News - November 2020 RSS Feed

I’m jumping to the end of the encyclical because I’m sure everyone is tired of me, IF you’ve been keeping up!  But there is much that is the core, at the end, to which the document has been building up. It has to do with legitimate conflict and forgiveness.

What is Pope Francis’ dream for our world?  It is a world engaged in and committed to “dialogue,” which means (for him) “Approaching, speaking, listening, looking at, coming to know and understand one another, and to find common ground” (#198).  Is this dream utopian, idyllic, Edenic, impossible?  If we think so, why?

Pope Francis longs for what he calls a “better kind of politics” (##146ff), one that can be responsive to the vision of a global community of fraternity based on social friendship (#154).  Do we need this?  One glance at the divisive results of our current politics makes the answer easy, the implementation very difficult.  It is a vision that wants to unify people into a genuine people, looking to long-term advantages rather than short-term benefits.  He thinks that unjust inequality can only be overcome and sustained by proper economic growth, the key to which is employment; “welfare projects” should always be temporary responses to crises (##161-162).  It’s a straightforward statement he makes: “…there is no poverty worse than that which takes away work and the dignity of work” (#162).  Pope St John Paul II would have heartily agreed.

Pope Francis next tackles an issue that is traditional in Catholic teaching (from the era of the “Church Fathers,” in fact) but which is controversial, to say the least, today.  It is the principle of the common use of created goods, the “first principle of the whole ethical and social order” (## 119-120).    Just in case you were wondering, the quote actually comes from Pope St John Paul II, in his encyclical Laborem Exercens.  The Catholic Compendium on Social Doctrine calls this “a natural and inherent right that takes priority over others.”  What’s the fancy theological word for this principle?  Sharing.   It is an explicit rejection of the sort of economic philosophy that says business is all (and only) about increasing shareholders’ profits, at whatever cost.