Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina:
Pope Francis and the Caring Society
by Samuel Hux (February 2018)
Screaming Cardinals, Whit Conrad, 2012
merican liberalism—at least since the New Deal—has assumed that capitalism, whatever its capacity to create expectations of a high standard of living, had to be controlled, its individualistic urges contained by some degree of social planning. If liberalism did not go so far as socialism’s open animus against the capitalist ethic, it was nonetheless distrustful of capitalism left to capitalists. But in fact the conventional American liberal attitude has never been quite as distrustful of capitalism as traditional Catholic social thought has.
However the “Protestant Ethic” aided the “Spirit of Capitalism,” intellectual Catholicism has generally been resistant to that spirit—even though it is true, as R.H. Tawney pointed out in modification of Max Weber’s theory, that without the “capitalist spirit” of Venetian and Florentine bankers in Catholic Italy, a nascent capitalism would hardly have expanded as it did. But I’m not in the habit of thinking of bankers, whatever their religious affiliation, as particularly responsive to social philosophy.
For these reasons in part, I am not as disturbed at some of Pope Francis’s hostile remarks about capitalism as many American Catholics are. Let me say off the bat that I (non-Catholic by the way) am not a fan of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, principally because I had gotten used to the intellectual heft of the two philosopher-theologians who preceded him, John Paul and Benedict: in comparison, Francis seems a good-willed intellectual light weight (okay . . . medium weight) whose sociological pronouncements seem to suggest the depth of mental deliberation of your garden-variety liberal professor of English. His notion for instance that the purpose of an economy is to lead people to God is absurd: its purpose is to make a life beyond the level of subsistence possible. His prejudice that “Possessions are so dangerous” because they encourage vanity and make you feel important and “when you believe you are important, your head swells and you become lost” strikes me as intellectually juvenile. Nonetheless, his distrust of capitalists left to their own devices is not outside the broad tradition of papal social considerations. Laissez-faire simply does not easily trip over the tongue of intellectual Catholicism. (Which is different from the tongues of some Catholics who are intellectuals, William Buckley being one glorious instance.)
(by Andrew M. Yuengert, Samuel Gregg, Gabriel X. Martinez, Lawrence J. McQuillan with Hayeon Carol Park, A. M. C. Waterman, Philip Booth, and Allan C. Carlson) are worthy efforts in themselves to understand and judge Pope Francis, I finally cannot experience the urgency which I and other readers (presumably conservative) are clearly meant to feel.
The essays may focus on papal predecessors, the pope’s Argentine nationality, even and uneven economic playing fields, charitable giving, the environment, conservation, and family economics—to simply skim the top—but the real theme of the book is something other. The subtitle may be “and the Caring Society,” clearly inspired I think by Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home—but a better subtitle would have been “Pope Francis’s Lamentable Failure to Appreciate Capitalism as Well as His Immediate Predecessors Did.”
And while Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI did indeed abhor socialism and enthusiastically endorse capitalism (so long as guided by a moral vision rather than crass calculations), I don’t think the issue ends quite there. To put my thoughts and my judgment of this book in context, I would like to think out loud a bit about Pope John XXIII’s great encyclical: John being a vastly deeper thinker than Francis, that fact more important than the popular view of both as lovable avuncular types and men of the people.
There is little point in dwelling long on the clear liberal features, the “Christian Democratic” tone of Mater et Magistra: the concern for the Just Wage, the approval of labor unionism, the demand for full employment and balance between wages and prices, the insistence on the dignity of labor and the need for dignified working conditions, and such.
John’s so-called “opening to the left” ( so-called I repeat) seems fundamentally at odds with the warning of Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno in 1931 that although there was a clear difference between Communism and democratic Socialism—the latter having moderated its views on property and collectivism and having muted the notion of class war—Socialism and the church remained opposed to the extent that “No one can be at the same time a sincere Catholic and a true Socialist”—which opposition John dutifully repeats in his encyclical, in somewhat muted form, even while making “the opening.” But perhaps the two popes are not so fundamentally at odds on this issue after all, thirty years having passed between them, and since Pius wrote that “it may well come about that gradually the tenets of mitigated Socialism will no longer be different from the program of those who seek to reform human society according to Christian principles.” Or it may well be—I think it is—that even as early as Quadragesimo Anno the tenets of “mitigated” Catholic reformism were undergoing a change, accelerated later in Mater et Magistra. I think there is some radical redefinition of just property relations.
I’m being presumptuous enough to try to imagine a lively process of assumption in John’s mind which informs his disparate remarks on productive property in separate parts of the encyclical. When he affirms that “artisan and farm enterprises of family type should be safeguarded and fostered, as should also cooperatives that aim to complement and perfect such enterprises,” and that it is not less fitting “that the State make special provision for them in regard to instruction, taxes, credit facilities, social security, and insurance,” I don’t necessarily hear G.K. Chesterton’s call in The Outline of Sanity for “taxation of contracts so as to discourage the sale of small property to big proprietors and encourage the break-up of big property among small proprietors”—although I’m listening—but I do hear not only fostered but safeguarded. Which suggests that the charitable restraint of big capital is not enough to rely upon. Neither is the invisible hand of the market: John early quotes Pius XI’s recognition that “economic power has been substituted for the free marketplace,” something many classical economists still fail to recognize, those who tend to create market models to explain the functioning of an economy often clearly guided by very visible grasping hands. And John is willing to sanction the nationalization of productive property, following Pius XI again, whom he quotes, “if these [enterprises] carry with them power too great to be left in private hands, without injury to the community at large”—although he appeals to Pius’s “principle of subsidiarity” that what bears no threat to the commonweal should be left to the exercise of private moral responsibility.
Here I’d like to take a quirky look at Saint Thomas Aquinas before returning to a quirkier look at the encyclicals. Nationalization. It’s a kind of theft or robbery, from one obvious point of view. In the Summa Theologiae (2a 2ae, Question 66) Aquinas distinguished in value and kind between “theft” (furtum) and “robbery” (rapina). Robbery is the more detestable because more physical injury can be inflicted, although theft is not open, is done by stealth, is furtive. Nonetheless they are kindred acts. Is either ever justified?
Leo XIII: private property is a natural right, as St. Thomas says. Pius XI: private property is a natural right, as Pope Leo and, implicitly, St. Thomas say. John XXIII: private property is a natural right, as Popes Pius and Leo and St. Thomas say.
Two matters occur to me. (1) Why is John so pronounced in stressing the social function of property, insisting that if you have it you have it in stewardship, and what’s the rather ambiguous meaning of the following conjunction?: John repeats that “the right of private property is from natural law itself” while in the preceding sentence he has summarized approvingly a teaching from Pius XII (1941 Pentecost Broadcast) to the effect that “the right of every man to use [material goods] for his own sustenance is prior even to the right of private ownership.” And (2) what exactly does Aquinas say about natural rights and property? To the Summa Theologiae again, 2a 2ae, 66:
Second Treatise of Government as well is absolutely right.)
addition to natural law” (italics mine). And consequently, I add, if rational beings were to judge that collective possession was more reasonable, they could, by human agreement, fix upon such as an addition to the natural law and not in violation of it.
What am I after? Why this digging around in papal encyclicals and Thomism? A traditionalist conservative who, while grateful for the largesse capitalism affords those of us lucky enough to live under it, I am still resistant to the idea of embracing its laissez-faire variety, and even more resistant to the idea that such an embrace is the natural duty of the conservative. And as a traditionalist I am taken by the sheer traditionalism of Catholic thought, tradition being to me not something frozen in the past but a living process of communication across the ages in which first words are not forgotten. From Chrysostum’s primitive-communist declaration that “wealth is common to thee and thy fellow servants, just as the sun is common, the earth, the air,” to Basil’s that “the bread you keep belongs to the hungry. The gold you have hidden in the ground belongs to the needy,” to Aquinas’s cautious defense of private possession according to “human agreement” modified by the declaration that “in the case of necessity everything is common,” to John XXIII’s insistence that economic prosperity is defined not by “the sum total of goods and wealth” but by “the distribution of goods according to norms of justice.”
I never quite understand why putative conservatives would make the embrace of laissez-faire economics a test of one’s conservative credentials. After all, when you get right down to it (as we used to say), a laissez-faire arrangement (or dis-arrangement) of economic life is an un-deservedly respectable version of Thomas Hobbes’s life in a state of nature: the war of all against all: so much for being thy brother’s keeper. Nothing conserving about that.
John XXIII’s great encyclical was famously called his “opening to the left.” That’s nonsense. Reinhold Niebuhr observed some years ago (while commenting on John’s Mater et Magistra and Protestant surprise at its acceptance of extensive welfare measures) that the social thought of the church in predominately Catholic countries has skipped over classical laissez-faire and retained much of the social and anti-atomistic ethos of medieval thought. Opening to the left? It seems rather to me an opening to and welcoming of the traditional.
Nonetheless, if Francis frightens people who judge the conservative disposition by how closely it reflects conventional economic endorsements of capitalism and definitions of property, they should know that Francis cannot hold a candle to John XXIII, to say nothing of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Response to David Theroux’s Rebuttal (February 5, 2018)
I conclude my review of Pope Francis and the Caring Society with the compliment that this “seminar-in-print” makes me wish to join the conversation—so I am pleased to continue the conversation now with Mr. Theroux. I agree that my piece is really an essay (or “review-essay” in the Victorian tradition) but I don’t think it true that I have “barely addressed the actual content of the book.” Since the book ranges over several separate issues having to do with Pope Francis, with a preface, introduction, formal essays, and a conclusion (by Thomas Murphy, as I indicated, which Mr. Theroux seems to have missed), rather than sketch skimpy treatments of each contribution I have focused on the theme which ties all the essays together: that is, the argument that Pope Francis is insufficiently appreciative of capitalism, is indeed a rather careless critic of it. Which is, in fact, my own belief, as the final paragraph of my piece reiterates. My reservations have to do with the book’s clear implication that Francis’s papal predecessors have all fully and unreservedly endorsed what Francis condemns.
Furthermore, I do not possess the “skeptical views of ‘capitalism’” that Mr. Theroux attributes to me. My admittedly provocative reference to Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature has to do not with capitalism itself, but with the laissez-faire version of it which excites libertarians.
Mr. Theroux objects to my characterization of economics as “the dismal science,” carelessly assuming that I do not know that Thomas Carlyle invented the term. The fact that Carlyle was a racist is here irrelevant as “the dismal science” has become over time a half-comic phrase in public intellectual discourse. Surely Mr. Theroux is not slyly insinuating that any person with ambiguous feelings about the market thereby endorses Carlyle’s racist views!
I haven’t been called “naïve” in a long long time (it almost makes my cynical self feel fresh and youthful). But I am not naïve to say that “wealth should be distributed not simply because the powerful should be charitable . . . but because wealth is created partially by labor and justice demands that labor share fully in it”—because that is not presented as an expression of my opinion but is rather a summary of part of John XXIII’s thinking.
As for Mr. Theroux’s remark that “Incidentally and contrary to Professor Hux, C.S. Lewis was a devout Christian” etc., I confess to being stunned since nowhere in my piece is Lewis so much as mentioned. And I feel somewhat prickly at the implication that I should be so ignorant of “Jack” Lewis. Incidentally, since Mr. Theroux refers to a book on Lewis, I would like to recommend several by my colleague and fellow contributing editor at NER, James Como, who must be amused at my fictional ignorance of his intellectual hero.
Let me say again what I assumed was clear from my review-essay: I appreciate as much as Popes John Paul and Benedict do (to mention only the most recent before Francis) a capitalism over which there is some social control and public responsibility. (“I fully agree with the authors of Pope Francis and the Caring Society that capitalism is far more productive and protective of a good life for all so long as morally conceived . . . and that Francis is misled in his hostility toward it.”)
My difference, it seems, with Mr. Theroux is essentially my belief that there is a papal tradition, influenced by Thomism, of ambiguity toward laissez-faire capitalism, located in for instance the writings of Leo XIII, Pius XI (and XII), and John XXIII, a tradition strong enough to make Francis’s fulminations sound and be somewhat intellectually embarrassing.
That Mr. Theroux is enthusiastic about the “Catholic Late Scholastics at Salamanca” suggests to me that I would be well-advised to look into them. But before I do (and perhaps after I do), I have to confess that it will take a great deal to make me give up my intellectual enthusiasm for (which is not the same as abject agreement with) Leo, Pius, John . . . and of course Thomas Aquinas . . . or alter very much my understanding of the history of the Roman Catholic social critique of economics.
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Samuel Hux is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at York College of the City University of New York. He has published in Dissent, The New Republic, Saturday Review, Moment, Antioch Review, Commonweal, New Oxford Review, Midstream, Commentary, Modern Age, Worldview, The New Criterion and many others.
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