by Nathaniel Peters
Every economic system is based upon an implicit vision of the human person. Maciej Zieba’s new book provides an introduction to Catholic social thought that examines the anthropologies of Catholicism, liberal democracy, and the free-market economy.
Some of the greatest misunderstandings of the Catholic Church arise from trying to fit it into the political and economic categories we use to analyze figures and organizations. Is the Catholic Church liberal or conservative? Is the pope a libertarian or socialist? Documents are pulled out, and the proof-texting begins. In truth, the Catholic Church cannot fit into these categories. The pope is not a politician but a custodian of truths. Yet popes do speak on many of the most contested topics of our time. How, then, should we understand their words, and what contribution do they offer to the discussion?
In Papal Economics: The Catholic Church on Democratic Capitalism, fromRerum Novarum to Caritas in Veritate, the Polish theologian Maciej Zieba, OP provides good answers to these questions. A physicist who became a Dominican priest, a member of the Solidarity movement that peacefully overthrew the Polish communist regime, and a close friend of John Paul II, Zieba approaches this topic with experience and learning. His book is partly an introduction to Catholic social thought (CST) and partly a study of CST’s engagement with liberal democracy and the free-market economy, particularly in John Paul II’s encyclical Centesimus Annus. Zieba could have drawn clearer lines between those two parts, but, on the whole, his book succeeds on both counts.
Before examining what CST says, we first need to understand what kind of thought it is. The first example of CST is Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, which was written in 1891 to address the political and economic crises of the industrial revolution. Since that time, subsequent popes have sought to apply the theological truths of Catholicism to a rapidly changing world. Because CST attempts to apply unchanging principles to changing circumstances, it is more contingent on historical circumstance than dogmas such as the Trinity or the human and divine natures of Christ. Yet CST is not a policy white paper. It specifies ends and goals, leaving the question of what means to employ open for debate. CST also eschews utopianism for meliorism, which Zieba defines as “the gradual perfection of existing structures and institutions.”
Perhaps most important, CST is not an ideological program that purports to have the ability to solve all of society’s problems, if only it were implemented fully and correctly. Christianity, Zieba argues, is not an ideology, no matter what its critics claim. Following John Paul II’s understanding in Centesimus Annus, Zieba writes:
ideology maintains a concept of truth and goodness that captures all of reality in a simple and solid schema, and its advocates believe that this concept can be imposed on other people. Christian truth, the pope observes, does not fulfill this second condition and therefore is not an ideology.
To further the point, Zieba argues that Christians cannot impose their own concepts because, in a sense, they are not their own. The Church is not the owner of Christian truth, “only its depository”—an idea Pope Francis echoed recently when he said that it is not so much that Catholics possess the truth as that Catholics are possessed by the truth. One must acknowledge, of course, that this is more a statement of principle than of history: examples of Christians using their faith as an ideology abound. But Zieba and Francis are right: an epistemological humility should lie at the heart of Christian thought. Maintaining that humility makes CST all the more powerful as a tool of analysis and critique.
The subject of CST is the human person in all his fullness. As now-Cardinal Carlo Caffara put it, “Neither homo technicus, nor homo oeconomicus, nor homo politicus is the pastoral object of the Magisterium, but rather homo humanus.”
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