Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

I have been slowly making my way through B16’s new Encyclical and have been simultaneously keeping track of what many are saying about it.   I am not finished with it yet, but as with others I feel compelled to provide some initial thoughts.  I should like to take (I have been conversing with someone from the UK recently) George Weigel’s comments in NRO as a point of discussion.  I have had a great deal of respect for George Weigel’s insights and viewpoints ever since I read his Witness to Hope.  Often, I think he is right on.  Other times, I think that he can allow his neo-conservative politico-economic outlook to unduly color his analyses of Church issues.  I think that his analysis of Benedict’s latest encyclical falls squarely in the latter category.

He begins by suggesting that inter-curial machinations demand that one approach the Encyclical with a hermeneutic of suspicion leading to a source-critical reading of the text.  This seems to me, all too reminiscent of dissenting scholars’ approach to Church teaching and so it gives me pause at the outset.  I don’t know, Weigel may very well have inside information (in contrast to his implication that it is just a set of suspicions) that justifies his wariness.  For myself, I find the document to be seamlessly coherent.  I believe that what accounts for this difference is the politico-economic biases to which I would argue that he succumbs.

This is what I mean.  Weigel seems to have an allergic reaction to certain phrases such as “wealth redistribution.”  It is true that this is a favorite phrase of many socialists but one must recognize that B16 has accepted the use of the term for his Encyclical.  Clearly Benedict is thoroughly Catholic and in full agreement with Rerum novarum.  Unlike many revisionists, he does not distance himself from any of Leo XIII’s or subsequent pope’s criticisms of socialism (that I have seen any way). However, this does not mean that this phrase is not his.  Rather, one must read it in the context of Benedict’s references to the need for sharing wealth through gratuitousness.  He states that gratuitousness is in contrast to “the logic of public obligation, imposed by State law” (39).  In other words, when Benedict talks of wealth redistribution, he is not talking of technical solutions to problems of povery so much as he is discussing the needs of anthropology at the macro level.  This is why I would argue that Weigel’s complaint that the Encyclical does not give sufficient attention to wealth generation is unwarranted.

For Weigel, the discussion of gratuitousness and gift seems to be “clotted and muddled.”  If one presupposes that the Encyclical is interwoven with two opposing streams of thought then one will not be likely to look for clarifying explanations throughout the text.  This seems to be the problem with Weigel’s take on the “gift” discussion.  He recognizes that it might be the Communio school’s anthropology but seems to dismiss that possibility because he finds the language so “clotted and muddled.” Perhaps he does not recognize that this anthropology is more ubiquitous among Communio scholars that just JPII.  However, if one does recognize that B16 is in fact employing the vision of the human person as an individual who has the task of perfecting himself after the manner of the divine archetype, which is a total self-gift of self to others in relationships, the entire logic of the Encyclical becomes clear (at least as far as I have so far read).

Weigel and others seem to be worried that Benedict is implying a prudential judgment of the priority of wealth sharing over wealth production.  Benedict is doing nothing of the sort.  Again, he is instructing about a socio-economic necessity deriving from an anthropology that undergtands man is created after the image of total Self-gift.  His point is that for an authentic economic structure that promotes the integral human fulfillment of all of its members, the economic structure must be one which promotes all freely giving of themselves for the common, the greater good.

He is true to his word; he provides no technical solutions to such a great challenge.  However his comments in paragraph 39 (see above) and other places show that this structure has to be one promoting the free giving of individuals and societies at all levels.   In other words, this cannot be achieved through State compulsion.  That is not to say that there is no place for some level of public obligation.  Benedict is not trying to instruct the reader in the concrete solutions.  He is providing insights into what the human person and society need in order to flourish and to overcome the economic manifestations of the spiritual crisis in which we now find ourselves.

I am sure that I will have more to say later; especially in terms of Benedict’s discussion of what I term the co-principles of subsidiarity and solidarity.  I have an article I am working on that addresses this very point.  However, Hierothee has convinced me that it needs some reworking.  As I settle into a new routine, I hope to take the article back up again.

O.k., I suppose that I am done for now…