THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SOCIALISM
Cort, John C.
Strange things have been happening on the interface between religion and socialism, and few more strange or interesting than some of the developments within the Catholic church. In Poland, at...
...To those who believe that democracy is the magic formula that resolves all problems, it must be perplexing to see a young country like Chile realistically confront the need to strengthen liberty, security, justice and general progress through the use of strong and energetic authority...
...You can fault this statement for its apparent ignoring of democratic socialism in the West European style, but there is no question that it is a repudiation of the Leninist, Soviet or Cuban approach...
...The U.S...
...Some of the socialist governments of Western Europe have contributed to that clarification, but it will not be complete until we in the United States, the heartland of capitalism, can prove to any reasonable person's satisfaction that a flowering of democracy is not compatible with capitalism but could be realized in a democratic socialist society...
...p. 402...
...He expressed this attitude in the encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963) in a clear reference to Marxism: . . . Neither can false philosophical teachings regarding the nature, origin and destiny of the universe and of man be identified with historical movements that have economic, social, cultural or political ends, not even when these movements have originated from these teachings and have drawn and still draw inspiration therefrom...
...Christians for Socialism has branches in America, Western Europe, the Philippines, and elsewhere...
...The rule which up to now held good for the benefit of those nearest to us must today be applied to all the needy of this world.5 Basil's coat was out of the closet once again, or, to put it more accurately, the door of the closet had at least been pried open...
...Notes 1 The full text of the Frankfurt Declaration can be found in the New International Review, Winter 1977...
...This last sentence was an obvious attempt to distinguish socialism from communist and/or Leninist regimes...
...How this will ultimately affect the Church's stance toward socialism is not clear, although the present strategy is to deny any opposition to socialism as such, merely to the violation of human rights...
...The only thing missing is an explicit, right-handed blessing for democratic socialism...
...John Eagleson (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1975), p. 162...
...Moved by the indescribable poverty and suffering of their people—a poverty and suffering caused and sustained, at least in substantial part, by the sins of multinational capitalism—even the bishops and cardinals began to sound like socialist agitators...
...One paragraph in the document reads as follows: The revolutionary process is in full swing in Latin America...
...2 Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 1891, Vatican translation (Derby, N.Y.: Apostolate of the Press, 1942), pp...
...The realization that the process is all-embracing and one in character makes us comrades, uniting all those who are committed to the revolutionary struggle in a common task...
...In the abandonment of this negative stance John XXIII, as in so many other matters, played a key role...
...The Frankfurt Declaration of the Socialist International (1951) makes this clear with its emphatic repudiation of communism and dictatorships of any kind, its insistence on liberal democratic process as an essential component of socialism, its acceptance of a pluralist economy that combines public ownership with consumer and producer cooperatives and private ownership in "agriculture, handicraft, retail trade, and small and middle-sized industries," and its more open attitude toward religious and non-Marxist systems of thought.' The example of democratic socialist governments in Western Europe in putting these principles into practice also could not help but be reassuring...
...3 Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, 1931, Vatican transl...
...Whether socialists build their faith on Marxist or other methods of analyzing society, whether they are inspired by religious or humanitarian principles, they all strive for the same goal—a system of social justice, better living, freedom and world peace...
...We Christians do not have a peculiar political approach of our own to offer, and we do not wish to have such an approach...
...His whole approach to the world outside the Church, his ability to distinguish between what people say and what they do, his wonderful openness to the good wherever it may be found, all these had a powerful impact...
...A different scenario emerges in Latin America...
...Even more clearly than Paul VI, John Paul corrects the ambiguities of Leo XIII on the right of private property by resurrecting the teaching of Aristotle, adopted and expanded by Thomas Aquinas, that "the right to private property is subordinated to the right to common use, to the fact that goods are meant for everyone" [emphasis in original] John Paul, like preceding popes back to and including Pius XI, gives his approval, when and where circumstances dictate, to the "socialization" of the means of production, either by the state or by "joint ownership of the means of work, sharing by the workers in the management and/or the profits of businesses, shareholding by labor, etc...
...What will persuade those who harbor them are such 199 facts as the triumph of democratic socialism in France and the assurances of Francois Mitterrand to the struggling government of Nicaragua that it can find friendship and help elsewhere than in the reactionary democracy of Ronald Reagan or the stultifying dictatorships of Russia or Cuba.'6 A recurring phenomenon in Latin America has been the radicalization of once-conservative bishops such as Camara and Romero, which was the result of the persecution and martyrdom of their priests and laity who were striving to put into practice the true teachings of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets in regard to property and the poor...
...The Latin-American process is all-embracing and one in character...
...This return to the older tradition was most dramatically expressed by Paul VI when he wrote in reference to the plight of the undeveloped world, We must repeat once more that the superfluous wealth of rich countries should be placed at the service of the poor nations...
...6 Pope Paul VI, Octogesima Adveniens, 1971, in The Gospel of Peace...
...The clarification of this question should inevitably produce Christian socialists, as it has produced them in the past, usually among the more progressive Protestants like Frederick Maurice in England in the 19th century or Reinhold Niebuhr in America in the 20th...
...In Latin America the situation is pushing the Church toward a new commitment to socialism...
...He is also one of the more outspoken critics of Soviet- or Cuban-style "socialism...
...14 Ibid., p. 240...
...It is a foolish fancy for those of us who are devoted to democratic socialism to think that we are going to exorcise these suspicions by appeals to reason and the complex experience of history...
...It also produced some peculiar ambiguities in the papal encyclicals...
...Among other things it declared, Far from working against it, let us learn to embrace socialism with joy as a way of life better adapted to our time and more in accordance with the spirit of the Gospel...
...Enrique Dussel in Argentina...
...I have not yet read anything by any of them that could be construed as critical of Fidel Castro and Cuba, although my reading has not been exhaustive...
...Penny Lernoux, a knowledgeable student of the Latin American Church, has written of this conference, Medellin produced the Magna Carta of today's persecuted, socially committed Church, and as such rates as one of the major political events of the century...
...Are they interested only in liberation from capitalism and military juntas...
...The article by Gonzalo Arroyo, S.J., "Christians, the Church and Revolution," appeared in the Paris periodical Politique Aujourdhui, January– February 1974...
...In Nicaragua Catholic priests were among the leaders of the revolution that toppled Somoza and installed a mainly Marxist government...
...The archbishop was of course also saying that it is not simply a matter of whether the Soviet Union or the United States will dominate Latin America, and that if the pursuit of justice involves a risk of Soviet infiltration a la Cuba, better to go with the risk than to sanction injustice and oppression...
...If the reproductive capabilities of the latter are threatened, then liberal democracy is choked off at its roots by the bourgeoisie— shamelessly and, in the case of Chile, without any pretense...
...Matthew 25 (unless you feed, clothe and shelter the poor, you don't get to heaven) is of course a basic text, but almost more common are references to the Exodus, the archetypal liberation from slavery and oppression...
...Juan Luis Segundo in Uruguay...
...There is no lack of evidence to support their thesis that our most profitable export, the multinational corporation, is knee-deep in the sweat and blood of the Latin American worker and peasant, and the history of the Reagan years in the White House will doubtless add to that evidence...
...Democratic or dictatorial...
...The letter was signed by 15 bishops and 2 apostolic vicars—from Brazil, Colombia, Algeria, China, Egypt, Indonesia, Laos, Lebanon, Oceania, and Yugoslavia...
...The first powerful impulse comes from the blood of martyrs such as Romero and the American nuns, which concentrates the mind on the reasons for which they died...
...In Poland the situation is pushing the Church toward a stronger commitment to democracy...
...There has also been a rethinking of the Church's teaching on private property and a switch from the more modern emphasis on inalienable rights of dominion to the older tradition of the Hebrew prophets, the Fathers of the Church and Thomas Aquinas, the notion that the goods of this world were given by God to all and for all, a view that is oversimply but forcefully expressed in the aphorism of St...
...One of the most progressive members of the most progressive hierarchy, that of Brazil, Dom Helder Camara, archbishop of Recife, took the initiative in drawing up "a pastoral letter from the Third World" entitled Gospel and Revolution...
...To the liberation theologians democracy in the Western sense is damaged goods suffering from guilt by association with capitalism...
...On the Catholic side some important revisionism has been taking place over the last century and especially during the last two decades...
...This theology is now being studied with enthusiasm all over the world in both Catholic and Protestant seminaries...
...Before the more conservative prelates knew what was happening their progressive brethren put the whole Latin American hierarchy on record at Medellin, Colombia, in 1968, denouncing "institutionalized violence" and the "international imperalism of money" and committing themselves firmly to "the option of the poor...
...The bias is evident in the "Final Document" of the founding convention of Christians for Socialism in Santiago, Chile, in 1972, while Allende was still in power—that is, before Chilean democracy had been strangled...
...What they have in common is a passionate commitment to the plight of the poor and an insistence that Christ came not simply to save souls but to save bodies as well, not simply to preach the Kingdom of God in heaven but the Kingdom of God on earth...
...The problem is, what kind of socialism...
...Despite what I have said about the careless thinking of the liberation theologians on the subject of democracy, it is important that we give full credit to them for their more careful and persuasive thinking on the question of what Jesus demanded of his followers as regards the poor...
...445-76...
...8 Laborem Exercens, see NCR, Sept...
...In Latin America, as noted, these new attitudes of John and Paul in particular and the Church in general have seen their most radical expression...
...This is an interesting statement, mingling sense and nonsense in about equal proportions...
...235-36...
...from Sec...
...The implications of this statement, including the extraordinary boast that the delegates had no "peculiar political approach" of their own other than commitment to "revolutionary struggle," were made even clearer in an article by Gonzalo Arroyo, a Chilean Jesuit, the chief organizer and first president of Christians for Socialism, several years later in a French journal...
...He is clearly the most popular, bestknown and most widely traveled of all the spokesmen of Christian socialism in Latin America...
...It shattered the centuries-old alliance of Church, military, and the rich elites...
...This document was prepared by a group of theologians that included Gutierrez, Assmann, and Giulio Girardi, an Italian theologian...
...John Drury, ed...
...In Poland, at this writing, the Communist bulldozer has buried the first offspring of free trade unionism and democratic process, and the Church is solidly aligned with Solidarity in the struggle to disinter them...
...Other important representatives are Hugo Assmann, a German who has worked mainly in Brazil and Costa Rica...
...it reaches into the life of a people too long denied the fruits of their labor, too long denied meaningful participation in the life of their society...
...Besides, who can deny that those movements, insofar as they conform to the dictates of right reason and are interpreters of the lawful aspirations of the human person, contain elements that are positive and deserving of approval?' At the same time Catholic theologians, stimulated by John's creation, Vatican Council II, were reexamining the sources of the Church's social teaching and beginning to question the assumptions behind the dominion concept of 196 property...
...Jose Miranda in Mexico...
...In 1976 he gave an interview to an American magazine in which he said, I don't see any solution in capitalism...
...Even cardinals are making speeches denouncing international capitalism...
...It is understandable that Castro would be admired, or at least respected, as one who delivered his people from a reactionary dictator and then stood up successfully to the Colossus of the North...
...Those Catholics who took a dim view because they identified it with oppressive regimes in Russia, China, and so forth, or with a rigid concept of public ownership of the means of production, or with a closed system of Marxist metaphysics, are beginning to understand that those matters are no longer synonymous with the socialist movement, at least not with its Western, more democratic manifestations...
...But many more Christians, imprisoned in mental inertia and categories that are suffused with bourgeois ideology, regard this process fearfully and insist on taking the impossible pathway of reformism and modernization...
...Many Christians have made a personal commitment to it...
...Leo XIII is scarcely less forceful than Marx in some of his denunciations of the rich and powerful ("a very few rich and exceedingly rich men have laid a yoke almost of slavery on the unnumbered masses of non-owning workers"), but anyone who reads Rerum Novarum must be impressed with the extended paeans of praise for an almost absolute right of private property, which then becomes the basis for his rejection of socialism.' Forty years later Pius XI repeated those views in Quadragesimo Anno and reaffirmed the rejection of socialism, though conceding it is far preferable to communism and "its programs often strikingly approach the just demands of Christian social reformers...
...It is clear that the experience will not diminish the Church's general distaste for the Leninist variety of socialism...
...On February 25, 1981, a representative of the American Catholic bishops put them firmly on record as opposed to any military aid for the government of El Salvador, locked in murderous conflict with an opposition that is predominantly socialist in one sense or another...
...16 the French bishops expressing public neutrality, approximately 25 percent of France's practicing Catholics voted for the Socialist candidate, as indicated by French pollsters...
...There more and more members of the Church, from laymen to archbishops, are not only committing themselves to the poor but to socialism as well...
...7 Pope John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, 1981, reprinted in full, National Catholic Reporter, Sept...
...Whether privately or collectively owned, production is subject to this key test: does labor, the worker, the human being, receive priority in respect, compensation, and security over capital, the tools, the machines, the dead matter...
...But we can hope...
...It is not so understandable, given their presumed knowledge of Christian psychology, that these theologians should be so reluctant to join Dom Helder Camara in his rejection of dictatorships of the 198 left as well as of the right...
...By this test, John Paul emphasizes, either private or collective ownership may be either approved or condemned...
...Most, if not all, of these theologians are Christian Marxists, casting aside the atheism and materialism, but accepting the class analysis, the dominance of the economic factor, tending to accept the necessity of violent revolution, tending to accept the possibility, if not probability, of some form of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a sort of necessary evil...
...Now we are beginning to see the same process of radicalization spreading among the Catholic laity, clergy, and hierarchy of the northern hemisphere...
...A suggestion of the nonsense may be seen in a more recent statement by Allende's successor, President Pinochet, as he entered his new eight-year term...
...This is not the sort of stand one can imagine the American hierarchy taking as recently as, say, ten years ago...
...Which will take a lot of doing...
...Unfortunately, such statements are not easily come by in reading the books and articles that have flowed from the theoreticians of Christian socialism south of the border, most of whom fall into the category of exponents of "liberation theology...
...Jos6 Miguez Bonino, a Brazilian Protestant...
...Leonardo Boff in Brazil...
...These inhuman systems have engendered others which, in their attempt to free peoples, have instead also become oppressors, falling into totalitarian collectivism and religious persecution...
...We have already seen Vice-President Bush, appropriately clad in barong tagalog, standing before Dictator Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and congratulating him on his "dedication to democratic methods...
...In effect, the bars were down.' In the new labor encyclical, Laborem Exercens, the most impressive of them all in some ways, the present pope, John Paul II, has flung wide the door of the closet...
...The suspicion or distrust of democracy that recurs in the writings and statements of the liberation theologians of Latin America is echoed in those of their friends and admirers around the world...
...25, 1981, p. 14...
...Archbishop James Hickey, head of the Washington archdiocese, put it this way in his testimony before Congress: The conflict [in El Salvador] has deep roots...
...My socialism is justice...
...It reveals a strikingly similar contempt for democracy: Nothing will change...
...He worded it cautiously and repeatedly warned against the more extreme varieties of Marxism-Leninism, but in practical terms it was a kind of left-handed blessing for those Catholics who still cared what the popes might think about their joining socialist parties...
...It includes this statement: "Socialism is an international movement that does not demand a rigid uniformity of approach...
...The latter-day Pharaohs are, locally, the military juntas and dictators, behind them the native capitalists and behind these the international capitalists—most especially, those of the U.S.A...
...Derby, N.Y.: Apostolate of the Press), p. 54...
...12 Interview in the Sign, July–August 1976, p. 12...
...The clarification of the question of democracy should produce democratic socialists among these converts...
...9 Ibid...
...After all, what does "liberation" mean...
...My socialism is a special socialism, a socialism that respects the human person and goes back to the Gospels...
...Latin America has now proven that the boulder can be moved, is in fact being moved...
...There the Church, once its defender, is more and more actively confronting a power structure of the right...
...5 Pope Paul VI, Populorum Progressio, 1967, in The Gospel of Peace...
...15 Boston Sunday Globe, March 15, 1981, p. 40...
...499-501...
...If I may be permitted a religious expression, only God knows...
...Switching the context, Father Arroyo could not have said it better...
...Will the net result be a Church that is, if not committed, at least benignly favorable to democratic socialism...
...The dominion view of property suited the too customary role of the Church as defender of the status quo...
...The common sense of Arroyo's statement is more obvious...
...It is not principally a matter of guns but of justice...
...Thus we will avoid causing anybody to confuse God and religion with feudalism, capitalism and 197 imperalism, the worldly oppressors of the poor and of the workers of the world...
...It included the following: President Allende was betrayed by his trust in democracy...
...emphasis in original...
...One ingredient of the new attitude has been the growing realization that socialism too has 195 changed...
...By no other pope has the Church's indictment of capitalism been made so clear or been so convincingly argued as a violation of "a principle that has always been taught by the Church: the principle of the priority of labor over capital" [emphasis in original...
...From Leo XIII to Pius XI, John XXIII, the Second Vatican Council, Paul VI and John Paul II a social theory has been developing that reveals some remarkable similarities with the Frankfurt Declaration...
...10 "Medellin Documents," in The Gospel of Peace...
...11 The pastoral letter was written in Recife on August 15, 1967, under the direction of Dom Helder and first published in French on August 31, 1967, in Témoignage ChrHien, Paris...
...Are they ignorant of or, worse, indifferent to the oppression of the poor and the powerless that has issued from the seats of the mighty on the Marxist-Leninist side...
...200...
...Basil, "The coat that hangs in the closet belongs to the poor...
...and Jon Sobrino, a Spanish Jesuit who has studied in America and Germany and taught in El Salvador...
...The 400 delegates were mostly priests from Latin American countries but included Protestant ministers and lay activists...
...13 Christians and Socialism: Documentation of the Christians for Socialism Movement in Latin America, trans...
...4 Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, 1963, Vatican transl., from The Gospel of Peace and Justice: Catholic Social Teaching Since Pope John, ed...
...But neither do I see it in the socialist examples that are offered us today, because they're based on dictatorships and you don't arrive at socialism with dictatorship...
...III of the encyclical, see NCR, p. 13...
...We can expect that Ronald Reagan and Alexander Haig will be devoting their talents to similar chokings over the next few years...
...Four of them have been serving in the first Sandinista cabinet, with the reluctant permission of their more conservative bishops...
...The effects already may be noted in America...
...Lernoux is quoted by Alan Riding in "The Sword and Cross," a good review of four recent books on the Church in Latin America, New York Review of Books, May 28, 1981, pp...
...Joseph Gremillion (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1976), pp...
...The bourgeoisie, ably asissted by its North American branch and Richard Nixon, did indeed choke off Chilean democracy...
...Dom Helder, an engagingly enthusiastic prelate, presides over a cathedral whose walls are pockmarked by the machine-gun bullets of right-wing elements intent on scaring him into silence...
...Liberal democracy is a fiction, an ideological ruse which safeguards the interests of the ruling classes and functions exclusively within the confines of the capitalist system...
...Against this tendency the Catholic church stood like a great immovable boulder in the middle of the road...
...The ancient opposition of the Catholic church to socialism as well as to communism, most forcefully expressed in such encyclicals as Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931), is giving way to dialogue, flirtation, and cohabitation with all kinds of leftwing isms, from the most cautious expressions of social democracy through bolder commitments to democratic socialism over to all-out cries for revolution now and the dictatorship of the proletariat afterward...
...25, 1981...
...5-14...
...response should address the roots of the conflict...
...A few years later Paul picked up and developed the distinctions that John had made in Pacem in Terris between Marxism as a metaphysical system and socialism as a historical movement that is pursuing a form of political economy more in keeping with notions of justice and freedom that are shared by believers and nonbelievers...
...Its dean and most persuasive practitioner is Gustavo Gutierrez, Peruvian author of A Theology of Liberation (Orbis, 1973), which is still the seminal book on the subject...
...This is a new high...
...The partiality for democratic government has not been so emphatic, though Poland is changing that, but there has been a sharp critique of capitalism and its grasping materialism, a strong defense of workers' rights, support for various forms of cooperative and employee ownership and worker participation in management, as well as approval for public ownership where necessary...
...These theologians encompass a variety of emphases...
Vol. 29 • April 1982 • No. 2
