Catholic Radicalism?

An interesting confluence of articles occurred in my reading of the NY Times today. Firstly, anniversary celebrations are beginning for the 1969 Apollo moon landing. Alonside a few short documentary videos, the Times posted a PDF of the front pages for the days covering the journey to the moon. The first thing that jumps out at you is how dense the text is. This is the front page on the cusp of the transition to our current image culture. Secondly, however, all that text gives ample room to display a number of other top stories. For instance, on July 14, 1969, they ran a story about a left leaning Roman Catholic sociology professor who was murdered in Brazil. The title of the article, "Church in Latin America Develops Leftward Trend," almost blames the professor for the political disposition that led to his violent murder by right leaning conservatives frightened by the Marxists in their midst. The quote that really stood out however was from the Premier of Cuba, Fidel Castro: "The United States shouldn't worry about the Soviets in Latin America, because they are no longer revolutionaries. But they should worry about the Catholic revolutionaries, who are."

Firstly, this story reminded me of the broader social political matrix for works such as Gustavo Gutierrez's A Theology of Liberation. Secondly, even though the Vatican eventually stood against this attempt to syncretize the thought of Karl Marx with Jesus Christ, the story nonetheless gives voice to the ever present socio-economic radicalism in history of the Roman Catholic Church. Lastly, however, this historical excursion provided the context for the rest of my scan through the headlines and most read articles of today's paper where I subsequently came across the NY Times coverage of Benedict XVI's recent encyclical, "Charity in Truth," which was his first on economic and social matters.

The first article I will mention was Ross Douthat's "The Audacity of the Pope," which makes the claim that truly radical political and social thought that breaks from the typical ideological factions in the US today is not to be found in the Obama administration which continues to pander neo-liberalism in new "internet-era font," but rather in the thought of the Pope whose audacious ideas defy conformity to either left or right. Although Douthat stops short of advocating the Pope's encyclical as a kind of third way party manifesto, he nonetheless asks:

Why should being pro-environment preclude being pro-life? Why can’t Republicans worry about economic inequality, and Democrats consider devolving more power to localities and states? Does opposing the Iraq war mean that you have to endorse an anything-goes approach to bioethics? Does supporting free trade require supporting the death penalty?

The second article I will mention is "Catholicism as Antidote to Turbo-Capitalism," by Carter Dougherty. Here he explores the German bestseller by a more recent Marx who cheekily penned his own Das Capital.

Unlike the 19th-century Marx, who thought organized religion was a trick played on the impoverished in order to control them, Archbishop [Reinhard] Marx and other Catholics yearn for reform, not class warfare. In that, they are following a long and fundamental line of church teaching. What is different now is that some of them see this economic crisis as a moment when the church’s economic thinking just may attract serious attention.

As an institution, the Catholic Church has tried to stand somewhere between the socio-economic left and right for most of the twentieth century. John Paul II's upbringing in Poland honed his instincts against the injustices of communist regimes. But he was equally dismayed as the fall of communism led to an equally Godless form of turbo-capitalism. Although the Church was largely intolerant of the more radical left and right wing factions within the church, then as now, they nonetheless recognized that their engagement in the physical world was directly related to people's willingness to turn to them regarding spiritual things.

What is most surprising in the coverage of Catholic socio-economic teaching today, however, is that in the fall-out of both capitalist and communist systems the institutional centrist reform ethos of the Catholic Church is itself now interpreted as a kind of radicalism. I do not at this point want to comment in detail upon the specific ideas being proposed here. No doubt there would be no clear consensus from the right or left on how to work them out in practice. But there is a broader phenomena at work where the Catholic presentation of the socio-economic radicality of Jesus is seen to outstrip Marx. Whereas once it was the social failures of the church to care for the poor which inspired the secularist prophets' readership, now it is the failure of capitalism and communism which inspire the Church's.

This is not to say that the Roman Catholics are advocating another grand utopia. “'There is no way back into an old world,' Archbishop Marx said in a recent interview, before the encyclical was issued. “'We have to affirm this world, but critically.'” But is it possible that somehow, through audacity of the Pope no less, Jesus is again being heard as a political radical? I suppose the best way to answer that question is to begin where Benedict does: "Charity in truth, to which Jesus Christ bore witness by his earthly life and especially by his death and resurrection, is the principal driving force behind the authentic development of every person and of all humanity."