A syllabus for progress
Carlin, David R. Jr.
manent-press fabric. Their small, close-knit communities call barn was before me, faded like driftwood. I dismounted from to mind the Latin American communidades de base. Shaker the bike, vexed by...
...Just as Catholicism cannot endorse abor- tion, which follows in a logical way from the premises provided by moral subjec- tivism and relativism, so it cannot endorse the premises themselves...
...In the 1832 encyclical Mirari vos, Pope Gregory XVI crushed the hopes of Lamennais and others who dreamed of a reconciliation between lib- eralism and Catholicism...
...While this first stage of liberalism certainly offered much to be negative about, in par- ticular its unbridled laissez-faire eco-nomics, it also had enormous merit, espe- cially its recognition of the intimate link between liberty and human creativ-ity-moral and intellectual creativity as well as industrial creativity...
...For like their furniture and their dwellings, my basic from pine shelves fashioned in a friend's basement, I'm proud unawareness of the Shakers seemed to be a product of their spirit...
...The short answer is correct, but incomplete...
...3. Contemporary liberalism, which came into its own in the late 1960s, splits the difference between the two earlier forms...
...The observance in Rome will be marked by a new encyclical and a symposium of authors, teachers, and advocates from around the world...
...The question is: Will Catholicism, which made a relatively good adjustment to the progressive stage, be able to make a successful adjustment to the latest stage...
...It is replete ernism in general and liberalism in par- 2. Progressive liberalism, which began with quaint touches...
...The Columbia University...
...As recently as 1864, (Thomas Carlyle, no friend of this ideal, standards it was pretty tame stuff too...
...Why had I never been shown this spot, not merely old modate progress: though they renounced the world, Shakers and thus historic, but the place where a religion had come to acquired telephones and automobiles soon after these had been life...
...even more unqualified way...
...By late twentieth-century Catholic church had been a bulwark of was expressed in the slogan, "That govstandards, Rerum novarum is tame stuff...
...But in the United States we have moved into a new age of liberalism...
...What but purity is this, to bear witness, up...
...shopping in Colonie's malls during my trips home, I'm proud in the end, more for God's eyes than for ours...
...In considering the relationship between ay 15, 1991, is the one and political parties were on the march in the church and liberalism, we may divide hundredth anniversary Germany, France, and Britain, Rerum liberalism into three periods: classical libof the publication of novarum was not exactly radical doctrine...
...In agreement with progressive liberalism, it allows extensive state intervention in the economic sphere...
...Rome was much better at accommodat- ing progressive liberalism...
...Even Leo, when he was not being to flourish about a hundred years ago (about woman is by nature fitted for homework, relatively progressive on the labor question, the time of Rerum novarum), faulted its and it is that which is best adapted at once kept himself busy writing other encyclicals predecessor for excessive individualism, to preserve her modesty and to promote denouncing such evils as freemasonry and for a failure to understand the quasi-organic the good bringing-up of children and the the separation of church and state...
...The little more than twenty-five years before described it as "anarchy plus a constable...
...In the decade So Rerum novarum, if it did not place appreciate the radically social nature of of the 1890s, when socialist labor unions the Catholic church at the forefront of social individual conduct and individual person280: Commonweal ality...
...No sex allowed--of course they died out...
...but that's another story...
...for instance this: "A ticular...
...mark encyclical letter, dards the encyclical was a bombshell...
...Paul Elie is a student in the Graduate Writing Division at That afternoon, though, I felt ignorant, profoundly so...
...Nonetheless, contem- porary liberalism has a profound, though WORLD perhaps one-sided, appreciation of the importance to morality of the subjective component--including individual free choice...
...b) that everyone therefore ought to have as much freedom as possible to pursue his or her notion of the good...
...The central idea, best expressed in philosopher John Rawls's book, A Theory of Justice (1971), is: (a) that there is no moral good we can all agree upon...
...encyclical recognized the fight of labor Rerum novarum, Pope Pius IX, the imme- The idea was that government should allow unions to exist, but balanced this with an diate predecessor of Leo XIII, issued his maximum liberty in all spheres of activity: emphatic endorsement of the rights of pri- notorious "Syllabus of Errors," which freedom of trade, manufacture, religion, vate property...
...and (c) that equality ought to be maximized so that everyone, not just the more privileged fac- tion of society, will have a fair chance of pursuing his or her private vision of the good...
...Of course, great numbers of individual Catholics accept both the premises and the conclusions...
...The practical conclusion drawn from these social-psychological premises was that government has the right and duty to intervene in the life of society, especially its economic and educational life, to a degree that would have outraged the clas- sical liberals...
...On a worldwide scale we are still in the era that opened with Rerum novarum, the era of progressive liberalism...
...but it is more than a match for classical liberalism in telling the state to keep its nose out of a sphere of privacy in which are carried on a person's religious (or irreligious) and moral (or immoral) conduct...
...neither was able to address fully the central issues raised by Rawls or by the person-in-the-street who has elevated the right of privacy to a semidivine status...
...But both writers antedate contemporary liberalism...
...The response to the papal and episcopal invitations has been extraordinary: Across the country Catholic institutions and orga- nizations have planned a diverse menu of activities extending all through 1991 to observe the centenary...
...The 1. The essence of classical liberalism Rerum novarum...
...In 1864 the "Syllabus" confirmed this in spades...
...They might have been Shakers' rapid decline in numbers one hundred and fifty years two in a long line of Shaker goats--the sect's only descendants, ago will provide an analogy, inexact but telling nonetheless, as I supposed...
...reform, at least signaled an end to the long era of dark reaction...
...At the very moment Herbert Spencer was denouncing the new doctrine with all the intransigence Pio Nono had used in denouncing the old, Leo XIII was embracing generous portions of progressive liberalism...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS David R. Carlin, Jr...
...A broader response would distinguish three dimensions of the social 3 May 1991:281...
...As I eat at a homemade work table and take books like mine...
...The papacy's response to classical liberalism was almost totally negative...
...The key issue, of course, is: What is being commemorated...
...I recalled the Shakers' demise, in the manner of Catholics reflect with growing concern on the church's rule of one culturally literate, as a sort of highbrow Helen Keller joke: clerical celibacy...
...For an expression of this outrage, see the 1892 book, The Man ver- sus the State, by Herbert Spencer, the last of the old-line liberals, who was convinced that the latter-day liberals were betraying the essence of liberalism...
...What did they expect...
...Maritain and John Courtney Murray provided materials that might be used in constructing a contemporary Catholic-liberal reconciliation...
...nature of society, and for being unable to well-being of the family...
...For that matter, by late nineteenth-century most of the century...
...The short answer is the encyclical tradition, the stream of papal and conciliar texts rooted in the spirit of Rerum novarum even as they develop far beyond its categories...
...WATCH J. Bryan Hehir FROM LEO Xlll TO JOHN PAUL I1 THE EVOLUTION OF CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING n May 15, 1991, the uni- versal church will cele- brate the centenary of Pope Leo XIII's Rerum novarum, the first of the "social encyclicals...
...But Rome missed the point...
...Shaker the bike, vexed by the laws that discourage talk of religion in asceticism, admired by Thomas Merton a generation ago ("The public schools: surely students at Mencken Grammar and Norman peculiar grace of a Shaker chair," he wrote, "is due to the fact Rockwell High are taught their namesakes' histories...
...Morever, the encyclical tradition needs to be related to the wider social tradition if its full potential is to be realized...
...In the United States the National Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted a statement urg- ing "parishes, dioceses, national organi- zations, educational and other institutions to use the opportunity to share our social teaching," and they designated the period from Ascension Thursday to Pentecost Sunday as a time for parishes to focus on the social dimensions of Catholic faith...
...Why did that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel I know so little about the miracles of enthusiasm in my home- might come and sit on it"), was surprisingly willing to accom- town...
...Knowing all this, I feel a vague sense of kinship with the Maybe, I thought, they expected private moments of discovery Shakers...
...Without question the encyclical was a watershed event in the history of the church...
...to know that while I wouldn't renounce the world, someone PAUL ELII~ back there once did...
...eralism, progressive liberalism, and conPope Leo XIII's land- But by nineteenth-century Catholic stan- temporary liberalism...
...And perhaps the the barn...
...invented, like the hippie throwbacks who spread the message Then, as I stood reflecting, a couple of goats ambled out of of simple living on Macintosh-user networks...
...The definitive philosophical reconciliation between Catholicism and the second-stage liberal- ism was worked out by Jacques Maritain, especially in his books Integral Humanism (1936) and Man and the State (1951...
...It cannot simply endorse it, since the ethical agnosticism and subjectivism of present- day liberalism are radically incompatible with the Catholic notion that goodness and badness have a kind of objective reality...
...The encyclical tradition is part of a wider social tradition dating not to 1891 but to the very origins of Christian Catholic faith...
...It indicated the first stages of a willingness to come to terms A SYLLABUS FOR PROGRESS with the modern world, a process that cul- minated seven decades later with Vatican LEO )(Ill PLAYS CATCH-UP II...
...It denounced the evils of cap- made it plain as noonday that the Roman thought, speech, press, association, assemitalism, but it denounced socialism in an pontiff would have no truck with mod- bly, and so on...
...I stared at them, they at me...
...social and political reaction throughout ernment is best which governs least...
...It remains to be seen how Catholicism will respond to contemporary liberalism...
...to know about the people who built more graceful versions of What but asceticism is this, to forgo descendants who will keep these at the settlement only a mile or so from where I later grew you in the curriculum...
Vol. 118 • May 1991 • No. 9
