Yes, we know. Pope
Francis’s birthday was yesterday. He was
born December 17, 1936, making him seventy-eight years young (see? we can be
diplomatic at times). So, what do you
want? CESJ is not a Catholic
organization, nor is the Just Third Way a Catholic movement. We didn’t get him a cake, either, or tug 78
times on his earlobe (yes, that’s the Argentinian tradition, we looked it up).
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| Is that a face? |
The Papal Social
Program
The
liberals are blind to individual ethics.
The conservatives are blind to social ethics. As these two groups slug it out, the rest of
us are left wondering what the heck it all means, what the heck they mean, and
why are they being so mean?
Anyway,
the endless acrimony about who is faithful and who is not ensures that nobody
is reasonable — reason? Reason? We don’t got to show you no stinkin’ reason!
It
also ensures that the papal program for social reconstruction is
misunderstood. Specifically, both sides
in the debate fail to realize that the popes have been calling for a
two-pronged or a two-phase approach to address the problems of the modern
world.
The First Prong
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| Justice AND Charity |
When
the need is extreme and there is no other recourse, duly constituted authority
is justified in redistributing wealth sufficient to meet the emergency. (Ibid.) This comes under the State’s
responsibility to care for the common good, and is permitted in individual
ethics under “the principle of double effect.”
The
State’s object in cases of extreme need is not to meet the needs of individuals
and families, however, at least not directly.
It would be a grave injustice for the State or anyone else as an end in
itself to take from some simply because they have, to redistribute to others
who have not.
Rather,
the goal of redistribution as an expedient in an emergency is to prevent harm
to the common good by ensuring that extreme cases do not disrupt the social
order. The intended overwhelming good of
preserving the common good inviolate outweighs the limited and unintended evil
of redistribution.
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| "It is expedient that one should die that the nation perish not." |
The Second Prong
The
second phase of the papal program addresses the most important of individual
needs as it applies to human beings as human beings. This is the obligation of every human being
to acquire and develop natural virtue so as to become more fully human and lay
the foundation for the supernatural virtues, and thus humanity’s final
end. This involves establishing and
maintaining a proper environment within which people can meet their own needs
through their own efforts, preferably through widely distributed ownership of
capital.
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| The Act of Social Justice |
"What We have thus far stated regarding an equitable
distribution of property and regarding just wages concerns individual persons
and only indirectly touches social order, to the restoration of which according
to the principles of sound philosophy and to its perfection according to the
sublime precepts of the law of the Gospel, Our Predecessor, Leo XIII, devoted
all his thought and care." (Quadragesimo
Anno, § 76.)
Confusing Ends and
Means
Unfortunately,
both liberals and conservatives have assumed that the first phase of the papal
program is the only phase. Both liberals
and conservatives incorrectly construe redistribution of existing wealth, wages
in excess of a market-determined rate, welfare, and other measures as the
proposed permanent solution under social ethics, not correctly as an expedient
under individual ethics to buy time and preserve the common good (albeit
indirectly) on the way to developing a permanent solution.
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| Knox Unenthusiasic |
In the liberal view, those
who claim the inviolability of the natural law are going contrary to God’s law,
the supernatural law that supersedes the natural law, and lose all
justification for their position. Only
the godly have rights, whether individual or social. (Ibid.)
That,
or the natural law has been subsumed into the supernatural law. The effective negation of the natural law in
modernist thought is an example of what Monsignor Ronald Arbuthnott Knox
(1888-1957) called enthusiasm or ultrasupernaturalism. (Ibid., 1-2) This is what
Knox termed “the logic
of enthusiasm” (ibid., 586), a more
accurate description in this instance than the misuse of the term the logic of
gift. Knox defined enthusiasm as "an excess of charity that threatens unity."
Conservatives
correctly assume that individual ethics are permanently valid, but make the
mistake of assuming that social ethics are therefore naive, prudential, or
contrary to nature. It is obvious that a
viable system cannot be based on distribution on need, however necessary that
may be as an expedient in an emergency.
Where the faith of the liberals tells them that individual ethics are
contrary to nature, that of the conservatives tells them the same thing about
social ethics. None of them truly consider a just, third way.
#30#