church without benefit of any "social teach- ing...

...This rather dubious equation was encouraged by Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, and other Democratic politicians, and popularized for the Catholic public by Father Charles Coughlin, whose mellifluent radio addresses presented a distorted version of"Catholic social teaching" to millions of economically distressed listeners...

...At any given time, however, each of us projects his or her own experience on such an accumulation...

...Almost everything thus gathered together was, understandably, about him...

...She typed, edited, and prepared his papers for publication...

...In this pile of paper and in the row of books on my Orwell shelf I wanted to find Eileen, the writer's wife, between the lines of his life...

...Easy payments...

...And of course plenty of learned experts--Catholic and non-Catholic--could easily be found to argue for the value of state-regulated welfare capitalism or other economic practices opposed by Simon and Novak...

...Note on that to authors S. and A.: Gentlemen: It is also true that the writer's husband, unless he is a writer, is simply "her husband...

...The bishops (or those who research and write under their authority) are seemingly caught in a double bind...

...But they no longer constitute the sole form of American Catholic social teaching in the way that the pre-Vatican II encyclicals and statements did...

...Harriet Beecher Stowe...

...In this sense, the non-Catholic public is probably better served than the church itself, because only the few highest-profile official statements have received widespread media attention...

...As some critics of the hierarchical social statements--most but not all of them conservative have pointed out, it is difficult for those who are essentially pastors of the Christian church to strike a proper balance between expressions of broad moral concern about social questions and the detailed, sophisticated knowledge demanded of those leaders, many of them non-Christian, who actually seek to exercise responsibility in the public realm...

...Of course, their very diversity (and often outright disagreement with one another), as well as their lack of official standing, means that such groups cannot attain the visibility and authority of official teaching in addressing broad issues of public policy...

...The deeper issues at stake in various economic arrange- ments cannot in fact be decided on the basis of expertise, effi- ciency, or narrowly economist considerations, but depend (as the bishops said) on fundamental moral choices of social values...

...Orwell, "a quantifier," Mary McCarthy called him, might have observed that all of the above was stored in a 10- by-18-by-8 1/2 Pet Milk carton and weighed approximately twenty pounds...

...The second question is how far church leaders should go in making explicit the relationship between Christian faith and social policy of all sorts...

...effective when confined to the central purposes that animate it...

...Oh, yes...

...Seen against this backdrop of diverse, unofficial Catholic social thought and action, the more recent social encyclicals of John Paul II and the official statements of the American hierarchy assume a somewhat different significance...

...I COMMONWEAL I 15 Dutch Street, New York, N.Y...

...Besides this narrow but important strain of principled American cem, American Catholics have long worked with Protestants and others on behalf of social causes...

...While many of these groups focus more on activism than on systematic thought about society as such, their experiences present the potential of developing more wide-ranging reflections on how American Christianity can assume a greater share of responsibility for the common good...

...These efforts, however limited, stand out because the corporate system, the federal government, and the larger American public--including many Catholics-have retreated from general social concern amidst the generally status-quo political climate of the times...

...By contrast with the often thinly documented and narrowly moralizing statements on social issues emerging from the National Council of Churcbes, The Challenge of Peace, Economic Justice for All, and other statements of the U.S...

...Here he could be found, as much of him as was accessible to me, in bits and pieces about his life, his world, his writing...

...The support for "work- ingmen's associations" in Rerum novarum and Quadragesimo anno was in fact highly qualified and saturated with a nostalgic view of employee relations that suggested corporate paternalism rather than American-style unions...

...That is especially true, I think, of authority that rests its claims on spiritual ground...

...Agatha Christie...

...American Catholic labor activists, clerical and lay, seized on the papal statements and made them central charters for their widespread labor schools and labor organizing...

...and John Paul II's Laborem exercens (1981) and Sollicitudo rei socialis (1987...

...Granted, an even longer list of prominent American Catholic politicians who have been oblivious, or nearly so, to the "Catholic social tradition" also exists--and among the names on that list would be that of John F. Kennedy...

...Hugh's College, Oxford, and was grad- uated with a "very good second" in English, not good enough, she thought, to encourage an academic career...

...They may even have worked in more subtle ways to shape policy...

...Money and property may be privately owned, Leo contends, but they are, as it were, held in trust, and may not be used for private or selfish ends: "It is one thing to have a right to the possession of money," the encyclical asserts, "and another to have the fight to use money as one wills...

...What, indeed, do we know about Charlotte Bront~'s husband, except that he was her father's curate...

...In 1935, however, she was enrolled and doing well in a graduate program at the University of London, moving toward a master's 288: Commonweal...

...From the standpoint of general public credibility, this is probably a good thing...

...Who knows how far it will take them...

...I came upon a box of papers I had forgotten about--all the materials collected for the George Orwell class I taught: lecture notes, bibliographies, syllabuses, tests, monographs...

...John XXIII's Materetmagistra (1961) and Pacem in terris (1963...

...Who he was, where he went, what he said...

...Edith Wharton...

...the important thing is to use them aright...

...till, the question remains: Is it really desirable for either the Christian church or American public life to have some of its most visible spiritual leaders engaging in the same business as the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute...

...IfI understand Commencement is just a few weeks away...

...286: Commonweal This approach has also increasingly enabled the American bishops and their intellectually alert advisors to incorporate into these documents some perspectives from the more informal varieties of Catholic social engagement...

...We're 66 years old and still in near-mint condition...

...Would not the inevitable effect of such a tendency over the long run be to erode their distinctive religious authority and bring them into the public arena as simply another competing policy lobby--no matter how wise and morally valuable its pre- scriptions...

...10038 I I Trial subscription offer: 11 issues for $12...

...287 them correctly, this is what many groups like the National Center for the Laity, the Catholic Worker, Bread for the World, Network, and many others have attempted to do...

...5/3/91 I...

...Uncertain of pur- pose, she floundered through a variety of jobs, teaching in a girls' school, reading for a rich old lady, running a secretarial service...

...Of course, some of the criticism along these lines is itself ill- informed or grounded in an ideological bias that cannot withstand much scrutiny...

...As writers in Commonweal and elsewhere noted at the time, the Simon-Novak document was unable seriously to refute the venerable assertion of all Catholic social teaching since Rerum novarum that unregulated Friedmanesque capitalism--no matter how allegedly dynamic, "democratic," or benevolent is incompatible with the social claims of the common good on economic life...

...And most startling of all for the time, the pope proclaimed what might be called a "preferential option for the poor" rooted in divine will: "God himself seems to incline to those who suffer misfortune...

...When Rerum novarum was issued it made no splash with the American public, and stirred only a few small ripples among American Catholics...

...and why it matters to critics fight or left or allegedly unaligned...

...But why be so predictable...

...Here, the parallel American Catholic tradition of non-official "Catholic social teaching" by a variety of explicitly Christian but nonauthoritative groups and movements---including both men's and women's religious orders and especially lay organi- zations-seems particularly suggestive as an additional way to bring valuable Christian perspectives to public life...

...I KATHARINE BYRNE subjected himself and her, during the brief span of his great creative years...

...284: Commonweal t first, only a few creative clergy like John A. Ryan and William Kerby saw the rele- vance of eerum novarum to American socioeconomic conditions, and began inter- preting the seemingly obscure Roman teaching for American audiences--including Catholic bishops...

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...What most early commentators missed was the central feature that has made Rerum novarum the foundation of all subsequent papal social teaching: its derivation of crucial social values from the heart of Christian theology...

...But American experience has taught us that authority of any kind is seriously eroded when it is misapplied beyond its proper scope, and most MRS...

...They have been extremely important as legitimations of concern and touchstones of debate among public policy elites, Catholic and non-Catholic...

...The Catholic tra- dition has been to appeal to a "common good" accessible to all regardless of religious belief...

...And who was Mr...

...She was Anglo-Irish, a member of a warm and close-knit upper- middle-class family of middle-managers for the Empire...

...here is no question that the two most important social statements of the American Catholic hierarchy in the 1980s, The Challenge of Peace and Economic Justice for All, have brought unprecendented attention and prestige to Catholic social teaching in this country...

...A century ago, such a thing would have been almost unimag- inable...

...So even if the bishops' particular policy recommendations have not been "implemented" in particular ways, and are not generally heeded by the majority of Catholics, The Challenge of Peace and Economic Justice for All have served the badly needed function of elevating American public discourse...

...You could give that favorite graduate a car...

...Paul VI's Populorum progressio (1967) and Octogesima adveniens (1971...

...The Catholic alliance with the New Deal broke apart in the late 1930s over a variety of causes, but the legacy of Depression- era American social Catholicism has endured, especially in the close links between some socially conscious American Catholic leaders and segments of organized labor...

...photocopies of articles and reviews, a few of these my own...

...Fact, conjecture, argument, analysis, reputation...

...3 May 1991...

...If they engage primarily in general moral assertions and policy recommenda- tions, without elaborating comprehensive social theories and detailed analyses to justify their stands, they can be accused of naivet6 and pious moralism...

...Although the special 61an of the Catholic-labor connection faded after World War II, it has remained probably the most publicly significant institutional consequence of the American Catholic social tradition...

...This tradition, along with the wealth of sec- ondary analysis it has generated, constitutes a uniquely coherent and valuable body of modern social thought that deserves to be at least as well known as the schools associated with Adam Smith, welfare-state liberalism, and Marxian and leftist social criticism...

...In the 197qs alone, for instance, the U.S...

...The only work for which she demonstrated continuing enthusiasm was the labor of love she performed for an admired older brother, a brilliant surgeon...

...Whether they in fact refrained from bombing military targets located amidst civilian populations is a different and at this point unknown matter...

...The bishops' adaptations of the "public hearing" model, initially in relation to the 1976 bicentennial Call to Action conference, and their submission of draft versions of their statements for public com- ment, have effectively combined American democratic openness and diversity with the Catholic tradition of a focused teaching authority...

...Its legacy can be traced not only in the careers of many notable Catholic unionists, such as Philip Murray of the CIO, but in the public outlook of a number of Catholic politi- cians, including Robert Wagner, Sr., Eugene McCarthy, Edmund Brown, Sr., and now, perhaps, Mario Cuomo...

...This was certainly the case in Toward the Future (1984), the William Simon-Michael Novak "lay response" to the bishops' pastoral on the economy...

...But if they try to incorporate more sophisticated analysis into their statements, they appear to be intruding into the terrain of secular public policy and undermining their distinctive religious calling...

...bishops have seemed models of judiciousness and careful reasoning...

...The pope wants you to join a union" became the Catholic equivalent of secular organ- izers' appeal that "the president wants you to join a union...

...The bishops also showed just how American they had become by hiring a Madison Avenue adver- tising agency to publicize their statement...

...But the movement from state- ments of highly abstract moral norms to social policy is fraught with difficulty...

...After flagging in the 1920s, an encyclical-inspired Catholic liberalism flowered again in the early 1930s, when most Catholics, including the bishops, supported the first phase of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal...

...One of her friends adds these qualities to the list: sophisticated, fastidious, intelligent, and intellectual...

...His efforts bore fruit when the bishops adopted as their own the Program of Social Reconstruction (1919) that he had written, and made him head of the social action department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference (now the United States Catholic Conference) to implement it...

...Furthermore, with few exceptions, the earliest American Catholic commentators on Rerum novarum focused almost exclu- sively on the encyclical's case against socialism, thus emphasizing the church's role as defender of a political prejudice that was hardly in jeopardy among Americans, Catholic or otherwise...

...But no matter...

...It is when it can genuinely illumine issues of worldly existence from that point of view, as the best official social teaching has done, that the church contributes most effectively to the common good of the society that it inhabits, as well as refreshing the wellsprings of its own inner life...

...Too often, in all the churches, the idea of "listening to the lay person" on social matters has meant accommodating watered-down Christianity and banal popular prejudices...

...The Reagan administration's revival of the cold war and its ideological return to laissez-faire economics created a public social climate that the American Catholic hier- archy, primarily because of the long Catholic social tradition it had inherited, was well prepared to address critically...

...To this outside observer, at least, this seems a real danger that socially concerned Catholics would be well advised to weigh...

...As stated earlier, the real force of Rerum novarum and its offspring lies not in their particular prescriptions, useful as many of them are, but in their capacity to see our common public life, as secular social thought does not, in relation to the city of God...

...I Name I I Address I I City, State, Zip I I [] I prefer a full year's subscription at $36...

...In Europe, Leo's encyclical was part of the long historic process by which Rome began trying to recover the "lost" working classes and extricate itself from the heavy mortgage to the ruling classes it had taken out before, during, and after the French Revolution...

...for Jesus Christ calls the poor 'blessed...

...In my judgment, the strong insistence by Pentagon officials during the Persian Gulf War that they were avoiding civilian targets was in part, at least, a delayed response to the critique of civilian targeting set out in The Challenge of Peace...

...I found myself looking at these papers in a new way, and for the first time wondering about her, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, Orwell's first wife, the woman who offered love and support through good times and bad times, the tests to which history subjected them, the trials to which he KATHARINE B YRNE is the former director of the Division of Continuing Education at Mundelein College, Chicago...

...Dozens of state- ments on numerous topics have poured forth from the Catholic church, with varying degrees of official status...

...Besides, it's the thought that counts...

...The alternative, it might be suggested, is not that there should be less Catholic social teaching or "softer" and more uncritical versions of Catholic social thought...

...Despite its recently enhanced prestige, several dangers seem to attend the continuing enterprise of official Catholic social teaching...

...Who, I wondered, was Eileen O'Shaughnessy, the woman described by her husband's friends as tall, thin, pretty, witty, and channing...

...But there is no inherent reason why strong Christian commitment, sophisticated social thought, and a critical regard for American democratic values may not be found among lay religious people, whether Catholic, Protestant, or other...

...Catholic Conference issued state- ments on prison reform, national health insurance, capital punishment, regulation of handguns, housing, television, strip mining, the elderly, American Indians, and welfare reform...

...And such voluntary Catholic or ecumenical organizations and their "teaching" pub- lications will inevitably be much smaller and more poorly funded than agencies run by the Catholic church itself...

...Most conservative evan- gelicals' social vision was very limited or focused on a few hot- button moral issues...

...Stansky and Abrahams, thoughtful and sympathetic biogra- phers of George Orwell, observe that the writer's wife, unless she is herself a writer, exists only as she relates to him and usually ends up in literary history, if at all, simply as that shadowy figure, "his wife...

...But in the last decade national ecumenical organizations like Bread for the World and Habitat for Humanity, as well as local efforts like Project Nehemiah (New York) and Bethel New Life (Chicago) that include Catholic participation, have assumed new vigor and importance in addressing issues like food-and-agriculture policy, low-cost housing, and the like...

...This support was reinforced by the widespread Catholic identification of FDR's National Recovery Administration (NRA) and other measures with the "vocation~ group system" advocated in Pius XI's Quadragesimo anno (1931...

...At the same time, other religious voices that might have addressed a troubled American society had faltered...

...It is this essential Christian outlook on the whole of material existence, rather than the particular social prescriptions con- cerning government protection of wage earners, a living wage, restriction of working hours, and the like, that has made Rerum novarum the touchstone of the sustained tradition of papal social teaching that consists especially of Pius XI's Quadragesimo anno (1931...

...Rather, the primary locus for such teaching in a mature Christian community should be among an increasing number of religiously committed lay leaders who can bring their knowledge of economics, business, race rela- tions, gender, or politics, along with their slrong Christian com- mitment and values, to public policy discussions...

...It was while she was teaching a course on Orwell at Mundelein that two of her essays appeared in Commonweal: "George Orwell and the American Character" (April 12, 1974) and "A Different-looking Orwell" (March 11, 1983...

...He displays the most tender charity toward the lowly and oppressed...

...Vatican II's Gaudium et spes (1965...

...This is what seems to have happened to the public social voice of most of mainstream liberal Protestantism, which is widely regarded, even by most people within its churches, as more a partisan lobby than the source of a distinctively spiritual perspective on our social lives...

...Despite its scholastic categories and archaic attitudes, and the vast social and economic changes that a century has brought, the essential strength of Rerum novarum lies in its radical relativizing of earthly wealth, which it viewed not from the standpoint of economics but sub specie aeternitatis: "As for riches and other things that men call good and desirable, whether we have them in abundance or lack them altogether--so far as eternal happiness is concerned--it matters little...

...Most mainline Protestant churches and the National Council of Churches deplored the prevailing trend of public policy, but their religious decline and tendency to engage primarily in "prophetic" denunciation left them severely weak- ened as contributors to wider debates...

...Ryan, in particular, recognized that papal teaching cut not only against the grain of socialism, but against the laissez-faire capitalism that constituted the prevailing American economic faith...

...She had a scholarship to St...

...While each of these statements may have some resonance with those directly concerned, one wonders whether even the dedicated readers of Origins are keeping up...