John Richard NeuhausIn a recent blog post at dotCommonweal titled “The Fall of the House of Neuhaus,” Annett offers a brief history of the way Neuhaus and his friends tried to turn John Paul II into a free-market Pope who brought a fundamental change to Catholic social teaching.
I would like to see a response to this post from the folks at First Things.
Here is a taste of Annett’s piece:
Back in 1991, the late Richard John Neuhaus penned a now-famous op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, in which he argued that Pope John Paul II’s latest social encyclical, Centesimus Annus, represented a decisive break with the past—a development of doctrine, even. The new encyclical, proclaimed Neuhaus, was nothing less than a “ringing endorsement of the market economy.” He went on to argue that Catholics who defended democratic socialism or a “third way” between capitalism and socialism were in “serious error”. He then wagged his finger at the US bishops’ pastoral letter, Economic Justice for All, proclaiming it “unrepresentative of the Church’s authorative teaching.”
With the instincts of a seasoned politician, Neuhaus understood the importance of defining the narrative from the outset. He actually broke the encyclical’s embargo to do this, a serious ethical breach.
In this, Neuhaus had a team of supporters. George Weigel, for instance, echoed Neuhaus’s claim that this encyclical was part of a hermeneutic of discontinuity. “Centesimus Annus thus marks a decisive break with the curious materialism that has characterized aspects of modern Catholic social teaching since Leo XIII,” he opined back in 1992. There was no ambiguity: the encyclical marked a “new departure in Catholic social thought.” Ten years later, Weigel was still proclaiming that Centesimus Annus “set the social doctrine of the Church on a new path by its endorsement of the free economy.”
Michael Novak also joined the chorus at the time: “The encyclical Centesimus Annus does what many of us had long hoped some church authority would do: it captures the spirit and essence of the American experiment in political economy,” he proclaimed. “Thus Pope John Paul II has brought economic liberty…into Catholic social teaching.”
Read the rest here.
With the instincts of a seasoned politician, Neuhaus understood the importance of defining the narrative from the outset. He actually broke the encyclical’s embargo to do this, a serious ethical breach.
I don’t know what “embargo” means here, and it is an assault on Fr. Neuhaus personally, very dangerous ground. Encyclicals are not infallible ex cathedra. It is permitted to differ with the pope in many matters, especially on the how of achieving desirable ends. As Benedict writes in Caritas in veritate
Whatever works, as long as it is in accordance with human dignity. Pace the left, gentlepersons such as the esteemed Dr. Arnett, “a climate change and sustainable development advisor at the Earth Institute at Columbia University and in this position is affiliated with Religions for Peace,” free-market capitalism is not necessarily antithetical to human dignity, and it has been damned effective.
https://www.aei.org/publication/take-a-bow-capitalism-nearly-1-billion-people-have-been-taken-out-of-extreme-poverty-in-20-years-thanks-to-markets/
How many people have been impoverished as the result of capitalism? How many more have died due to capitalism? To say that it has been damned effective is to neglect the whole story.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/capitalism-and-global-poverty-two-billion-poor-one-billion-hungry/5393262
This is a tired and tiring debate. Humanity can select between capitalism and socialism in the same way that humanity can select between hot and cold or between wet and dry. The truth is that life is filled with spectrums, and humanity must make space for both free-market principles AND the principles of socialism (properly understand as Pope Benedict XVi’s “logic of gift”.) Arguing for or against capitalism is like arguing for or against wetness or dryness, or against heat or cold. The truth is that cold and heat, wetness and dryness, each have a place in the world. See the following argument for how to set both capitalism and socialism in its proper place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYGO5tepBLY.