Volume LIV, No. 5
January, 2001
The Future of Catholic Social Teaching
Thomas Massaro, S.J.
IN THIS ISSUE Moral Theologian Thomas Massaro, S.J., examines Catholic Social Teaching in continuity and change. After identifying four shifts in emphasis in recent years, he projects two new challenges for the future of the social gospel: concern for the environment and the consequences of postindustrialism.
With Catholic social teaching, as with most subjects, the past is much more certain than the future.
We find ready agreement, for example, on the matter of what has until now comprised official church social teaching. It consists of the contents of a dozen or so papal encyclicals and related documents that address matters of politics, economics and life in modern society. Allowing for some variety in interpretations, we also witness broad agreement on the major themes treated by these documents over the past eleven decades. These positions include the dignity of every person, the importance of family life, human rights, subsidiarity, the responsibilities of property ownership, the rights of workers, a commitment to peace-making, an emphasis on solidarity and regard for the common good.
So much for the easy part. It is a much greater challenge to predict with any certainty future developments in Catholic social teaching. In attempting to chart the future course of church teaching, it seems safe to say that we can expect a mix of change and continuity. This essay seeks to identify the most likely developments in the years ahead.
Four Continuities: Further Shifts in Emphasis
In this section, we examine four examples of how Catholic social teaching has updated itself in recent years. None of the four involves completely new principles or ideas displacing older teachings. Rather, each witnesses a shift of emphasis or a new way of talking about familiar concerns as the church addresses a rapidly changing world. In each of these four areas, we can expect even further refinements in the coming years as the tradition of Catholic social teaching continues to grow and mature.
1. Personalism
The first of these shifts has been toward an approach called personalism. This word is a hard one to define, since the term has been applied to various schools of philosophical thought in different times and places. Interestingly, one of the hotbeds of personalism was the University of Lublin in Poland, in the very department where Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, taught in the 1950s. At the heart of personalism is a deep concern for the value of the human person, especially as it is threatened by the large structures (such as government and powerful corporations) though which modern life is organized. To be a personalist is to measure all things–including changes in culture, technology and systems of production--by their contribution to the well-being of persons. The messages of many personalists include appeals to reawaken interest in spirituality and the religious dimension of human life, challenging us to look beyond the level of merely material needs and their fulfillment.
Notice how closely this description of personalism overlaps with several themes of Catholic social teaching, especially its emphasis on human dignity and rights. Indeed, a personalist flavor has always been present in modern church teachings on life in society. However, only in recent years, especially since Pope John Paul II started mentioning personalism by name in his social encyclicals, has it received quite so much attention in church circles. Because the term personalism captures so many of the concerns the church seeks to underline in its teachings about human society, we may certainly expect an even more obvious and deliberate use of personalist thought in future social encyclicals.
Personalism is most helpful when it guides our way in balancing the extremes of a radical individualism (the blind spot to which capitalist systems are prone) and collectivism (one of the errors of communism). If we go too far in either of these directions, our approach to life is incomplete and potentially harmful to ourselves and others. This is precisely the message that John Paul II applies to the field of human work in the 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens. In paragraph 15 (a section entitled “The Personalist Argument”), the Pope explains his defense of “the priority of labor over capital” by focusing on the way people are treated in such places as factories and large corporations. On one hand, the dignity of each person should not be dwarfed by such huge structures which threaten to gobble up our individuality. On the other hand, we should not emphasize our individual rights so strongly that we lose all sense of social responsibility and our willingness to make sacrifices for the good of larger groups. Since personalist thought helps us maintain this important balance, we should warmly welcome further explicit use of personalism in future Catholic social teaching documents.
2. Humility Before the Data of Social Analysis
Next we consider the attitude and method of recent church social teachings. The growing trend worth noticing here is perhaps best summarized by the phrase “humility before the data.” While an older style of proceeding might have favored making firm church pronouncements on social issues, with a strong sense of certainty about its positions, the more recent style emphasizes caution and modesty about the judgments we make.
The church today is hesitant to lay down firm stances on complex economic or political issues, preferring instead to see its task here as one of informing the consciences of people as they form their own opinions. This observation becomes especially obvious when we contrast social teaching with the church’s more clear-cut stipulations in the field of sexual ethics. All the documents of Catholic social teaching since 1961 have recognized the possibility of legitimate differences of opinion and the need for ongoing social analysis, that is, the method of gaining knowledge about political and economic life that involves gathering information and subjecting it to rigorous scrutiny before making provisional judgments and acting upon them.
Another way of explaining this second theme is to say that Catholic social teaching has developed a greater appreciation of the limits of natural law. In the past, the church exhibited more confidence that the conclusions it drew from natural law reasoning were fixed and final. Recent decades have witnessed so much rapid social change that the need for ongoing social analysis and data collection could no longer be ignored.
A good example of this shift concerns the church’s stance on the legitimacy of private property. The earliest social encyclicals cited natural law to support private ownership of property as God’s firm intention. Yet later documents came to recognize a number of legitimate exceptions to unlimited property rights. What accounts for this change is a growing awareness of the complexity of social relations in various regional contexts around the world. This shift is reflected in a change of style in the more recent documents of Catholic social teaching. Whereas the oldest documents used a deductive style (a “top-down” way of reasoning from universal principles to local applications), the newer ones are more inductive (using “bottom-up” reasoning that is more likely to respect local variations and special needs). We can expect this trend to continue, for the simple reason that the world of human society is not likely to halt its dizzying rate of change.
3. Awareness of Social Sin
A third development we can expect to continue is the recent emphasis on social sin. Since the 1970s, several documents of Catholic social teaching have expressed concern about “structures of evil” which surround all people and in which we all too often take part. One example of such an evil social structure is racial discrimination. Even though we are free as individuals to refuse this temptation, the accumulated weight of racial bias exerts an indisputable influence on our cultural environment. The sheer act of living in a society that perpetuates such destructive patterns of thought and action makes it quite likely that each one of us will somehow fall prey to the sin of racism, even if in subtle ways. Other evil structures denounced in recent encyclicals include imperialism and colonialism–patterns of activity that have harmed millions of people and in which millions of others have cooperated over many centuries.
The point of talking about social sin is not to make us feel guilty about injustices we are hardly responsible for, and situations we merely inherited from previous generations. In fact, to truly qualify as a sin in the usual sense of the word, an act of racial bias or some other form of injustice must be deliberately chosen by an individual who acts with impure motives and at least some awareness of the harm being inflicted. However, calling attention to the evils that are already present in social structures may help to motivate us to make the desperately needed changes that will benefit those harmed by destructive patterns of behavior. It may succeed in challenging us to move beyond the temptations of complicity and apathy to a sincere commitment to urgent social change. Few of us are called to be famous prophets who denounce injustice in public arenas, but our Christian vocations always include a call to practice the virtue of courage and to challenge the status quo in some constructive way.
We can hope that church officials will continue to use Catholic social teaching as a vehicle for expressing the call to both individual holiness and social holiness. Future social encyclicals may continue to be privileged places where church teaching might bridge the local and the global, and express the need to examine ever more closely unjust aspects of the structures and institutions we so often take for granted.
4. Public Theology and Concerns about Credible Witness
The fourth and final item on our list of shifts in Catholic social teaching is the new emphasis on the public role of Christian theology in the broader society. This shift toward a more complete public face of the church is neither a brand new development nor an achievement we are close to completing. Rather, it is an ongoing task in which the church’s efforts have been unfolding since the beginning of Christianity: the task of “doing public theology.”
Let us focus on a few issues that have arisen concerning the way Catholic social teaching has been able to engage public life in our contemporary cultural setting. One significant development has been a noticeable antagonism between some Christian voices and certain aspects of popular culture. In standing up boldly for important principles such as the dignity of all human life, Catholic as well as Protestant leaders have found themselves denouncing certain currents of thought that have become common in the cultural mainstream.
The most ringing phrase that echoes in these recent public conversations is the accusation that we are witnessing a “culture of death.” This calls attention to the many ways, including public policies and private practices such as abortion, euthanasia and capital punishment, that society has exhibited an attitude of callousness toward human life. Perhaps the boldest denunciation of these horrifying trends appears in Pope John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (“The Gospel of Life”). Here the Pope reviews and extends arguments from such figures as Chicago’s late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin calling for a “consistent ethic of life.” The calling of all Christians, John Paul asserts, is to resist the “culture of death” by creating a “culture of life” grounded in the gospel.
By challenging the “culture of death,” our church leaders seem to be making a choice to play the prophet, in the sense of challenging injustice even at the price of their own popularity. But it would be a serious mistake to interpret this choice of the “prophetic option” as somehow eliminating the “dialogue option” that has for the most part characterized the recent relationship between Catholic theology and modern culture. Even as it spends time and energy criticizing destructive aspects of secular culture, Catholic social teaching renews its commitment to engage and even learn from what is helpful in that culture. In fact, although they barely makes an appearance in most official church documents, a number of pressing concerns about how to strengthen the “dialogue option” have received much attention in church circles in recent years.
Many in the church today are worried about the credibility of the church’s public witness. If hardly anyone is willing to take seriously what the church says about peace and justice, then it becomes doubtful whether Catholic social teaching can effectively fulfill its mission.
What steps can the church take to increase its public credibility without altering its prophetic messages about social justice? The most important items are several measures that would, in a sense, take ammunition away from those who claim that the Catholic church is guilty of blatant hypocrisy. These vocal critics find fault with the church for not practicing in its internal policies and procedures all the elements of the justice message it preaches. Until the church “gets its own house in order,” they warn, it will not have earned sufficient credibility to be an effective public witness to the gospel. In fact, from time to time church voices have publicly echoed this very concern. For example, Justitia in Mundo, the social teaching document from the 1971 Synod of Bishops, declared that “anyone who ventures to speak to people about justice must first be just in their eyes.”
Let us now explore a partial list of the complaints that are contributing to this credibility gap. Below we examine three of the issues which cannot be ignored as the church attempts to win a fair and sympathetic hearing for its social teaching and to continue its important task of dialogue with the modern world.
At the top of any such list of credibility issues facing the church today is the question of gender equality and the treatment of women within the Catholic church. Charges about sexism in church practices are especially prevalent in the Western nations with the most advanced feminist movements, and go far beyond the controversy over whether women are eligible to be ordained. Critics of church practices accuse officials of excluding women from meaningful participation in ecclesiastical decisions and blocking their rightful access to positions of authority. Even the very documents of Catholic social teaching are sometimes read as part of the problem, as some critics see them as belittling the contributions of women and enshrining an old-fashioned family ideal that prevents women from advancing. Even without entering into the complex debate about the merit of these accusations, we can certainly say that the church should work hard in the years ahead to change these perceptions and the realities behind them. Until women are able to recognize in Catholic teaching the real world of their daily struggles, the church’s social message will fall on many deaf and disbelieving ears.
A second cause for concern about the credibility of the church relates to labor issues, an area where Catholic social teaching has been a beacon of light in professing the rights of workers. The problem is that, directly or indirectly, the church employs millions of workers who do not always receive the best possible treatment. Specifically, in recent years controversy has swirled around the adequacy of the pay scales and fringe benefits received by those who work in the schools, hospitals and other institutions sponsored by the Catholic church and its religious orders of priests and nuns. In some cases, church officials have encountered unfavorable publicity when union organizers pointed out to them the discrepancy between Catholic documents supporting the right to form labor unions and the actual practice of some church-based institutions which discourage unionization. Until the values of worker rights and full participation (which are clearly proclaimed in the documents of Catholic social teaching) are fully reflected in actual labor practices within the church, this stumbling block of perceived hypocrisy will remain.
A third challenge here involves the internal life of the church, including the very procedures by which the teaching documents are written. Some critics claim that the church needs to take a hard look at the way it conducts its study of social issues and shapes its response to contemporary problems. They argue that broader consultation in drafting the documents that become Catholic social teaching would enhance the credibility of the public witness of the church. Suggestions have been made about how to achieve wider participation in the process by which social teaching is developed. Some ask whether it is desirable for documents that will represent the entire worldwide church to be written in relative secrecy by just a handful of people who work at the Vatican.
The search for alternative models highlights the history of four documents of official Catholic social teaching. Two Vatican documents (Gaudium et Spes from Vatican II and Justitia in Mundo from the 1971 Synod of Bishops) were written by large committees composed primarily of bishops and their advisors during the course of worldwide gatherings of church leaders. Further, the two most influential pastoral letters from the United States bishops’ conference (“Economic Justice for All” and “The Challenge of Peace”) went through a lengthy process in which several early drafts were released in order to invite public feedback, which came in the form of thousands of letters. In a remarkable spirit of open dialogue, the committee of bishops in charge of each letter sponsored listening sessions in which dozens of experts were invited to testify. Many people expressed great enthusiasm for such an open process that consulted broadly and publicly over such a considerable length of time.
Clearly, a happy balance needs to be struck between the extreme models presented by papal encyclicals on one hand and the American bishops’ pastoral letters on the other hand. One issue is timeliness. It took the U.S. bishops six long years to complete the two letters after an initial commitment to the task in 1980. While many people were genuinely excited about their roles in helping to improve over time the drafts of the letters on peace and economic justice, it must be admitted that there is a diminishing usefulness to any project that lasts too long. It may come to resemble the challenge of trying to hit a moving target. By the time a shared description of the problem is reached, the problem itself may have significantly changed. Vatican II surely did us a tremendous service by adding to the traditional model of “the teaching church” a new model of “the learning church.” However, we still struggle with the challenge of finding the most effective ways for the church to accomplish its task of listening and learning from events and voices in the wider society.
The desire for broader consultation on social teaching, while still preserving a unity of vision and clarity of purpose, is clearly a genuine and constructive guide to future efforts. But it still remains unclear precisely how best to achieve wider participation in shaping the stance our church will take on social issues in the new millennium.
To this list of the three challenges we could add other areas where the church might grow toward greater internal justice: eliminating abuses such as clericalism, excessively centralized hierarchy, and the exclusion of minority voices that are too seldom heard by high church officials. Until all these problems are addressed, we should avoid any uncritical celebration of the church’s contribution to public life and ongoing debates regarding social issues. Only by making progress in all these areas will the church in the years ahead find itself a truly effective advocate for the values it professes: freedom, democracy, human rights, and equal dignity for all God’s children.
Two New Challenges: The Environment and Postindustrialism
This essay began with a promise to make some significant predictions about the future of Catholic social teaching. So far, we have hardly “gone out on a limb” in venturing forecasts, since the four trends treated above are merely continuations of already established trends in church teaching. That easy part of the job must now be followed by the harder task of predicting some themes that will, without benefit of much advance fanfare, become important in future documents of Catholic social teaching. Here I will gamble on predicting just two developments.
The first is the area of environmental concern. Although care for the earth is a theme that fits easily with the call to social responsibility within Catholic social teaching, it is surprising how seldom ecological concerns are actually mentioned in the encyclicals. There are practically no sections of the social teaching documents that offer an extended treatment of what it means to practice “environmental justice.”
Yet my guess about this future direction for Catholic social teaching is a gamble that is likely to pay off, for several reasons. First, there is a growing worldwide consensus that damage to the environment is reaching a critical point as we begin the twenty-first century. Although there have been significant efforts and movements for ecological improvement for many decades, our misuse of the resources of the earth, its waters and atmosphere are now crying out for renewed attention as an urgent challenge.
Second, there are already some initial hints that the message of environmental concern is beginning to take root in the minds of some church leaders, especially on the local level. Many parishes and dioceses have adopted programs to raise awareness of pollution and to organize efforts to preserve our fragile ecosystem. Local campaigns to expand recycling, encourage organic farming and raise funds to preserve the world’s shrinking rain forests have often been started or co-sponsored by churches and are making an important impact on the lives of many people of faith.
But there is a third reason why we might express confidence about a future flowering of environmental concern within the church: it simply makes a lot of sense that this should happen. When we consider all the rich themes of Catholic social teaching, it is a natural outgrowth of its messages about justice to extend our practice of social responsibility to concerns about the environment. That is why the relative silence of the church on these matters up until now is so surprising The earth is a gift from God we share with all other creatures, so it is obvious that our relationship to other beings, whether human or not, is affected by the physical environment. To show disregard for the air that others breath and the quality of the water they drink is to damage not only inanimate objects but also our relationships with living things. Wasting and polluting precious natural resources is sinful for it is an offense against the things and people God has blessed us with. To be concerned about the effect of all my actions on the fragile ecosystem is to nurture an attitude of care for others that is most consistent with the core messages of Catholic social teaching.
Some clues about the possible shape of future church statements about the environment may be found in recent documents on the environment published by national and regional groups of bishops, including statements from the Philippines, Australia, Italy, the United States and various parts of Latin America. These letters, along with a few writings and addresses from the Vatican on this topic, seem to be struggling to make a transition from a troubling older theory of the environment to a newer and more promising approach.
The older approach is sometimes called the “stewardship model.” It portrays humans as the rightful masters of creation, placed in the center of the world and presented by God with the gift of dominion over the universe. In the few places where documents of Catholic social teaching mention the natural environment, they interpret the book of Genesis in a way that encourages people to subdue the earth and claim its resources for the sole purpose of human improvement. For example, Gaudium et Spes declares: “Men and women were created in God’s image and were commanded to conquer the earth with all that it contains and to rule the world in justice and holiness...”
Following this view does not necessarily make us oblivious to ecological damage, but does tend to restrict our concern only to human well-being. As evidence that the spotlight is clearly on humans, note this sentence from Octogesima Adveniens: “Man is suddenly becoming aware that by an ill-considered exploitation of nature he risks destroying it and becoming in his turn the victim of this degradation.” The focus of concern is clearly on humans; the outcome of any other victims, such as species of animals or entire ecosystems, remain at best an afterthought.
A more adequate and updated approach would take more seriously the intrinsic value of non-human created things. It would get beyond the inordinate bias, sometimes called “species-ism” or “anthropocentrism,” that belittles the worth and beauty of nature. A more thorough reverence for creation would allow us to imagine a type of solidarity that extends beyond the limits of the human species to include other forms of life and their habitats as well. The divine plan for the universe is frustrated not just when our acts boomerang and cause harm to humans, but whenever they destroy the environment in irreparable ways. The challenge is to begin to measure our acts, such as damming rivers, felling forests and developing land for commercial use, in a more holistic manner, in terms of their ecological impact.
It would be a great contribution if future documents of Catholic social teaching would offer some insightful guidelines for making important decisions about how to balance care for persons and care for the natural world. The church’s tradition of speaking so forcefully about the sacredness of life, universal solidarity and the common good gives it a head start in forming constructive and credible teachings in the area of environmental concern.
The second future challenge involves the evolving shape of the economy and the ways that new systems of production will treat millions of people. New patterns of world trade, computer technology and machine automation have greatly altered the way goods are produced and valued. The computer age has even created a whole new category of “information goods” such as computer software and data bases. It has also launched a new class of “knowledge workers” who make their living as systems analysts, programmers and consultants. We are moving rapidly into the dizzying world of what is often called “the postindustrial society.” This awkward phrase does not really mean to say that we will soon have no industries at all, but rather that the dominant trend is toward an automated style of production that is rapidly turning the assembly line worker into an economic dinosaur.
The problem with all these advances is that they threaten to leave billions of people behind. While we in the First World celebrate the growing conveniences of a “consumer lifestyle” now served by the internet and the Web, the vast majority of the world’s people can only dream of access to these wonders. Even more disturbingly, there is growing evidence that this new economic order is systematically wiping out the types of manufacturing and blue-collar jobs that less educated workers in every land generally rely upon for their livelihood.
Automation and information technologies are eliminating entire categories of jobs. The value of low-skill jobs is declining, so that the salaries earned by these workers are falling sharply. Steady work at reasonable wages is becoming harder for many to find. Unprecedented levels of unemployment and underemployment are predicted as a result of this new postindustrial age. While not everyone agrees on the scope and size of the problem, the growing challenge of a postindustrial economy will surely require us to rethink traditional patterns of organizing our work and our time.
The questions raised by these new economic forces are not merely technical matters that might be decided by economists and policymakers alone. Many of the questions about adapting to postindustrialism are above all moral problems on which the church has much to say. Will our society simply accept a situation where the highly educated grow ever more fabulously affluent while the less advantaged find themselves further and further cut off from the social mainstream? Do the people who benefit the most from advanced technology owe anything to those unfortunate enough to be born in a region or social class where computers and technological expertise are not easily available? How may we close this “digital divide” separating the computer-savvy from the illiterate?
Catholic social teaching does not offer ready-made solutions to any of these questions. Although its ultimate conclusions and policy preferences might not be immediately obvious, the church does bring a rich set of resources to these questions. For example, the messages the church proposes about human dignity, solidarity and the common good suggest that Catholic social teaching would generally support measures that protect the weakest members of society from the dangers that accompany a postindustrial order.
None of God’s children deserves to be considered merely as a “surplus person.” Even those unlucky enough to possess few marketable skills cannot simply be ignored and tossed aside by the winners in economic competition. The material needs of all people make a serious claim on all members of the human family, and the artificial boundaries of political allegiance, class and race will never be an acceptable excuse for continued indifference to our neighbors. With the help of these insights from Catholic social teaching, we may yet hope for a worldwide reform of institutions to reflect the message of justice and social responsibility for all our neighbors.
The Surprising Future
We have attempted to peek into the future and predict some of the concerns that are likely to find their way into future documents of Catholic social teaching. Of course, these guesses may prove to be mistaken, and new items not foreseen here may turn out to be more important in focusing future church teachings. The only thing that would be completely surprising is if God ceased to send us new surprises!
There is no telling what new movements of the Holy Spirit we will witness
in the coming years. But we may well expect two things: that Catholic
social teaching will continue to play a vital role in leading people in
the ways of justice, and that the success of this teaching in advancing
the social mission of the church will depend squarely on the work of people
of all walks of life who put justice into practice in their daily struggles.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Thomas Massaro, S.J., is Assistant Professor of Moral Theology at Weston Jesuit School of Theology. He has a doctorate from Emory University, and is the author of Catholic Social Teaching and United States Welfare Reform, published in 1998 by Michael Glazier Books, The Liturgical Press, numerous articles, and his most recent volume, Living Justice, from which this article has been adapted and published with permission of Sheed and Ward. Further information about purchasing this excellent overview of Catholic Social Teaching is available in the announcement below.
