COLUMN

THE SOCIAL POPE

Gerard V. Bradley

For the first time since I began writing this column last year, I am considering a job action, some kind of formal protest. Perhaps I shall invite editor Ralph McInerny to lunch with me and my two youngest sons. They usually appear at the table heavily-armed, and almost always leave well-buttered. Their conversation is stimulating enough, though the younger is monosyllabic and the older is into superhero stuff. Lunch guests are asked to sign a waiver of liability: target practice is among the boys' table habits, and spills of Exxon Valdez proportions are common.

Why such a drastic proposal? My present assignment is a page (or two) about our Holy Father, Pope John II. Are you kidding me? A page or two about a man who has dominated the secular history of the last twenty years? Books have been written just about the Pope's philosophy of personalism, and some of them are limited to his philosophical writings before he succeeded to the Chair of Peter. Other books have been written about the Holy Father's role in the (more or less purely) political development of Eastern Europe. Just recently, the news broke that the Pope has chosen the American scholar George Weigel to write the history of his pontificate. Do you think the Holy Father gave Weigel a page limit?

I have said enough, I hope, to justify narrowing my focus just a bit - and doing so without further explanation. I offer here one person's opinion as to the most arresting statement by Pope John Paul II during his Pontificate. I do not argue that it is the (objectively speaking) most important pronouncement by the Pope. It likely is not. But perhaps because it concerns social teaching (a special interest of mine), what the Pope said in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor about the reach of the exceptionless moral prohibitions against acts including taking innocent human life, against adultery, and against torture, is (to me) breathtaking:

When it is a matter of the moral norms prohibiting intrinsic evil, there are no privileges or exceptions for anyone. It makes no difference whether one is the master of the world or the "poorest of the poor" on the face of the earth. Before the demands of morality we are all absolutely equal.

Wow! I honestly believe that here is the lodestar of the body of teachings generally called Catholic Social Thought. I believe also that here is perhaps the Pope's timeliest intervention on the world-historical stage. For it seems to me that one great threat to human well-being in our time is the radical dehumanization of persons by dominant groups who wish to exploit - to treat as things, as raw material - the weaker among us. By declaring certain aspects of every single one of us absolutely immune from direct attack, Catholic social teaching insures that no one whomsoever may rightly be made an instrument of the purposes of another - not of the Cabinet, the "community," or the 'great man.' None may ever legitimately attack a single innocent.

The Holy Father is saying that these norms are the indispensable core of the common good. They are the backbone of any decent and just social order, for they alone can anchor inalienable human rights. How have they become the heart of Catholic social teaching? The serious historical study that the question warrants would recognize that, beginning right at the beginning of papal reflections on the emerging modern order - Rerum Novarum - the Church's "social teaching" has been concerned to answer questions about vast institutional behavior - of markets, states, armies - engendered or posed by contemporary events. The "social question" was first the degraded condition of working classes in modern industrial society. Pope Pius XII approved "democracy" during World War II, seemingly because he believed politically empowered citizens would have reined in murderous governments.

The "social question" of our generation has been about socialism, capitalism, and the possibility of a Catholic "third way" in political economy. History seems to have settled that controversy as much as moral insight settled it. Experience finally showed that (anything like) a command economy did not satisfy the basic human needs that give rise to economic organization in the first place. This trajectory has lacked what might be called a distinctly Christian starting point. Such a starting point - a meditation on the dignity of the human individual - has allowed this Pope to say, as he can readily be heard to say in the encyclical Evangelium Vitae, that even if democracy is very useful, if democracy entails or presupposes ethical relativism, then so much the worse for democracy. Or, if killing innocents is essential to "women's equality" then so much the worse for "women's equality." The Pope does not suppose that by his so saying, the world will change. But he makes undeniably clear that here - in the exceptionless norms - are the grounds by which the faithful must judge public authority and guide their own actions, notwithstanding what the "principalities and powers" would have us do.

The question of the better (or best) political form - the long-time focus of debate in Catholic Social Thought - may now be settled. But the question is secondary. Democracy is a "system, and as such is a means and not an end." Its moral value "stands or falls" with its conformity to the "moral law" (Evangelium vitae, no. 70). And the heart of the moral law is, simply, the unalterable commandments, "Thou shalt not ..." v

Gerard Bradley, a regular columnist for Catholic Dossier, is a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame.