On November 11, 1984, a committee of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, headed by Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, issued the first draft of a “Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy.”1 Publication of the document had been carefully timed for after the elections, to avoid the impression of political partisanship. Given the contents of the draft, one can appreciate both the civic prudence of the bishops and the annoyance of some Democratic-party politicians who, it was reported, regarded it as less than helpful to have been assaulted repeatedly during the campaign by Catholic bishops opposing abortion while this document, which would have given support to important portions of the Mondale/Ferraro platform, was held back until after the Reagan landslide.
But the muses of symmetry were not asleep. For on election day itself another document was issued, on the same topic, by a self-constituted Lay Commission on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy, headed by William E. Simon and Michael Novak. Titled Toward the Future: Catholic Social Thought and the U.S. Economy,2 it is, fairly enough, a document the Republicans would have loved to have had at hand during the campaign.
The parallel character of the two documents is not accidental. The lay commission, knowing what its bishops had been up to, was engaging in a bit of preemptive damage control. Yet while the two documents came out at the same time, and deal with the same subject matter, in one important respect they are not comparable at all. The Simon/Novak report is the result of an unofficial lay initiative; it has no actual or potential standing in terms of official Church teaching. The pastoral letter of the Weakland committee, on the other hand, was commissioned three years ago by the assembled Catholic bishops of the United States. It is now to be discussed and revised, with a final version to be voted on by all the bishops in November 1985. At that point, the document will constitute official Catholic teaching—not, to be sure, on the level of an infallible pronouncement on faith and morality, but as an expression of the magisterial authority of the American episcopate, and as such to be taken very seriously by all Catholics.
This difference between the two documents is very significant. Because of it, and despite the fact that the Simon/Novak report is far superior both in its level of economic understanding and in the quality of its moral judgment, I will discuss the bishops’ pastoral letter here in much greater detail. For what the Catholic bishops of the United States have to say is of greater import than a statement, no matter how sensible, of a group of Catholic laymen.
The bishops, however, say they have spoken out not merely to give moral guidance to Catholics but also to join their voice to the public debate. Addressing all Americans, they explicitly mention and invite comment from non-Catholic Christians and Jews, with whom they share a common biblical heritage. The remarks that follow, then, are a response by a non-Catholic Christian to this invitation.
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The bishops’ draft letter is organized into two major sections. The first deals with the theological and ethical presuppositions of their approach to economic life. The second draws specific applications to policy, with particular attention to the areas of employment, poverty, food and agriculture (not yet in the present draft but to be added later), overall policies of economic collaboration, and relations between the United States and the world economy.
Few readers, Christian or Jewish, are likely to quarrel with the bishops’ basic presupposition, namely, that “the dignity of the human person, realized in community with others,” should be the fundamental moral criterion of economic life. Indeed, the Simon/Novak report, using almost identical language and citing the same authorities, also calls the dignity of the human person “the first principle of Catholic social thought.”
As the bishops develop this proposition, however, one is struck by the emphasis they place on what they themselves call the “communitarian” character of the Christian vision of economic life. To be human, they write, is to hear “the call to community”; they tell us that “the goods of this earth are common property”; they cite Clement of Alexandria on the “communality of possessions”; they refer to “communal solidarity” and the “fullness of community.” And they counter-pose all this stress on communitarianism to something they deplore, the “selfish appropriation and exploitation” of the goods and resources of the world.
Now, the bishops are careful to say that they are not against private property as such, and one may surmise that they are also not necessarily against capitalism—though, very curiously, they avoid using the word throughout the document. Yet from the beginning a suggestion has been planted that there is something basically wrong with our economic arrangements—since, obviously, they are not communitarian. In making this suggestion, to be sure, the bishops stand in a long Catholic tradition of suspicion toward capitalism and all its works (a tradition, incidentally, that long antedates modern socialism). It is a tradition, as we shall see, that is openly challenged by the Simon/Novak document, which in this respect, at least, is a far more radical statement than the bishops’.
Aside from their emphasis on communitarianism, the bishops also tell us, reasonably enough, that the Christian approach to economic life must be informed by the “primacy of justice” and by an awareness of the “dangers of wealth.” Then they go on to embrace the so-called “preferential option for the poor.” This awkward phrase, proclaimed as Church teaching at the 1979 meeting of the Latin American episcopate in Puebla, Mexico, encapsulates one of the leading ideas of liberation theology. It means, quite simply, that the criterion for judging the moral worth of a society is the fate of that society’s poor. It also means (in the words of the bishops) that the Church has a “prophetic mandate to speak for those who have no one to speak for them.” Deriving from this “option for the poor” are “basic economic rights” which every society ought to guarantee to all its members.
Shorn of its Guevarist undertones the “preferential option for the poor” is an idea unlikely to shock many Jews or Christians. After all, it was Dr. Johnson, not exactly a theologian of liberation, who insisted that “a decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.” But the rest of the bishops’ argument here is shaky. A common assumption of democracy is that no one has a “mandate” (prophetic or otherwise) to speak for people who have not elected him as their spokesman; the Catholic bishops of the United States have not been elected by any constituency of poor people. More importantly, even if there is some-thing that could be called economic rights, just who or what is the society that is supposed to insure them? The bishops repeatedly disclaim a statist approach to economic life, yet when they come to specifics it is mainly state action that they recommend.
This, indeed, is one of the major substantive flaws of the pastoral letter. When the bishops refer to the fact that most American Catholics were once poor, they do so in order to criticize them for the temptation, in their new-found affluence, to be indifferent to the fate of today’s poor. It does not occur to the bishops to ask how so many poor Catholic immigrants managed to achieve affluence within one or two generations in America. But if they had inquired into this tale of rags-to-riches, they would have discovered that it had very little to do with state actions or government policies; what it had a lot to do with was capitalism.
In view of the spirit animating the bishops’ document, it is not surprising that, in dealing with the putative shortcomings of the American economy, they should zero in on inequalities of wealth and income. The bishops are careful to say that the ideal of distributive justice cannot be reduced to a simple arithmetical formula and that a certain degree of inequality can “sometimes” be justified. However, present levels of inequality, both in this country and among the nations of the world, they deem “morally unacceptable.” (They make special mention of inequalities based on race and sex.)
Measures of income and wealth distribution are of course enormously complicated, but is it so clear that American society, as the bishops claim, exhibits a degree of inequality high enough to be labeled “morally unacceptable”? The driving forces in this area have considerably less to do with the political organization of a particular economy than with its location along a trajectory of industrial growth; when one compares capitalist with socialist economies at similar stages of industrial development, they evince surprisingly similar patterns of income distribution. Moreover, all industrial and industrializing societies show patterns of inequality that, to a large extent, resist political intervention. By what criterion is inequality to be deemed “sometimes” acceptable, sometimes not? Rather than fixing on the elusive ideal of “equality,” those with a professed concern for the poor might consider absolute rather than relative standards of living. If such a criterion were applied to American society (and indeed to the other societies of industrial capitalism), the level of “moral acceptability” would surely rank among the highest in human history.
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So much for the bishops’ diagnosis of the domestic scene. Their policy recommendations present rather a mixed bag. They call for a commitment to “full employment,” which, following current convention, is defined as 3-4 percent unemployment. By contrast, a level of 6-7 percent unemployment is termed, again, “unacceptable,” although we are not told by what superior moral insight the bishops find themselves able to accept the former but bound to condemn (prophetically?) the latter. To deal with poverty, or the “glaring disparities of wealth and income,” they recommend tax reform; self-help programs among the poor to be stimulated by government; affirmative action, “judiciously administered”; improved child-care services; something that sounds like comparable worth (“persons who make comparable contributions to society are entitled to comparable rewards”); and welfare reform (for example, by legislating national eligibility standards and by removing provisions that penalize employment).
Different readers will find different items here on which to agree or disagree with the bishops. Some of their recommendations are quite sensible, although one must wonder why the authority of Catholic moral teaching has to be invoked to support, say, job-training programs. As for the overall strategy for dealing with the social and economic problems of America, it is Left-of-Center, corresponding remarkably with the agenda proposed by the Democratic-party platform of 1984. And, like that platform, it can be described as modeled on an essentially European vision of social democracy.
I do not wish to be misunderstood on this point. The bishops do explicitly repudiate a collectivist ethic of economic life, and in this their document compares favorably with the 1983 statement by the Catholic bishops of Canada, which was indeed a massive attack on capitalism and, at least implicitly, an endorsement of socialism. One should be grateful for small favors: far better an American Catholic document that reads like a translation from Swedish than from Albanian. Yet it is ironic that the Catholic episcopate of the United States, feeling fully a part of American society and no longer constrained by the formerly marginal position of Catholics in that society, should find so little to learn from the American experience. In this, once again, the Simon/Novak document shows much greater ingenuity.
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When we come to the area of economic relations between the United States and the Third World, the predispositions of the bishops become if anything easier to pinpoint. The footnotes refer us to Mahbub ul Haq, Jan Tinbergen, Barbara Ward, and, prominently, to the report of the Brandt Commission—all well-known sources for the view that the economic distress of the Third World is attributable to an “un-just international economic order.” On the role of the multinationals in the Third World, there are references to the publications of the United Nations Center on Transnational Corporations, which are animated by a strong antagonism to capitalism, and to the 1974 book by Ronald Müller and Richard J. Barnet, Global Reach, which has become a basic source of anti-multinational propaganda. There are on the other hand no references to the work of Raymond Vernon, the most balanced analyst of this matter, and none to such pro-capitalist authors as P.T. Bauer and Melvyn Krauss. Thus, simply by consulting the sources relied upon by the bishops, one can pretty much predict what in fact the document delivers—a moderate (as opposed to radical) version of tercermundismo, or Third Worldism (to use the term coined, pejoratively, by the Venezuelan writer Carlos Rangel).
Morally this perspective may be inspired by a genuine concern for the poor, but empirically it is informed by a number of dubious assumptions. Foremost among these is the idea that much if not all of Third World poverty is due to dependency on the rich nations. In fact, however, as Bauer and others have pointed out, there appears to be, if anything, a reverse relation between poverty and dependency in Third World countries. Another false assumption of the bishops, implicit rather than explicit, has to do with their notion of the relevant parties to economic development. Thus, in their list of “actors” in international economic relations they mention nation-states, multilateral institutions (such as the World Bank), and multinational corporations; they completely omit the most important actors—individuals and businesses engaged in enterprise within Third World economies. That omission, more perhaps than anything else, reveals the flawed optics of the bishops’ analysis.
The specific criticisms and recommendations of the bishops follow logically from their underlying assumptions. We are told that there must be “basic reform” in the international economic system, a “fundamental recasting, not simply a modification, of the present system.” What they have in mind, alas, is something along the lines of the “New International Economic Order,” a project whose guiding premise is that Third World governments represent the Third World poor, and are truly interested in alleviating their condition. There are, to be sure, instances in which this premise holds; but there are at least as many, if not more, in which it does not. In such cases, economic development, if it is to take place at all, will do so in spite of or even against the policies of the government. A “fundamental recasting” of the world economy in the form the bishops propose would only make development more difficult.
Along the same lines, the bishops want discussions between richer and poorer nations, aimed at a reform of the world economy. Here too they embrace a favorite item in the Third World agenda, that of a “North/South dialogue” (also called “global negotiations”). By definition, such a dialogue must take place among governments—including governments whose economic and other policies are inimical to development and thereby antagonistic to the interests of the poor in their own countries.
A similar point can be made about the priority the bishops would give in the Third World to the “basic human needs of the poor.” This sounds unobjectionable, but the term “basic needs” is not innocent. It implies a particular strategy, one emphasizing immediate redistribution as against long-term economic growth; this is a strategy that carries with it great risks and human costs, and that is by no means self-evidently worthy of being singled out for favored moral distinction. Indeed, the “basic-needs” approach has been sharply criticized in the Third World itself, where it has been characterized as a paternalistic device for giving “welfare” without inquiring as to how underlying economic structures can in fact be permanently improved.
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What policies, then, should the United States adopt toward the Third World? According to the bishops, the United States (or, more precisely, the Reagan administration) views the Third World too much through the prism of “East/West” relations. But if so, this is due not to some perverse myopia but to the facts of energetic Soviet expansion throughout the Third World. The United States, say the bishops, gives too much military aid as compared with other forms. Again, is this traceable to moral perversity or is it a response to events on the international scene that are not of American making? The United States, the litany proceeds, favors bilateral aid when what is needed is aid through multilateral institutions. But experience has shown that bilateral programs are more easily monitored in terms of results, and less likely to be absorbed into the cesspool of corruption all too often characterizing Third World political structures. The United States is accused by the bishops of giving too little aid as a percentage of gross national product. This assumes that the more aid, the more development—a very questionable assumption indeed; it also assumes, no less dubiously, that government aid is more beneficent than the activities of private business.
To replace current policies, the bishops also make a number of specific recommendations, none of real merit. There should be an international equivalent of affirmative action: in view of the less than spectacular success of these policies in improving the condition of their intended beneficiaries domestically, the bishops’ faith in their efficacy on the international level seems a little misplaced. There should be less military aid and fewer arms sales: a pium desideratum, to be sure, but addressed with at least equal propriety to the Kremlin, Colonel Qaddafi, and the Palestine Liberation Organization (to mention but a few of the “actors” whose collaboration on this agenda would have to be secured). The United States should devise more favorable trade arrangements with Third World countries: definitely, but any such trade benefits to the Third World would be in tension not only with the goal of full employment for Americans that the bishops endorse but with their demand for a turning-away from “consumerism.” Some Third World debts should be forgiven: perhaps, but what would this do to the future credit needs of Third World governments? The United States should give more aid, especially through the International Development Association: doubtful. Private investment in Third World countries should be “appropriate” to their economies: probably so, but who is to make such judgments?
Not all the bishops’ criticisms of current American policies in the Third World are misplaced; most are. Not all the bishops’ positive recommendations are bad; most are. The problems of underdevelopment will not be solved by international agreement among governments, useful though some of these may be. Nor can development be fostered primarily by state actions either on the national or international level. The principal “actors” in the drama of development are people engaged, alone or in conjunction with others, in economically productive enterprises. There are cases of successful development in what only a few years ago were very poor countries—such as South Korea or Taiwan. And there are lessons to be drawn from the experience of these countries. But the bishops are in a very bad position to learn them. For, as in the case of their approach to poor American Catholics who have attained affluence, they never ask the most important question: just how does a society move from poverty to affluence?
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It is this question, by contrast, that most interests the lay commission. Its report, of course, appeals to the same Catholic social teachings as do the bishops, citing the same papal encyclicals and invoking the same basic principles: human dignity, the social nature of man, social justice. But the report also finds that the American political economy embodies a number of moral principles that Catholics ought to approve of: free association, cooperation, and “self-interest, rightly understood.” All this is related by the lay commission to the Christian notion of “co-creation”: human beings, in their activity, “following the clues left by God.”
Thus there is, according to Simon and Novak, an “innate virtue” to enterprise. They are careful not to leave the impression that they endorse every aspect of capitalism in practice, or that they oppose government action to remedy particular social ills. But they do point to two linkages that the bishops totally ignore—that between capitalism and democracy, and that between capitalism and successful economic development. They assert these connections not on grounds of doctrine, but on the basis of readily available empirical evidence: there is not a single democracy in the world that is not part of the capitalist world economy, and there is not a single non-capitalist case of successful economic development in the Third World. Thus, precisely on the grounds of the “preferential option for the poor,” Simon and Novak come out on the side of capitalism.
Although some of their specific recommendations are not too different from those of the bishops—for example, on employment-generation, or on the question of free trade—the whole tone of the Simon/Novak document is very different. Where the bishops mainly criticize America, while allowing that it deserves some praise, the lay commission mainly praises America, while conceding that there is room for criticism and improvement. In this difference, it is fair to say, the two documents faithfully reflect the two political parties in the country today.
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Well, one might ask, what is the harm in that? By way of an answer, imagine for a moment that the bishops had issued the document signed by Simon and Novak. If so, they would certainly have earned a higher grade in economic and political competence; but would we really want them to be blessing American capitalism and its works, any more than we would want them to denigrate them? What, in that event, about Catholics who happen to believe that American capitalism is “morally unacceptable”? Should they be read out of the community of faith? These questions touch on a vital theological issue, the manner in which social and political partisanship endangers one of the essential notae ecclesiae, or “marks of the Church”: namely, its catholicity.
The bishops claim that the application of their ethical presuppositions and their method of reasoning to the subject at hand constitutes a major contribution, both for Catholics and non-Catholics. But Simon and Novak, drawing on the same ethical presuppositions and the same method of reasoning, have come to very different conclusions. The fact that Catholic moral teaching is so flexible as to lend legitimacy to such opposed perspectives on reality raises serious questions about the alleged contribution of this method of moral reasoning. Both major political camps find it amenable to their views. The pity is that the official Church, which has better things to do, should be lining up on one side.
In both the present document and in their 1983 pastoral letter on war and peace, the Catholic bishops are increasingly sounding like the left wing of the Democratic party gathered for prayer. From one perspective, I suppose, this development could be seen as a step in the “indigenization” of American Catholicism. But not quite in the way envisaged by the bishops. For in their political and ideological positioning, the Catholic bishops are following in the well-worn footsteps of a major segment of official mainline Protestantism. If their pastoral letter reads in places like a translation from the Swedish, it is also, minus a few papal quotations, reminiscent of the social-action pronouncements of the United Methodist Church. This, given the fact that what we are supposed to have here at last is the voice of a Catholic community fully at home in America, is to my mind profoundly sad.
There is here, finally, a great missed opportunity. If any role in the social and political arena is natural for official spokesmen of religion, it is the role of mediators. For Catholics, their bishops may serve as teachers of moral doctrine. There are, in addition, specific evils in society that Christian bishops should publicly condemn (“prophetically,” if you will): racial oppression and anti-Semitism are clear candidates. But is it incumbent upon bishops of the Church to get into the details of policy alternatives? Would it not be more useful if they were to raise incisive moral questions and put them to all partisans? The Simon/Novak document represents a clear example of Catholics coming out on one side of a particular set of issues. Others have come out on the other side. In a society increasingly polarized by political and ideological issues, bishops and other religious spokesmen are in a unique position to mediate, to challenge, to civilize. But as in labor/management relations, one cannot be a mediator and a partisan at the same time.
Archbishop Weakland and others remind us that the pastoral letter is only a first draft, and there is a year remaining for second thoughts. Given the dynamics of this sort of process, one cannot be hopeful that the document adopted by the full assembly of bishops will differ significantly from this draft, or will reverse its basic thrust. Thus, at the end of the year the bishops of the Catholic Church in America will have taken another major step toward a fairly narrow political partisanship. Since many of their people are evidently moving in a different political direction, this will create practical problems for the bishops (as it has for Methodist bishops). For many Catholics it may also occasion serious anguish.
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As for the rest of us, if the bishops were simply engaged here in an academic exercise, we could say that they are not doing a very impressive job of it and be done. Their claim, however, is much more ambitious. They insist that they are engaged in a morally informed understanding, indeed, that they are exercising a “prophetic mandate” based on the “preferential option for the poor.” In the end, therefore, a moral judgment of their performance is also called for.
No one can be sure what the outcome of any sound policy will be, but there is good reason to believe that the strategy to which the bishops are committing the prestige of the Church may end by harming rather than helping the poor. Human lives are at stake: by what right, then, do these men appear before us, wrapped in the mantle of authority of prophets and popes stretching back to ancient Israel, and dare to tell us that one set of highly precarious policy choices represents the will of God in our time?
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1 Available from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1312 Massachusetts Avenue N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005.
2 Available from the Lay Commission, P.O. Box 364, North Tarrytown, N.Y. 10591.
