The last socialist?

As a man who has experienced first hand both Nazi and Communist tyranny,

and as a profoundly traditional social and political thinker.

Pope John Paul H is uniquely weU situated to speak to our time.

Why, then, does he so often sound like

IT IS A COMMONPLACE that the present Pope finds himself in a situation without parallel in the history of the Church. Man a Po e has confronted hostile secular authority, but none has hitherto emerged from a nation dominated by a government relentlessly dedicated to the wholesale extirpation of religious belief and practice from social life. Again, as a Pole, Pope John Paul II is heir to the experience first of Nazi, then of Communist totalitarianism-the two great enemies of the European cultural inheritance in our century. Pope John Paul II is also the representative to the world of the Polish Church, without which another unparalleled development could not have occurred-the transformation, for the first and so far only time, of a fully fledged Communist totalitarian state into an authoritarian despotism. Poland remains unique among Communist states in that its institutions of civil societyfamily, church, learned associations, trade unions-have successfully resisted incorporation into the totalitarian bureaucracy and have asserted themselves independently of the controlling institutions of the Party. It is not merely that Marxist ideology is dead in Poland-since it has long since perished as a spiritual force in all the major Communist states-but rather that, in Poland, even the attempt to legitimate the regime by means of this ideology has been openly abandoned. Standing then between the two power blocs, the present Pope has inherited a unique challenge, as he seeks to reaffirm the central content of Catholic social and political teaching against tbe background of a Communist dictatorship whose legitimacy his Church has effectively destroyed.

The novelty of his situation has led many Western commentators to neglect the profound traditionalism of Pope John Paul's social and political thought. Given his formative experiences of National Socialist and MarxistLeninist totalitarianism, many Western commentators-especially those with a conservative outlook-have been puzzled by pronouncements from him that suggest a moral equivalence between the institutions of democratic capitalism and those of totalitarian socialism. Such an interpretation of the Pope's thought is clearly unjustified. It neglects the complex and difficult circumstance in which he must address constituencies within the Church that have radically divergent histories and outlooks. The Pope must address both Catholic believers who (like those in Poland) have had ample experience of the material poverty and spiritual emptiness of Marxian socialism and the Catholics of Western Europe and North and South America who, lacking such experience, are captivated by the hallucinatory visions of liberation theology.

But if the Pope's thought supports no claim of moral equivalence between East and West, it can nevertheless be criticized on several grounds. It endorses a baseless and misleading history of Western capitalism and of the West's relations with developing nations. It does not support Marxian notions of class struggle, but it propagates a socialist caricature of unfettered capitalism, and it envisions an alternative to both capitalism and socialism that is, in the end, only a mirage. While there are aspects of Western capitalism that Catholic thought is bound to condemn, papal teaching goes astray insofar as it proposes radical alternatives to the system that has brought prosperity and liberty to Western Europe, North America, and, increasingly, the Far East.

WHAT POPE JOHN PAUL'S thought owes a profound debt to traditional Catholic social and political teaching is evident as soon as one considers the distinctive character of that teaching. In Aquinas, its greatest exponent, Catholic thought recognizes that man is a social animal, needing a particular framework of social institutions if he is to flourish. Among these institutions, just government comes high on the list, but in all distinctively Catholic thought the tasks of government are limited by the principle of subsidiarity: the maxim that what can be done by intermediary institutions-the professional association, the charitable organization, and, above all, the family-ought not to be usurped by the state. Indeed, we find in Catholic thought from Aquinas to Gilson and Maritain an incisive criticism of the contemporary cult of the omnicompetent state, which (in both its Communist and its liberal variants) is embarked on the sacrilegious project of erecting a political providence. If it rejects the modern heresy that government is the primary protector of general welfare, Catholic thought does not thereby fall into the libertarian trap of ascribing to the state only the minimal ,functions of enforcing contracts, maintaining justice, and providing national defense. Though restricted in its tasks, government has a vital role in securing for all the conditions of well-being. It may legitimately act as the guardian of those moral traditions and practices without which human life becomes mean and degraded. Most importantly, for our purposes here, a just government cannot be a minimum state of the libertarian sort, according to Catholic political thought, since such a state explicitly denies to property rights the absolute and indefeasible status claimed for them in classical liberalism. In the tradition of Catholic social thought, private property has always been celebrated as a condition of human freedom and dignity. At the same time, the entitlements of owners have always been held in a balance with the claims of human needs. Accordingly, we find Aquinas affirming that, where property rights in luxury goods come into practical competition with basic human needs, it is the former that must yield.

BECAUSE OF THESE distinctive characteristics, Catholic thought has never regarded liberal capitalism with unqualified admiration and has often questioned the conception of economic justice that supports capitalism. One of the present Pope's most distinguished predecessors, Leo XIII, used his encyclical Rerum Novarum (on the conditions of Labor, 1891) to express the concern of the Church over the plight of workers under a regime of unrestrained competition and to argue that ownership of capital carries with it positive duties as well as liberties and rights. Leo XIII went on to condemn doctrines of common ownership and of class war, and, in a fashion that was to become distinctive of the twentieth-century Catholic social outlook, he looked toward an economic order that was neither that of laissez-faire capitalism nor that of statist collectivism. While affirming that socialism is of no use to the workers (Section 4) and that it is unjust to individuals and families alike (Section 5), Pope Leo went on to demand a just wage for workers (Section 34), having condemned in the previous section "the brutality of those who make use of human beings as mere instruments for the unrestrained acquisition of wealth." He was followed by Pope Pius XI, who, in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (1931), reaffirmed the obligations attendant upon ownership and called for a just distribution of wealth, while condemning socialism. We find Pius XI in Section 72 claiming that "social justice demands that reforms be introduced without delay which will guarantee such a wage ["sufficient to meet normal domestic needs"] to every adult working man"-thereby endorsing a minimum-wage policy that has everywhere generated needless unemployment.

It is, however, in Pope John XXIII's Mater et Magisira (Christianity and social progress, 1961) that we find the clearest anticipations of the concerns of the present Pope, with issues of transnational justice and the organization of work being explicitly addressed. It is in John XXIII's encyclical that signs first appear of the influence on Catholic thought of leftist criticism of Western societies and policies, notably the ascription of responsibility for the evils of underdevelopment and of advanced industrialism to unrestrained capitalism. We are not, then, far from the fusion of traditional Catholic suspicion of liberal capitalism with the fashionable modernist denigration of capitalism as the root of all evil that animates liberation theology and that surfaces even in some of the statements of Pope John Paul II. Over the past quarter of a century or so, the moral criticism of market institutions that is deep and long-standing in Catholic social thought has been successfully exploited by enemies of capitalism coming from an entirely different tradition-the modern secular tradition of revolutionary Marxist humanism. It is in this historical context that the political thought of the present Pope is to be understood.

It is worth noting here that, for all its dependency on a long-standing tradition, the political thought of Pope John Paul exhibits an originality that derives from the man himself. We need to recall that the young Karol Wojtyla wrote a study of the ethics of Max Scheler, the pioneering theorist of ressentiment, and a doctoral dissertation on St. John of the Cross. These writings, as well as later works such as The Acting Person and Love and Responsibility, show Pope John Paul to be informed by a passionate conviction of the inherent and transcendental worth of human personality. This deep personalism, akin to that developed in France by Emmanuel Mouniere but wholly independent of it in inspiration, pervades the Pope's whole moral and political outlook. It leads him to condemn any institution which, in treating persons as mere tools or resources, denies their intrinsic dignity and value.

It is this personalism-based on the Christian affirmation that God and men are alike spiritual beings-that not only inspires the Pope's uncompromising rejection of Communism, but also strengthens his resistance to many of the fashionable forms of decadence in contemporary Christianity. Thus the Pope has repeatedly distanced himself from the Manichean certainties of liberation theology by stressing, on his visits to Latin America, that, although the Church must concern itself with questions of the distribution of political power and economic resources, yet in a Christian perspective salvation comes as a spiritual transformation, not a social revolution. What is original in the thought of the present Pope, then, is the blending of his personalist philosophy with the traditional perspectives of Catholic social thought and the unique experience of the Church in twentieth-century Poland. What is the vision of society that issues from these disparate influences?

We find a partial answer in the Pope's first major encyclical on these questions, Laborem Exercens (1981). This is a striking document in that it identifies as the principal source of conflict in the modern world the conflict between capital and Labor. According to its analysis, the unrestrained competition of laissez-faire capitalism was in the first half of this century moderated by Labor movements and progressive governments, producing a "neo-capitalism" in which capital served human needs rather than overwhelming them. More recently, however, capital has reasserted its primacy over Labor, and the combination of the profit motive and the new international mobility of capital has produced an economic order replete with deprivation and injustice, especially in the developing world. The encyclical seems to recognize no essential difference between the domination of Labor by capital in Western democracies and the subjugation of Labor by Communist bureaucracy in the East. In both cases, what is being denied is the principle of "the priority of Labor over capital".

Accordingly, both Western capitalism and Eastern Communism violate the Catholic insight that "the only legitimate title to the possession of capital

-whether in the form of private ownership or in the form of public or collective ownership

-is that it serve Labor. . . .

The right to private property is subordinated to common use, to the fact that goods are meant for everyone".

What does Laborem Exercens propose as a remedy for the unjust priority of capital over Labor? The encyclical is quick to note that nationalization, or collective ownership by the state, is no solution to the problem, since it substitutes the interests of the bureaucracy for those of the capitalists. What is needed, rather, is co-ownership and co-determination-a system in which workers are in a genuine partnership with employers and governments. The vision suggested by Laborem Exercens is a sort of ideal corporatism, in which the central planning of the economy by modern government is counterbalanced by democratic self-management within the enterprise. It is not hard to see in this conception an echo of the struggles of Solidarity in Poland, at the height of which the union represented itself as an alternative institution for organizing the entire national economy.

This analysis of the predicament of modern society, in which the insights of traditional Catholic social theory are married with the ideas of the socialist movements of Western Europe, is carried further in the encyclical Sonicitudo Rei Socialis (1987). It is true that in this encyclical Pope John Paul insists that "the Church's social doctrine is not a 'third way' between capitalism and Marxist collectivism", affirming that the chief subject of Christian social doctrine is moral theology, not political theory. Nevertheless, the Pope continues to develop the analysis of Laborem Exercens, arguing that the priority of capital over Labor in modern economies of all kinds "puts everyone in a position of almost absolute dependence, which is similar to the traditional dependence of the worker-proletarian in capitalism." Further, the Pope calls attention to the "persistence and often widening of the gap between the areas of the so-called developed North and the developing South," clearly implying that the underdevelopment of parts of the South is the moral responsibility of Western capitalism. Finally, and most notably, the Pope refers to the two opposing blocs in the modern world, with their "two conceptions of the development of individuals and peoples, both conceptions being imperfect and in need of radical correction" (Section 21). The Pope goes on to refer to the fact that "the Church's social doctrine adopts a critical attitude toward both liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism." Later, in Section 37, he proceeds to specify the "structures of sin" that exist in the modern world as being embodied "on the one hand [in] the all-consuming desire for profit and on tbe other, the thirst for power," and asserts that these are found in "certain forms of modern imperialism."

It is in such passages that, despite his insistence that Catholic social doctrine is not a middle way between capitalism and socialism, the Pope comes closest to maintaining that both systems are saddled with these "structures of sin," power structures that demean the dignity of Labor and subordinate human beings to impersonal forces. Although the Pope has insistently reaffirmed the truth that social structures are the expression of human beings acting with moral responsibility, his repeated references to "the acute need for radical reforms of the structures which conceal poverty and which are themselves forms of violence" come dangerously close to giving credence to the liberationist thesis that it is modern social institutions, and above all the institutions of liberal capitalism, that account for contemporary misery and moral disorder. This danger is most acute when we find papal pronouncements suggesting parallelisms between the structures of Western and Marxist societies. What are we to make of all this?

One need not interpret these papal pronouncements as affirming a full moral equivalence between East and West in order to be critical of their analysis. Consider, as a first example, the analysis offered of contemporary problems of underdevelopment. Contrary to the encyclicals, all contemporary evidence suggests that it is the adoption of the institutions of the market economy that is the chief condition of sustained economic development. We need only consider the Far East, and compare the prosperity of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan with the squalor of Vietnam or North Korea, to see that the role of capitalist institutions in the developing world is that of a pacemaker for economic growth, while socialist institutions are a recipe for continued poverty (and often famine). Again, it is simply false to suppose that underdevelopment is caused by Western capital. More commonly, the obverse is the case, as we can see in Burma, where decades of isolation from Western trade have progressively impoverished a once-rich country.

The encyclicals' faulty analysis of contemporary problems of underdevelopment runs in parallel with their repetition of the conventional wisdom about early capitalism. Contrary to that received view, the nineteenth-century heyday of unregulated capitalism witnessed an explosive increase in popular living standards, as infant mortality fell and hitherto luxury goods became staple items in the lives of ever larger numbers. The analysis of the encyclicals assimilates uncritically the historiography of the Industrial Revolution, most graphically stated by Engels in his book on the conditions of the English working class, according to which the Industrial Revolution was attended by a disastrous collapse in popular living standards. It is a pity that this once-dominant interpretation, now increasingly rejected by economic historians, should inform these encyclicals.

A DEEPER CRITICISM of the encyclicals would focus on the unreality of the ideal corporatism that is their positive content. The experience of tbe Seventies in Britain, the United States, and Western Europe is ample testimony to the fact that corporatist institutions are a recipe for economic stagnation and political corruption. Rather than acting to protect the common good, these institutions entrench private intcrests and confer on them public authority. The idea of an harmonious integration of interests through the machinery of central economic planning, like the idea of economic democracy or worker-participation in industry, has proved a mirage, the pursuit of which only distracts us from the real work of repair and reform of the institutions we have inherited. The positive vision of the encyclicals suffers from the same defect as that which afflicts Solidarity in Poland-that it offers no alternative to the disastrous institutions of centralized planning that is coherent or workable. No doubt Solidarity advisors are correct when they urge that moves to market institutions must be genuine ones that encompass the legal protection of private property rights. Further, the transition from state socialism to a market economy must address the costs inseparable ftom the dismantling of controls. Nevertheless, the vision that has sometimes animated Solidarity, and which is often present in recent papal teachings-a vision of a free society that is neither capitalist nor socialist-is a snare and a delusion. All modern experience suggests that there is only one alternative to state socialism, which will give us both prosperity and libertythc institutions of a capitalist market economy.

It is undeniably true that the Church can never identify itself unequivocally with any single economic system or political order. The Christian life has in human history flourished in a variety of systems and institutions, notably that of medieval feudalism, and it has no unique affinity with democratic capitalism. Further, there is no reason why the attitude of the Church to capitalism should be one of uncritical endorsement. There is within Catholic thought, after all, a legitimate tradition of criticism of capitalism-which found memorable expression in our century in the writings of Chesterton and Belloc-that identifies as a major blemish of capitalist institutions the exclusion of a significant section of the population from the benefits of private ownership, Democratic capitalism, like any other economic and political system, is heir to the evils that flow ftom man's intractable limitations and can be defended only as the least imperfect set of institutions available to mankind in the present age. Having recognized these truths, however, we must affirm that in our historical circumstance, the Christian life best thrives in the economic system which the papal encyclicals have condemned. For us, at any rate, radical alternatives to market capitalism are merely delusive, and the idea of a third way between capitalism and socialism is a distraction ftom the task of reforming our historical inheritance of capitalist institutions so that all may benefit from them.

For us, in other words, moral and spiritual life can thrive only in the civil society that market capitalism created and now sustains. For us, also, state socialism on the Marxist model must be perceived, not as a legitimate alternative to Western institutions, but as their mortal enemy. These are simple and indeed homely truths, which the Church should be first in recognizing and affirming. It is perhaps a measure of the achievement of the present Pope that, speaking ftom a circumstance of unprecedented novelty and complexity, he should return our thought to the most simple of insights-that Communism on the Marxist model not only fails to bring justice into the world, but also acts to destroy that cultural inheritance of Western values upon which all of us, believers and unbelievers alike, must depend.

The Vatican and the Kremlin: Full Circle

IN 1846, two years before the publlication of The Communist Manifesto, Pope Pius IX referred to "that infamous doctrine of so-called Communism which is absolutely contrary to the natural law itself; . . . [it] would utterly destroy the rights, property, and possessions of all men, and even society itself." In 1878, in Quod Apostolici Muneris, Pope Leo XIII defined Communism as "that fatal plague which insinuates itself into the very marrow of society only to bring about its ruin." In 1937, in the wake of Stalin's Great Terror, Pope Pius XI, in Divini Redemptoris, officially anathematized "atheistic Communism." And in 1949, the Holy See under Pope Pius XII denied the sacraments to those Catholics who knowingly and willingly joined the Communist Party.

During the next two pontificates, the relationship between the Vatican and the Kremlin changed dramatically. Pope John XXIII's 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris distinguishes between false teachings and the historical movements to which they give rise: "Who can deny that these movements, in so far as they conform to the dictates of right reason and are the interpreters of the lawful aspirations of the human person, contain elements that are positive and deserving of approval?"

As if to follow through on these overtures, John initiated the notorious Moscow-Vatican agreement. To obtain the presence of Russian Orthodox observers at the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), John promised the Soviets, through his chief diplomat, Cardinal Tisserant, that the Council would not attack Communism or the Soviet regime. Tisserant's official biographer, Monsignor Georges Roche, writes that at the Council, "whenever a bishop wished to touch on the question of Communism, the Cardinal intervened . . . to recall the order of silence in accordance with the Pope's wishes."

The results of this shift were profound. The Eleventh Congress of the Italian Communist Party noted: "The Council itself is providing us gratis with the best means of reaching the Catholic public." The Colombian priest Camino Torres, who joined his country's Communist rebels in 1966, stated, "John XXIII authorizes me to march along with the Communists."

Pope Paul VI's 1967 Populorum Progressio justified violent revolution against "manifest, long-standing tyranny," and urged Catholics to cooperate with "all those who Labor . . . to give unselfish service to their brothers." Radicals naturally included Marxist revolutionaries in that category. Father Daniel Berrigan found Ho Chi Minh superior to the Pope and recent American Presidents, more on a level with Jesus and Loyola, as he moved among the poor "allowing spiritual forces to be liberated." Peter Hebblethwaite, Britain's foremost Catholic leftist, found Mao a saintly hero: "If Marxism, in its Chinese version, has fed the hungry, transformed the lives of the oppressed and the outcasts, and brought about a more genuinely cooperative society, then it has come close to the Christian teaching that all are brothers in the one body."

Nothing better exemplifies the trend than the Catholic order of Maryknoll. Founded in 1911 as an international missionary organization, Maryknoll has, since the 1960s, undergone a radical revision of purpose. Father Leo McCarthy, an elderly Maryknoller, is quoted in the journal Crisis as explaining that in the old days, "we felt we had to convert the pagan Chinese because they were a people living in sin and darkness. It makes you feel like vomiting today." What concerns the order now is not evangelization but political and economic liberationliberation theology. Father Ernesto Cardenal, a Catholic priest now serving in the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, gives an example of the liberationist critique: "The people are constantly asked to perform practices which have no value at all. God does not want rites or prayers, sacrifices or incense. What He wants is for the people to be set free, to break all chains, to put an end to exploitation."

Such a transformation within the Church has not gone unnoticed outside. In Out of Step, Sidney Hook recalls being "confronted by a Jesuit priest who criticized me for protesting the ruthless persecutions of Catholic and other missionaries on the ground that the Chinese Communists were trying to help the exploited masses . . . Although I did not say it, I thought he was a disgrace to his cloth, which is a strange emotion for a disbeliever."

BUT AT LAST, the wind has shifted. In 1984, John Paul II wrote that liberation theology "seriously departs from the faith of the Church, and . . . actually constitutes a practical negation." His conclusion: "While claiming to bring them freedom, these [atheistic and totalitarian] regimes keep whole nations in conditions of servitude which are unworthy of mankind."

In 1985, the Holy See silenced the Brazilian liberationist Leonardo Boff for almost a year, indicating it would do the same to other theologians who promote Marxism in the name of Christ. More recently, it has investigated the Maryknoll order, found it subordinating Catholicism to Marxism, and closed its seminary in Ossining, New York.

Dominum et Vivificantem, John Paul II's 1986 encyclical letter, was the first in several decades to directly attack Communism: "the resistance to the Holy Spirit . . . reaches its clearest expression in materialism . . . The system which has . . . carried to its extreme practical consequences this form of thought, ideology, and practice is dialectical and historical materialism, which is still recognized as the essential core of Marxism."

In 1925, Soviet Foreign Minister Georgi Chicherin told Father Michael d'Herbigny, a Jesuit stationed in Russia, that international Communism felt confident about destroying capitalism, but that Rom "would be much harder to deal with." Thanks in large part to John Paul II, Chicherin's statement remains true.