The Mixed Blessing: Caritas in Veritate, Part IV

Perhaps the two most glaringly non-distributist arguments the Pope advances are those on foreign workers and the pervasive internationalism of the document.

On foreign workers, the Pope seems to completely avoid the clear issues that many nations have had with these workers, not to mention the problems that arise from their presence in large numbers in light of Catholic social teaching. Issues concerning integration with the native population are simply dismissed; the Pope praises these populations' roles “despite any difficulties concerning integration”¹ without further comment. He notes that the issue is “a striking phenomenon because of the sheer numbers of people involved,”² but fails to acknowledge any of those problems with any specificity other than to dismiss that of integration, as well as to remind us, rightly, that “[e]very migrant is a human person.”³

However, the Pope had already identified the many problems created by an overly mobile workforce, of which foreign workers must clearly be the most egregious example. He had noted that the formation of stable families is much more difficult in such conditions,⁴ as well as the fact that “new forms of psychological instability”⁵ and “new forms of economic marginalization”⁶ arise. For some reason, however, his consideration of foreign immigration is devoid of any such thoughts, save solely for a brief statement of immigrants’ essential humanity. Nor, the distributist must note, does he comment on the downward pressure that foreign workers put on wages in their host countries, particularly in blue-collar jobs, or the resulting pressure that their presence puts on native workers to abandon those jobs for already overabundant white-collar positions.

Regarding the document’s internationalism, I am certainly not the first to notice it. It’s a definite, clear, and persistent strain throughout the entire document. The Pope argues that one of the solutions to our current economic woes is to ensure that the United Nations “acquire[s] real teeth.”⁷ He mentions this international government solution several times, usually claiming its necessity to be due to increased global economic interdependence.⁸

Nor is this internationalism entirely alien to distributist thinking. Our own John Médaille, here at The Distributist Review, has commented on the article “Caritas in Veritate: The Bane of Austrianism” that

I think the Pope is right: in a world were [sic] there is world trade we need a world organization to regulate so that trade disputes do not end in war (as is common in history). We need a “WTO,” we just don’t need the WTO we have, which is a servant of the rich.

And the Pope is very circumscribed in what he envisages as his new world authority. He notes that “wisdom and prudence suggest not being too precipitous in declaring the demise of the State.”⁹ He further states that “the State’s role seems destined to grow”¹⁰ and that the state will be responsible for keeping order, punishing malefactors, and other traditionally state-level functions.¹¹ He even urges international aid to developing countries be dedicated in part to supporting states, rather than weakening them.¹² Those criticisms of this document which have had Pope Benedict demanding the surrender of all sovereignty to an international authority are clearly greatly overstating the case.

However, the Pope has made, as stated above, an unabashed assertion of the necessity for some type of world government:

In our own day, the State finds itself having to address the limitations to its sovereignty imposed by the new context of international trade and finance, which is characterized by increasing mobility both of financial capital and means of production, material and immaterial. This new context has altered the political power of States.¹³

In other words, the fact that money and goods flow so freely throughout the modern world means that a world government is necessary to help smooth said movement. While some critiques of the Pope’s position have been overblown, the distributist must look at this with some significant caution.

After all, the distributist seeks precisely more local production and less international movement of finance and capital. Naturally, it would be an impossibly gifted country which could provide all of its own goods for itself; even a land as graced by God as America still requires foreign production for goods like pineapples and coffee. The distributive state would not forsake all trade. On the other hand, the current situation, in which “financial capital and means of production” flow constantly, and are rarely locally based, is precisely the problem with our economy, and making this situation work more smoothly only perpetuates that problem, it does not solve it. Calling for a world government to make our current economy work better is like calling for drugs to strengthen a tumor; it’s bolstering the very system that’s the problem.

The distributist can certainly support some type of authority to help ensure the amicable resolution of trade disputes, of course, though he might just as legitimately oppose it. But the Pope is clearly calling for something more than merely that, even allowing for vagaries of translation:

[S]uch an [international] authority would need to be universally recognized and to be vested with the effective power to ensure security for all, regard for justice, and respect for rights. . . it would have to have the authority to ensure compliance with its decisions from all parties, and also with the coordinated measures adopted in various international forums.¹⁴

What the Pope states so blithely here is precisely the problem with the proposal. Such an international authority, to be truly useful, would need its own authority. Not merely the United Nations’s current authority to ask its members to enforce its decisions (which, of course, they do only extremely selectively), but its own authority. And that authority itself must be sufficient to enforce its will upon member states, even against their resistance. This means an international authority that is stronger than any one state, and thus capable of putting any given state’s sovereignty to nought.

Furthermore, this is plainly not an international authority limited only to international issues; that is, to issues which necessarily effect all nations. It involves enforcing “justice,” “respect for rights,” and “security for all,” phrases so broad that they would justify any intrusion into national sovereignty that the organization cared to undertake. Ironically, given that His Holiness correctly opposed the invasion of Iraq, this language would clearly have sufficed to justify that invasion, and sounds much like the language that our government in fact used to justify it. For how else can the international organization enforce its decisions against a non-complying member nation (which all nations are, of course, for he’s already specified that this organization must be “universally recognized”), should lesser measures fail? We could not have such an organization if it could not use force; but if it can use force, then national sovereignty is brought to nothing. Particularly given the godless nature of most of the states who would make up such an organization, and the anti-Christian nature of most of those non-godless ones who would be members, this should give any distributist great alarm. The Pope, however, does not seem to acknowledge this peril in any way.

The Pope attempts, of course, to mitigate the consequences of his words with other language, much of which is quite traditional in nature. He notes that his international organization “would need to be regulated by law”¹⁵ (what law, given that this organization is clearly meant to be above all national laws?) and “to observe consistently the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity, to seek to establish the common good.”¹⁶ All this is well and good. But much of it does beg the question:

Does such an international organization itself observe consistently the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity?

Surely in most cases more regional agreements would be sufficient to ensure that common interests among nations are protected without entrusting more authority than necessary to a higher order to which it does not rightly belong? The fundamental unit of economic activity, the good of which is rightly called the common good, is the state.¹⁷ For the state to send more functions outside of itself than is necessary would be to violate its own nature. This violates both the principle of subsidiarity (that the appropriate level of society should perform a given function) and that of solidarity (that all functions performed in society should be directed toward the common good). Why cannot states group together in limited numbers for limited purposes as they require, and leave other states alone otherwise? What real necessity is there for a “universally recognized” international organization capable of enforcing its will anywhere in the world in any matter dealing with “security for all, regard for justice, and respect for rights?”

The Pope calls for a world government with “real teeth,” but seems to have no appreciation for what that really means. He ignores the problems of actually forming such a world government, ignores the fact that nearly all of the potential member states are non-Christian or even anti-Christian, and fails to recognize numerous, less drastic measures which would suffice to solve the problems for which he proposes this world authority as a solution. At worst, this organization would be an unmitigated disaster, the total destruction of meaningful national sovereignty within the state, and thus of the common good, which depends upon the sovereignty of the state; even at best, it’s simply enormous overkill, with unintended consequences beyond count or measure. But the Pope gives no indication that he even recognizes any of these problems, much less offers any solution to any of them. The distributist must look with great caution at any call for a world government, even when it comes from the Pope. I urge all distributists to do so.

Finally, perhaps most alarming about the document is its apparent disregard for the vast majority of the Church’s social teaching. While the Pope does follow traditional teaching most of the time, as I’ve outlined in some detail throughout this article (see Part II particularly), the fact is that the document is almost entirely devoid of explicit references to said teaching. Other than Populorum Progressio, the Pope cites practically none of the social teaching that preceded his.

Let us back away from our examination of the encyclical’s text and consider the encyclical as a document for a moment. The Pope has stated more than once that he had been working on the document for an extended period of time. Allowing w3m to dump the text and deleting the navigation links produces a word count (via standard GNU wc) of 30,567 words. Granted, some of that is headings and other formal, non-content verbiage, but it’s certainly safe to say that we have a document here in excess of thirty thousand words. While this doesn’t provide any competition for the epically long encyclicals of his predecessor,¹⁸ it’s considerably longer than most of the great social encyclicals.¹⁹

Despite this fact, however, Leo XIII and Pius XI managed to reference large numbers of their predecessors and other great Catholic social thinkers throughout history, from St. Thomas Aquinas²⁰ to the Scriptures themselves, which are cited voluminously in almost all papal documents. The situation with Caritas in Veritate, however, is quite different.

Caritas in Veritate includes a total of 159 explicit citations. Of these, precisely five reference anything prior to Pope John XXIII. Of these five, we do not have anything like a reasonable employment of the long, proud, and rigorous social teaching tradition of the Church:

• Footnote 35 references Rerum Novarum, as the second of several sources, and even then only to highlight Populorum Progressio;

• Footnote 85 references The Catechism of the Catholic Church 407, which in turn references the Council of Trent; but this is an incidental note referring to original sin, not an explication of important social teaching;

• Foonote 88 references St. Augustine on free will; while interesting, this is again not an explication of important social teaching;

• Footnote 116 cites Heraclitus of Ephesus for the value of nature as a gift of God; again, interesting, but hardly a reliance on the Church’s long social teaching tradition;

• Footnote 130 references St. Thomas Aquinas, for the good purpose of showing man’s relationship to the community.

The entire world of social teaching embodied in Rerum Novarum, Mirari Vos, Quadragesimo Anno, Libertas Præstantissima, Immortale Dei, in innumerable other documents is all passed over. Does the Pope generally follow this tradition? Yes, he clearly does, and I’ve exerted some effort in this series to show that he does. But the fact that he so rarely acknowledges it, ignoring the vast bulk of Catholic social documents in favor of those few published in the last forty-five years, is unquestionably worrisome.

These, in addition to the troublesome lack of an official Latin text over two months after the document’s release,²¹ are the most difficult aspects of the encyclical from the Catholic distributist’s point of view. They do not make the encyclical bad, nor do they make it an unworthy part of the Church’s social teaching. They do, however, present a problem for such distributists. Treating these issues requires circumspection, tact, and most of all prayer and fasting. Let us all embark on this task; we will need to do so anyway, if we hope to have any influence in this world.

Footnotes

1. Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, no. 62.
2. Id.
3. Id.
4. Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, no. 25.
5. Id.
6. Id.
7. Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, no. 67. Incidentally, this is one of the problems of not having a definitive Latin edition available. Does an English idiom of this sort really accurately reflect the Pope’s thought? “Real teeth” indicates, in English, a strong enforcement power. Yet the French, for example, simply calls for giving “a concrete reality to the concept of the family of nations” (une réalité concrète au concept de famille des Nations), while the Spanish essentially duplicates this, wishing for “a real coming together of the concept of the family of nations” (una concreción real al concepto de familia de naciones). I’m afraid I’m not familiar enough with the other published languages to express an opinion on their translation, but one must wonder what the official Latin version will (does?) say.
8. Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, no. 67.
9. Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, no. 41.
10. Id.
11. Id.
12. Id.
13. Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, no. 24.
14. Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, no. 67 (emphasis added).
15. Id.
16. Id.
17. See, e.g., Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, p. 38-39 (teaching that “man’s various economic activities combine and unite into one single organism and become members of a common body,” clearly referring to the state); see also Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, no. 28 (teaching that the state comprises an organic whole consisting of its parts); see also generally Donald P. Goodman III, Distributism: A Catholic System of Economics 59–66 (Goretti Publications, 2009).
18. It actually, surprisingly, beats John Paul II’s most famous social encyclical, Centesimus Annus, which came in at only 27,522; however, Evangelium Vitæ comes in at an astounding 48,460.
19. Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum totals a mere 14,494, while Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno comes to 20,083.
20. Cited three times in Quadregesimo Anno and twice in Rerum Novarum.
21. This omission is particularly troublesome, given that the Vatican somehow managed not only official Latin texts for the Pope’s previous two encyclicals, but also such highly-demanded translations as Croatian and Byelorussian.

Praise be to Christ the King!


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