How Liberal Is the New Pope?
NIEBUHR, REINHOLD
THINKING ALOUD How Liberal Is the New Pope? By Reinhold Niebuhr ONE hears two questions about the old Pope and the new Pope, and they are generally put by people who have no particular...
...But prudence is also a form of virtue...
...Catholicism's contribution of this form of liberalism to Western democracy in its encounter with modern industrialism has never been sufficiently appreciated...
...I hope that, among the definitions it has taken on, the word has not become so broad that it is generally regarded as synonymous with "amiable...
...The nuclear dilemma has raised the moral ambiguity of the political order to the nth degree...
...In Italy, as in all Latin nations, the Church has not been completely extricated from the old feudal order...
...This has had the salutary consequence of the Church championing all individual rights of conscience, and all the emphasis on the dignity of the person, which bourgeois and modern liberals hold dear...
...It does not appear that Pope Paul VI has this characteristic of grace and holiness...
...Thus Pope John declared: "It is our earnest wish that the United Nations organization, in its structure and in its means, may ever become more equal to the task of nobility and magnitude, that the time comes when every human being will find therein an effective safeguard of his rights, which derive directly from his dignity as a person...
...The late Pope's counsels cannot, therefore, guide a responsible statesman, even if, like President Kennedy, he is seriously devoted to the achievement of an adequate test-ban treaty...
...Virtue is not common among intellectuals...
...This embodies the creed of our Republican rightwingers, from Senator Taft to Senator Goldwater, and of many of the various liberal and free democratic parties of Europe...
...The two questions are: "How liberal is the new Pope...
...The questions make it necessary to spend some time with the definition of the word "liberal," for liberalism is defined in different and sometimes contradictory ways in various contexts...
...It may be achieved by as unsimple a soul as Paul VI seems to be...
...It is significant, too, that one of the points of tension between Pope Pius XII and Giovanni Montini, Archbishop of Milan, was said to be the lattcr's advocacy of an "opening to the left" in Italian politics, without which the Christian Democratic party could neither engage in significant land reform, establish viable tax laws nor create an adequate system of social security for workers...
...This capacity is extraordinary among all men...
...It is probable that, in consequence, he well might have missed election to the papal throne in the convocation which elected Pope John...
...But in measuring the comparative liberalism of the two Popes, it is necessary to weigh individually those connations of the word liberal which have to do with purely religious and ecclesiastical attitudes and policies, and those which have to do with the political order...
...Considering that Pope Paul is a sophisticated political thinker, one can only hope that he will not follow this mood of easy optimism in the late Pope's thinking...
...Politically, the word liberalism has achieved almost contradictory connotations...
...Insofar as Pope Paul is committed to the Council, he is as liberal as Pope John...
...and even though addressed by the faithful as "Holy Father," it is also extraordinary among Popes...
...The conception of the United Nations as an embryo world government is breathtaking...
...Will he carry forward the rather new liberalism of his predecessor...
...The questions are undoubtedly prompted by the wide personal appeal that the late Pope John XXIII had beyond the confines of the Catholic and the religious community, and the impact of Catholicism both on domestic policy in the Western world and on foreign policy in the cold war...
...We must assume that Pope Paul knows that this ambiguity has to be accepted, and not evaded...
...But in this area one can be certain that the new Pope will be as consistently liberal as Pope John: He is the son of a lawyer who was a member of Don Sturzo's Catholic party in pre-Fascist days, a party more consistently devoted to political renovation than today's amorphous Christian Democrats...
...On the other hand, liberalism connotes a desire to use all the instruments and authority of the political state for the attainment of justice...
...This means the welfare state, the politics of the New Deal, and of the Kennedy Administration's current integration program, which according to conservative Republicans violates the property rights of individuals by guarding the human dignity of our Negro fellow citizens...
...There is no question about the fact that, politically, both Paul VI and John XXIII are liberal in the second sense...
...In fact, Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, all Popes have been liberal...
...In the first context, liberalism means, or may mean, sympathy for the critical study of scripture, or a grant of greater authority to the bishops as contrasted with the curia or the Vatican bureaucracy...
...Thus, one may expect that Montini, now Pope Paul VI, will carry on the political policies of John XXIII, much to the discomfiture of the Italian and Spanish cardinals for whom the late Pope was known as the "Red Pope...
...At the same time, Pacem in Terris had the disadvantage of proclaiming the rather easy optimism which has characterized classical liberalism, with its disregard for the power realities of the political order...
...Being neither an expert on Catholicism nor privy to any inside information on so tightly-knit an organization as the Catholic Church, I dare to answer these questions merely from general knowledge and personal surmise...
...John XXIII was, after all, a very unsophisticated "good man...
...that is to say, I shall not answer the questions at all, but merely speculate upon them...
...It disregards the power realities of the cold war, and seems to be of a piece with the sort of liberalism which animates all proponents of world government...
...Pope John's last and most significant encyclical, Pucem in Terris, simply made Lockean liberalism, hitherto regarded by Catholics as a corruption of natural law, a part and extension of the old natural law theory...
...They were indeed intimate friends, and there can be no doubt that one of the reasons for Paul's ascension to the papal throne was that Pope John so creatively stirred the ecclesiastical waters that only a candidate who would carry on his work by reconvening the Ecumenical Council had a chance of election...
...Sainthood and intellectualism seem to be incompatible...
...We have long since come to terms with the fact that there is no easy "moral" way out of our present anxieties...
...In these terms— aside from his reconvening of the Ecumenical Council, which allows all the bishops of the Universal Church to be heard—there is no real evidence that Pope Paul shares Pope John's liberalism...
...And, as a corollary, "Is Pope Paul VI as liberal as was John XXIII...
...It is so breathtaking, it cannot be shared by even the staunchest advocates of the UN...
...He seems to be a highly intelligent and complicated ecclesiastic, really more like Pius XII than John XXIII...
...More than that, he had a great capacity for loving and being loved...
...They are in the vein of the old optimistic universalism, which the hard realities of our wintry age have taught us is no longer valid...
...It will be recalled that Paul had a complicated fatherson relationship with Pius XII while serving in the inner sanctum of the Vatican...
...His experience and intelligence clearly qualified him as a candidate...
...And it is because their liberalism has taken this form that Catholicism, once freed of feudalism by forces outside itself, could apply its idea of the social substance of human existence to modern technical collectivism...
...The red hat, however, was not conferred on him...
...The Catholic Church was able to skip over the individualism of the classical economy and deal with collective realities—such as trade unions and their right to organize and bargain collectively—in a way that secular or Protestant individualists could not...
...Here, though, we face a paradox...
...Pope Paul's relation to John XXIII is revealed by the fact that he was the first archbishop whom the late Pope made a cardinal...
...On the one hand, liberalism has come to mean the economics of the classical laissezfaire economy and the bourgeois individualism of John Locke...
...The social teachings of the modern encyclicals, therefore, have had more effect in other Western nations—in Germany, Belgium...
...Holland and the U.S.—than in Italy itself...
...There remains one other important question about Pope Paul's liberalism...
...Certainly the late Pope John was amiable...
...By Reinhold Niebuhr ONE hears two questions about the old Pope and the new Pope, and they are generally put by people who have no particular interest in Catholicism...
...The upshot was that he was made Archbishop of Milan...
...Pope John's disarmament proposals are of the same tendency, vaulting over the complicated and tragic problems of immediate security which make the balance of terror the basis of our precarious peace...
Vol. 46 • July 1963 • No. 15
