From the Distributist Review:
George Weigel’s recent syndicated article (“The Enduring Importance of Centesimus Annus,” June 22, 2011) attempts to reconcile Catholic Social Teaching with his free-market opinions by praising Centesimus Annus as a departure from the social patrimony of the Church, which began with Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum.
But Mr. Weigel’s conclusions clearly contradict the very encyclical he lauds.
Weigel’s insistence that Pope John Paul II’s encyclical embraces, “[the] free market of the liberal democracies” is nowhere to be found in the text. The “free market,” a self-regulating system determining prices, wages, interest rates, and so forth, with little or no interference by government, is the same economy described as shooting from “a polluted spring” by Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno and “radical capitalistic ideology” by Pope John Paul II in Centesimus Annus:
“… there is a risk that a radical capitalistic ideology could spread which refuses even to consider these problems, in the a priori belief that any attempt to solve them is doomed to failure, and which blindly entrusts their solution to the free development of market forces.” (Centesimus Annus, no. 42, emphasis mine.)
Described by Pius XI as, “that economic system in which were provided by different people the capital and labor jointly needed for production,” capitalism in toto never found endorsement in the entire social compendium, let alone free-market capitalism. Quite the opposite, Pope Pius XI’s weighty criticism of capitalism as the “individualist economic teaching” which spread the error of “direct[ing] economic life” by the “free competition of forces,” is arguably just as condemning of capitalism as it is of socialism.
The full article may be read here.
2 comments:
The line up to get on the "It's not really infallible and I'm not going to listen to the pope unless he agrees with me!" bandwagon must be getting long indeed. Rebellion against the pope and disdain for authority may be the one thing that unites the conservatives and liberals. Maybe it's time for all the closet sedevacantists to come out of the closet?
Pius XI's encyclical on economics carries with it the same doctrinal authority as his on marriage and the condemnation of abortion and contraception. Those equivocators who rebel against the Pope's teaching on economics have not a leg to stand on when they try to call out pro-contraception Catholics as dissenters. Dissenters they certainly are, but so too are the former. What we are witnessing is a massive revolt against the authority of the Church. Since Catholics dissented - usually through silence against the great social encyclicals of Pius (e.g. on Christ the King - my, that was a horrible embarrassment for Liberal Catholics, so devoted to a false meaning of "liberty").... that by the time of Humanae vitae, Catholics were accustomed to rebelling against the Pope. Humanae vitae is a logical extension of decades of disobedience and rebellion. The Second Vatican Council blew the lid off "social/socialite Catholicism.... years of ugly disobedience exploded following the Council.
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