This concentration of power and might, the characteristic mark, as it were, of contemporary economic life, is the fruit that the unlimited freedom of struggle among competitors has of its own nature produced, and which lets only the strongest survive; and this is often the same as saying, those who fight the most violently, those who give least heed to their conscience.
—Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno
We would be remiss, however, after going through some of the most flagrant accusations leveled against Pope Francis, to forget an important detail: not many years ago, similar attacks from American neocon and theocon circles were also raised against Pope Benedict XVI. In fact, on June 29, 2009, Benedict XVI signed his third encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, which dealt primarily with social issues. At over one hundred pages, it was essentially an update on Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio (1967) and John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus (1991). The world had changed between 1991 and 2009, and there was need for a fresh new look on specific issues. The encyclical, whose publication had been delayed to allow the inclusion of a few thoughts on the economic and financial crisis, calls for a national economic development of countries to be implemented along three inseparably linked directives: responsibility, solidarity, and subsidiarity.
The pope’s document met widespread acclaim but also some criticism. According to some, different topics were presented without taking a clear position, leaving room for ambivalence. With regard to globalization, for example, there were those who found that the document was attentive to the “great problems of injustice in the development of peoples,” but also that “growth has taken place, and it continues to be a positive factor that has lifted billions of people out of misery.” Coincidentally, similar criticism was moved against Benedict’s successor.
But the strongest criticism was over the passages dealing with the markets and globalization; and, surprisingly, those critics were from the “right”—namely, those who have a clear and especially positive idea of markets and globalization. The paragraphs that received most of the criticism are the ones that follow.1
Benedict XVI writes: “The global market has stimulated first and foremost, on the part of rich countries, a search for areas in which to outsource production at low cost. . . . Consequently, the market has prompted new forms of competition between States as they seek to attract foreign businesses to set up production centres, by means of a variety of instruments, including favourable fiscal regimes and deregulation of the labour market. These processes have led to a downsizing of social security systems.”
Further, the pope adds: “Through the combination of social and economic change, trade union organizations experience greater difficulty in carrying out their task of representing the interests of workers.” And then, “The global context in which work takes place also demands that national labour unions . . . turn their attention to those outside their membership, and in particular to workers in developing countries”
A passage on foreign trade follows: we must “give serious attention to the damage that can be caused to one’s home country by the transfer abroad of capital purely for personal advantage,” and “there is no reason to deny that a certain amount of capital can do good, if invested abroad rather than at home.”
About a month after the release of the encyclical, the aforementioned Michael Novak—together with other leading American Catholic neoconservatives such as the late Richard John Neuhaus and George Weigel—had his say in the online pages of First Things.2 Novak’s ideas are well known. For years he has proposed his “democratic capitalism” as the political and economic system most compatible with Christianity, especially Catholicism. To the Catholic world Novak has always presented himself as an opponent of liberation theology, considered clearly molded on Marxism, to convince Catholics to accept in all respects “market capitalism.” Novak has always deemed himself capable of reading within the papal texts the theory of market capitalism, especially in encyclicals. But then he overlooks the same papal condemnations of those mechanisms of debt and monopolization with which different developing countries must deal. Not surprisingly, in a comment on John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus that appeared in National Review, Novak wrote, “If in Vatican II, Rome accepted American ideas of religious liberty, in Centesimus Annus Rome has assimilated American ideas of economic liberty.”3
Thus, in 2009 Novak stood up to make his remarks on Pope Benedict’s encyclical. And the headline for the Italian edition of his article indicates specifically what and how Novak intended to attack: “Too much Caritas, too little Veritas. Benedict XVI’s new encyclical: between right intuitions and (involuntary) omissions.”
Novak begins warily. It becomes clear that he would rather attack the papal text more explicitly, but at the beginning he remains cautious. Then, slowly, he starts to come into the open and writes, “The staff work [for the encyclical] has been rather poor,” and then he continues: “For myself, though, I love best the starting point in caritas,” because “watching Benedict XVI write about caritas so beautifully brings me immense satisfaction.” But then comes the jab:
In all candor, however, if we hold each sentence of Caritas in Veritate up to analysis in the light of empirical truth about events in the field of political economy since 1967, we will find that it is not nearly so full in its veritas as in its caritas. For instance, the benefits for the poor achieved through the spread of economic enterprise and markets (capitalism is for some too unpleasant a word to use) should be more resoundingly attended to. In 1970, for instance, the mortality age of men and women in Bangladesh was 44.6 years old, but by 2005 it had risen to 63. Think what a joy and what vigor such increased longevity means to individual families. Similarly, infant mortality rate (deaths per 1,000 live births) in Bangladesh in 1970 was 152, or 15.2 percent. By 2005 this average had been brought down to just 57.2, or a little less than 6 percent. Again, what pain this lifts from ordinary mothers and fathers, and what joy it brings. There is surely more to do to raise health standards for Bangladeshi. But the progress just in this past thirty years is unprecedented in world history. There are many more omissions of fact, questionable insinuations, and unintentional errors strewn through this encyclical. . . . Every deficiency of veritas injures caritas. That is the beautiful and powerful linkage in this encyclical.
In short, Benedict XVI’s text, according to the American scholar, is too reticent. It fails to recognize, with due emphasis and in length, the importance of capitalism for the advancement of the poor.
But Novak was not the only one to criticize Benedict XVI’s social encyclical. One of the main biographers of both John Paul II and Benedict XV, American public commentator George Weigel, followed suit. On July 7, 2009, Weigel wrote an article titled “Caritas in Veritate in Gold and Red” for National Review.4 According to Weigel, chair in Catholic Studies of the Ethics & Public Policy Center, Caritas in Veritate is a “hybrid” creature—he compares it to a platypus—where one can find and highlight with a yellow marker the passages related to Benedict’s authentic thought while underlining in red the “incorrect” ones—those developed by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and vitiated by an entrenched and naïve third-world outlook, considered typical of conciliar thinking.
Weigel was therefore critical of the work that, in his view, was put into the preparation of the encyclical:
The Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, which imagines itself the curial keeper of the flame of authentic Catholic social teaching, prepared a draft, which was duly sent to Pope John Paul II—who had already had a bad experience with the conventionally gauchiste and not-very-original thinking at Justice and Peace during the preparation of the 1987 social encyclical, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis. John Paul shared the proposed draft with colleagues in whose judgment he reposed trust; one prominent intellectual who had long been in conversation with the Pope told him that the draft was unacceptable, in that it simply did not reflect the way the global economy of the post–Cold War world worked.
So John Paul dumped the Justice and Peace draft and crafted an encyclical that was a fitting commemoration of Rerum Novarum. For Centesimus Annus not only summarized deftly the intellectual structure of Catholic social doctrine since Leo XIII; it proposed a bold trajectory for the further development of this unique body of thought, emphasizing the priority of culture in the threefold free society (free economy, democratic polity, vibrant public moral culture). By stressing human creativity as the source of the wealth of nations, Centesimus Annus also displayed a far more empirically acute reading of the economic signs of the times than was evident in the default positions at Justice and Peace. Moreover, Centesimus Annus jettisoned the idea of a “Catholic third way” that was somehow “between” or “beyond” or “above” capitalism and socialism—a favorite dream of Catholics ranging from G. K. Chesterton to John A. Ryan and Ivan Illich.
In short, according to Weigel, John Paul II had finally shown to the Catholic Church that capitalism, as we know it, was the best, the most appropriate, and the most Catholic system. And from this instrumental perspective, intended to sanction the indissoluble alliance between the church and the free market, Benedict XVI’s encyclical already appeared to be a step backward.
As a result, Weigel sought to deconstruct the magisterial text, separating what he believed was Ratzinger’s authentic thought from the passages prepared by his collaborators of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.
Weigel wrote: “But then there are those passages to be marked in red—the passages that reflect Justice and Peace ideas and approaches that Benedict evidently believed he had to try and accommodate.” Weigel explains that the passages on “gratuitousness” and “gift” certainly would fit better in a spiritual context, and not in a socioeconomic one. Those on a “world political authority” could have been justified at the time of John XXIII, but less so today.
Weigel concludes by writing: “If those burrowed into the intellectual and institutional woodwork at the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace imagine Caritas in Veritate as reversing the rout they believe they suffered with Centesimus Annus, and if they further imagine Caritas in Veritate setting Catholic social doctrine on a completely new, Populorum Progressio–defined course (as one Justice and Peace consultor has already said), they are likely to be disappointed. The incoherence of the Justice and Peace sections of the new encyclical is so deep, and the language in some cases so impenetrable, that what the defenders of Populorum Progressio may think to be a new sounding of the trumpet is far more like the warbling of an untuned piccolo.”
Thus we have seen two leaders of American Catholic conservatism who had openly criticized Benedict’s encyclical. Because if in John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus capitalism somehow passed the test, Benedict’s document remains more cautious and advances several criticisms. And for the two American intellectuals that is unacceptable. They probably did not expect such a text, especially from Benedict. Hence we have their attempt to attribute the encyclical to a kind of conspiracy of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, which at that time was headed by Cardinal Renato Raffaele Martino—the “revenge of Justice and Peace,” as the subtitle to Weigel’s article puts it. A conspiracy that, to be fair, would have to be proven first.
Today, no one remembers these criticisms of Benedict XVI, when the German pope dared venture out of familiar territories and from the organic reading of his own pontificate that his supporters had built. In effect, today the misleading contrast between Benedict and his successor is more prevalent. It is an opposition based not so much on elements of discontinuity—always and obviously evident when comparing different pontificates—but rather on a hostility that certain circles, even within the Catholic world, manifest toward Francis’s testimony and teaching.
Returning to those accusations made against Benedict’s social encyclical, a few months after the American conservative criticisms, a response arrived from Cardinal Martino himself, one of Novak and Weigel’s main “suspects”:
The criticism from some American circles to Benedict XVI’s encyclical does not surprise me that much . . . the church, as its Compendium of the Social Doctrine makes clear, does not forget and cannot forget that scientific and technological progress, as well as the globalization of markets, which can be a source of development and progress, however, exposes workers to the risk of being exploited by the mechanisms of the economy and the unbridled pursuit of productivity. The Church does not forget, and cannot forget, that the same right to private property is subordinated to the principle of the universal destination of goods. This is a principle that applies to financial, technical, intellectual, and personal goods as well. The mechanisms of the economic system must be at the service of humanity and not of illicit exploitation and speculation. It seems to me that these criticisms from well-known circles in the United States end up revealing a desire to have the pope say what those same circles would like to hear, to support and legitimize their positions, downplaying or censoring what the magisterium of the Church says that it is not in line with those positions, for example, on globalization, the market, and the defense and protection of creation.
These pages dedicated to Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate show, therefore, that there is the constant attempt to have the Catholic Church say what others would like her to say, or to have her impart her blessing on one’s own economic systems and worldviews. By looking back to what happened in 2009, are we still surprised by the taunts thrown at Francis, who, unlike his predecessor, is also “guilty”—in the eyes of certain capitalist think tanks—of coming from South America and of speaking more frequently of the poor?