Few documents are more vulnerable to
distortion in our sound-bite age than
papal encyclicals. Too long for casual Web surfers to read in full, too
dense
for secular journalists to unpack on deadline and too important for
newshounds
to ignore, encyclicals typically wind up caricatured by headlines that
reduce
thousands of carefully weighed words to a few crude talking points.
Four years into his papacy, Pope Benedict XVI surely is accustomed to seeing
his complex treatises oversimplified and misrepresented. So the screeching
headlines and press releases that followed the publication of his third
encyclical last week — depicting "Charity in Truth" as a papal endorsement
of
everything from the Employee Free Choice Act to Marxist economics — probably
did not surprise him.
Still, the pope seemed especially eager to squelch mischaracterization of
his
message this time. He opened his Wednesday audience last week by noting that
his encyclical "does not aim to provide technical solutions to today's
social
problems but instead focuses on the principles indispensable for human
development." Most important among those principles, Benedict said, "is
human
life itself, the center of all true progress."
It is telling that Benedict summarized his encyclical this way. Many
left-leaning politicians and pundits have been working overtime to depict
the
pope as a shill for their pet economic proposals or to disentangle the
encyclical's pleas for social and economic justice from its repeated
condemnations of abortion, euthanasia, embryo-destructive research and
coercive
population-control programs.
Benedict clearly anticipated this reaction. He loaded his encyclical with
passages reaffirming Catholic teaching that social justice begins with
respect
for all human life, born or unborn. "The Church forcefully maintains this
link
between life ethics and social ethics," Benedict says, and any development
plan
that disregards that link leads to degradation, not justice.
This person-centered perspective characterizes Benedict's approach to nearly
every topic he tackles in the encyclical. From his objections to the
"anti-birth mentality" pushed on citizens of developing countries by their
governments and wealthier neighbors to his insistence that we protect the
environment without viewing nature "as something more important than the
human
person," Benedict consistently returns to his central theme: We must put the
dignity of the human person at the top of our priority list when making
development decisions.
No one who reads "Charity in Truth" will mistake Benedict for an economic
libertarian. He criticizes our modern tendency to divorce economics from
morality and argues forcefully for the rights of workers. He calls for
economic
solidarity, corporate responsibility and financial regulation "to safeguard
weaker parties and discourage scandalous speculation."
Yet Benedict's encyclical is not a rant against the free market.
"Admittedly,
the market can be a negative force," he says, "not because it is so by
nature,
but because a certain ideology can make it so." The problem is not the
instruments of economy and finance, Benedict argues, but how we use them:
"Therefore it is not the instrument that must be called to account, but
individuals, their moral conscience and their personal and social
responsibility."
Benedict takes a similar view of globalization, recognizing its inherent
dangers while warning that "blind opposition" to globalization mistakenly
ignores its promise for expanding wealth. He cites the principle of
subsidiarity — the idea that, wherever possible, the people closest to a
problem should solve it — as a corrective to the excesses of globalization
and
an "all-encompassing welfare state."
"Charity in Truth" supplies no snappy sound-bites or quick fixes for our
fiscal
woes. It offers something we need far more: a reminder that solutions to
social
problems must begin with a rediscovery of our intrinsic dignity as human
persons and our shared responsibility to act in ways consistent with that
dignity in every realm of life — even economics.
Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television and radio host and St.
Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is
www.colleen-campbell.com.