HOLY SMOKE

...Overlooking the promise of Eurocommunism on his doorstep, he offers no hope that socialism can be given a human face, while insisting against all historical experience that capitalism can shed the greed and selfishness that are its soul...

...As though it were possible to reconcile Pius IX's rejection of workers' claim to a voice in their destiny ("The faithful who allow themselves to be seduced will be heaping up for themselves treasures of vengeance before the Divine Judge on the day of wrath") and John Paul's insistence on the right to organize independent unions and to strike, a position that reflects the problems of Solidarity in his native Poland...

...For Pius XI that right was not affected even if owners failed to use their possessions properly...

...These were the inheritance of all, and all should share in their control and benefits...

...Paraphrasing Jesus's revolutionary claim that the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath, John Paul insists that work is for the worker, not the worker for work...

...He fails, nevertheless, to make the logical deduction that the property of workers has been illegally expropriated by the powerful...

...John Paul is conscious of the limited character of our natural patrimony...

...John Paul II's emphases are distinctly different...

...With capitalism in the throes of self-destruction, humankind had acquired a level of control of the material world that could not be entrusted to private hands: nuclear energy, genetic engineering, automation, instant communications...

...Significant here is the absence of any mention or even echo of the theology of liberation that offers self-realization and dignity to these masses...

...He seems unable to escape from the ahistorical role after which the Roman church has long hankered, modeling its attitudes and behavior on a series of preconceptions of reality, not on the reality expressed existentially in the signs of the times...

...Yet John Paul, in a series of bafflingly ambiguous references, gives the impression that it can be saved...

...The emphasis on the right to ownership of property has also shifted...

...Basil: "All that grows ceases to do so when it reaches its normal size, but the money of the greedy never stops growing...

...than accumulated labor...

...John Paul comes across as an observer rather than as a participant and co-sufferer with the world's oppressed majority...

...The father remains head of the family and the breadwinner...

...that they are slaves to what their work has created...

...One annoying, if minor, result of this institutional habit of mind is the repeated assertion in Laborem exercens that the church's teaching on the rights of labor "has remained unchanged throughout the centuries...

...Whatever Laborem exer-cens's ambiguities and contradictions, it is clear that John Paul has stepped back from the radical reformulation of the social problem made by Pope John XXIII in Mater et Magistra and Pacem in Terris, an evaluation echoed by Vatican Council II in its statement on The Church in the Modern World...

...Ambrose: "Nature has produced a common right for all, but greed has made it a right for a few...

...While ahead of Pius XI on this point, John Paul backs off from the verdict his predecessor rendered on capitalism in Qua-dregesimo Anno, written to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum...

...and that capital is something other Gary MacEoin, a free-lance journalist living in Tucson, writes extensively on the Catholic Church and Latin American issues...

...abstract and ambiguous essays on the most pressing global issues cannot count for much...

...Elsewhere in the encyclical, he proposes the joint ownership of the means of production by labor and management, the sharing of profit and decision-making by them, and an "etc...

...Basing his argument on the scriptural authority of the Genesis creation myth, rather than on the natural law arguments favored by his predecessors, he ranges himself boldly against Milton Friedman's Chicago School and the derived Reaganomics...

...But, in the Pope's scheme, she is still far from an equal partner in human affairs...

...John Paul makes many other concessions to a contemporary sense of human dignity and political reality...

...But the ministry of women, Rome's acceptance of family planning, optional clerical celibacy, and remarriage for those whose earlier unions have died—these are divisive and consequently taboo subjects...

...Regrettably absent from the document, moreover, are a sense of moral passion and outrage at the degradation of workers in the interest of selfishness and greed that were the daily flywheels of Marx's life and thought...

...What is significant is the absence in the encyclical of any mention or even echo of the theology of liberation that offers self-realization and dignity to the masses in the Third World Such a view sets progress at the speed at which the most resistant can be persuaded to change—the world will continue to move away faster than the church is prepared to run after it...

...Although there is no hint of his century-old source, John Paul is catching up with Das Kapital, just as the main theme of his earlier encyclical, Redemptor hominis, argues for the convergence of the humanism proclaimed by Marx and a transcendent faith in Christ...

...Yet that was the common teaching of the early Church fathers...

...It is bad enough that through such a sense of the world he squanders the enormous influence of the papacy...

...His expressed concern is for the millions of skilled workers threatened by automation and the exhaustion of natural resources...

...Pius agreed with Lenin that "free enterprise" necessarily evolves into monopoly capitalism, "an international imperialism whose country is where profit is...

...Such conservatism would also explain— though not justify—John Paul's failure to make more than a few passing references to the vast numbers, including more than half of all Roman Catholics, who live lives of desperation in the Third World of dependent capitalism...

...John Paul rejects what he calls the "rigid" capitalist position that private ownership of the means of production is "an untouchable dogma of economic life...

...We must live with an unjust status quo as long as monolithic unity is valued over all other considerations...

...Nature, he said, could satisfy all our needs forever...

...At one point he even insinuates that it has already been reformed, noting that the conversion of the worker into an instrument was an error of "early" capitalism...

...John correctly described the objective impulse of contemporary society as an intense drive toward socialization, collectivism, and planetary unity...

...Of its own nature," wrote Pius, capitalism concentrates power in antisocial types, in those "who fight most violently and give least heed to their conscience...

...not further specified...

...that they exist to serve the market...

...What emerges is the portrait of a very traditional Roman Catholic whose role image as pope is one many believed had been laid forever to rest...

...As a tract writer he condemns both capitalism and socialism in their various incarnations...

...Jerome: "One is rich either through one's own injustice or by inheriting from an injust person...

...Undoubtedly influenced by the success of the Polish church in maintaining popular allegiance and power in the face of a hostile regime, he posits a monolithic, unquestioning unity as the basis for the church's survival...

...But unlike John, he ignores the themes and the forces driving the world around him...

...Leo XIII held that nature destined woman to primarily domestic activities, but John Paul is content if work is so organized that she is not forced to abandon her specific role to the detriment of the family...

...Such is the basic message of Pope John Paul H's 20,000-word encyclical Laborem exercens ("engaging in work"), written to mark the ninetieth anniversary of the first papal expression of labor's rights and duties, Leo XIIFs Rerum Novarum...

...Leo XIII exhibited as little interest in man's stewardship of the Earth as have the multinationals ravaging the Amazon today...

...If such is the nature of capitalism, it obviously is beyond reform...

...What is worse is that the pope's mindset frustrates those who would set the church's own house in order by honoring the basic human rights of its members, a task that is essential—as John XXIII insisted—if the church is to be a credible witness to the world...

...The suggestion is even less comprehensible when contrasted with John Paul's condemnation of the growing role of transnational corporations in widening the gap between rich and poor countries...

...In yet another context he says, "one cannot exclude the socialization [italics in original], in suitable conditions, of certain means of production...

...In Laborem exercens he follows Marx in rejecting the capitalist premises that people have no right to their own labor...

...the mother, the homemaker...