Those of us who attempt to think with the Church’s social doctrines as well as her theological and moral teachings know the feeling well: we quote a papal statement at odds with a particular war, or critical of unfettered capitalism, and we are told "Well, that is just his personal opinion," as if the Pope’s opinion were merely one of many, with no more weight than yours or mine, and considerably less than Fr Neuhaus’ or Mr Bush’s.
It is a favorite tactic of the Catholic neoconservatives, when they cannot twist papal pronouncements to their own end, to make a fine distinction between infallible and fallible statements.
I am not saying that this distinction does not exist, but it seems to come glibly, with little reflection, to those whose own opinions are challenged or rejected by something the Pope has said.
This cavalier attitude toward Papal teaching is odd, especially when it comes to statements about particular wars, which after all are matters of life and death for huge numbers of innocents.
Stephen Hand, in a recent piece at the Traditional Catholic Reflections website addresses this, and the general tendency of the neocons over the last few decades to co-opt Church teachings for their own ideological ends, saying that this attitude is "…particularly troubling since papal prudential judgements have never been viewed as off-the-cuff soundbites but, especially relative to war, as very important rational conclusions based on 2,000 years of infallible Catholic moral principles and reasoning, and which the popes publish only after very careful and weighty analysis".
It has long been evident to those of us who have been observing them that the Catholic neoconservatives have no interest in sitting at the feet of the Church, our Mater et Magister, but rather are intent on leading Her around on their own ideological leash. Mr. Hand’s very fine and comprehensive critique can be read here.
—Daniel Nichols
This is nothing new. As William F. Buckley said in the early 1960s: “Mater, si, Magistra, non!”
I agree and disagree. I could take Scriblerius’ comment as my jumping off point. I believe that Buckley’s comment was about Humanae Vitae – No? HV is a general moral teaching of the Church – a universal moral statement about artificial contraception (negatively speaking), or, positively, about the ends of sex, and about when it is wrong and right to practice natural family planning. Disagreeing with HV in principle is simply dissent from Magisterial teaching as such. Whereas, I think what Neuhaus and the FT outfit are up to is more analogous to if, say, Paul VI had pointed to one particular family and said, ‘you guys don’t have good grounds for slowing down on procreation,’ and Buckley had said, in print, I think you’re wrong on that.
What has become very common place in the past half century is public disagreement with the Popes and the Vatican about the particular application of the Church’s moral, social and political teachings.
I agree and disagree. I could take Scriblerius’ comment as my jumping off point to show where I disagree. I believe that Buckley’s comment was about Humanae Vitae – No? HV is a general moral teaching of the Church – a universal moral statement about artificial contraception (negatively speaking), or, positively, about the ends of sex, and about when it is wrong and right to practice natural family planning. Disagreeing with HV in principle is simply dissent from Magisterial teaching as such. Whereas, I think what Neuhaus and the FT outfit are up to is more analogous to if, say, Paul VI had pointed to one particular family and said, ‘you guys don’t have good grounds for slowing down on procreation,’ and Buckley had said, in print, I think you’re wrong on that.
What has become very common place in the past half century is public disagreement with the Popes and the Vatican about the particular application of the Church’s moral, social and political teachings.
The actual innovation seems to me to be threefold. In the 1st place, in the past, if a cleric or even a lay person publically criticised particular applications of Papal teachings, for instance about the Papal States, their Bp usually slapped them down or they were subject to various forms of official disapproval. That is much rarer, and this is comparable to the relative rareity of Bps slapping down on dissent from basic doctrine, liturgical practice etc. It is because both kinds of ‘speaking one’s own mind’ are equally tolerated today that we may tend to confuse the two forms of ‘waywardness’ – one relating to dissent in principle, the other to disagreement about particular policies.
In the 2nd place, it was never, I think, uncommon for Catholic thinkers to disagree about particular policies of the Papacy or the Vatican. One just didn’t go into print with it. Say, for example, Gilson wrote private letters to Marie Dominique Chenu sympathising with his being silenced in the 1940s – but he wouldn’t have dreamed of publishing an article about it. He could see, as he believed, perfectly well, the different between the policies of the Holy Office and the teachings of the Church, but it wouldn’t have occurred to him publically to criticise those policies.
In the 3rd place, one asks oneself, apart from the fact that they would probably be subject to official criticism or the disapproval of other Catholics, why didn’t Catholic intellectuals of the pre Vatican II era commonly express their disagreement about particular policies? It could be because they thought it just ‘dumb’, or to use a technical term ‘imprudent’ to be *certain* that they knew better than the Holy Office or the Vatican or the Pope. An intellectual doesn’t print something unless they are pretty damn sure of it. It is probably prudent to imagine that one’s own prudential judgement is even narrower and more fallible than that of the Pope
So, I disagree in so far as your comments *equate* dissent from universal teching and disagreement about specific policies. But I agree in so far as I think even what I call ‘disagreement’ – especially when it is effectively normative, or forms a pattern – is imprudent, or dumb. 25 years ago, in Dallas, we had a parish priest who was excellent, and someone asked him his secret, and he said ‘I’m where the pope is, not to the left of the pope, and not to the right of the pope’. That’s prudence. (This isn’t the same as the vaguely ‘centrist’ approach taken by some Bps).
Years ago, round the same time, I heard a ‘philosopher’s joke’ from John F. Crosby – he called some eventuality ‘a priori unlikely’ or ‘a priori improbable’. That’s a joke because the a priori realm isn’t usually thought of in connection with probabilities or contingencies. It’s a priori improbable – ie, not impossible, but just what it says – that a pattern of judgements by two popes, whether it be about just war or capital punishment or the value of the writings of a well known Catholic theologian – could be wildly off the mark. If a journal like FT or an academic movement is way to the left or right or simply out of kilter with the Pope, it is not necessaril dissent per se, but it’s *probably* not pursuing a spiritually fruitful avenue of approach. If a journal or theologian or movement has its own agenda which doesn’t take some of its bearings from the papal encyclicals etc, it’s probably sectarian. It may cook up a storm of interest, but people will look back and wonder how anyone could have thought that was the wave of the future.
Just a by-the-way: I don’t think the “Mater Si” etc. comment was re Humanae Vitae. I’m almost certain it was earlier than that, more like 1962-63. Possibly it was re Pacem in Terris.
Also, according to the story it wasn’t actually Buckley’s line but Garry Wills’s. Which is only of academic interest, since Buckley printed it, but interesting in light of Wills’s subsequent move to the left.
A quick Google discovers this. Scroll down a bit more than halfway for the M-M comment.
Cheerfully accept correction on that! Learn a new thing every day – I always thought it was about HV.
But Francesca, I long ago came to believe that the neocons in fact do not ascribe to the central principles, though they are willing to use the language. Do you think it a coincidence that they one and all decided that HV, which they previously dissented on, was okay at the same time they decided that coopting JPII was prudent?
For a naked example of disagreeing with the principles, see their concerted effort, including a trip to Rome, to get the Holy See to shift in its opposition to preemptive war before the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 . And note that though the Holy See did not shift, they continue to defend it. This is not just a difference on application of principle, but a disagreement on principle.
Or see Neuhaus’ deceptive paraphrase of Centisimus Annos (my analysis of it is available on the CT archives, link at right of page).
Do you think it a coincidence that they one and all decided that HV, which they previously dissented on,
Fr. Neuhaus was once a Lutheran pastor, and one assumes in that capacity he taught things at odds with the Church’s moral understanding. I think Michael Novak has said that he has been unpersuaded by philosophical (but not theological) arguments against contraception. That aside, can you point texts by Fr. Neuhaus, George Weigel, J. Bottum, Robert P. George, Cdl. Dulles, Michael Behe, &c. &c. that take exception to Magisterial teaching on contraception. Can you say what it is about the array of said texts that would compel you to ascribe to them the motives that you do?
we quote a papal statement at odds with a particular war, or critical of unfettered capitalism, and we are told “Well, that is just his personal opinion,”
Are you sure you have not confounded Fr. Neuhaus with Harry Binswanger? When has he ever been an advocate of unfettered capitalism?
It would have been agreeable for Mr. Hand, in the course of his fine and comprehensive critique, to have quoted a sentence fragment uttered by any one of the three men (Fr. Neuhaus, Dr. Weigel, and Mr. Novak) under discussion.
For the benefit of anyone who, like me, didn’t recognize the name “Harry Binswanger”–I wasn’t sure if it was a real name or a way of saying “any old clown,” like “Rufus T. Firefly”–Google reveals that he is real and associated with the Ayn Rand Institute.
I was wondering the same thing as Art – whether Neuhaus/Weigel/Novak had been conflated (by Dan) with Buckley/Wills on HV. It’s part of the problem of treating the first three as a team or a three headed hydra, of course. I recall that Novak used to be criticized for his attitudes on HV, then he went silent on it.
Christopher Blosser cited some explicit disclaimer by Ratzinger, to the effect that such were his own opinions – but, my memory and the blogospere information overload being what they are – that might have been in relation to something other than just war and Iraq – it could have been capital p.
On the other hand, Benedict has said exactly the same thing about his new book on Jesus. I haven’t read it, since, when it got here from amazon, I promptly gave it to one of our Protestant Biblical scholars, thinking it would do him good to see how sound an RC can be. That’s where my point about the difference between dissent and disagreement kicks in. No theologian has to agree with Benedict’s views on New Testament Christology. But I think it would be their loss – or pretty dumb and unthinking – to ignore him and plough one’s own furrow.
Discussions in which one side insists on only referring to the other side by some label are never very persuasive and are often not very useful. Weigel, Neuhaus and Novak may share some common perspectives and projects, but they are hardly a monolith, even on social issues. And they do give arguments for their positions. In other words, even if they are wrong, it does not mean that they are being intentionally subversive. Or, even if one is being intentionally subversive it doesn’t mean they all are.
Would it not be quite foolish for someone to speak of the NicholsHortonStorck and say that the NicholsHortonStorck thinks absolutely the same on social issues because they said some similar sounding things in a magazine in the early 1990s?
I know enough about the thinking of Horton and Nichols, at least, to think that wouldn’t be a very prudent or useful argument.
In speaking of neoconservative dissent on HV I am talking about the 70s and 80s, when as AD points out, Rev Neuhaus was a Lutheran pastor, and when Weigel was a pup, not yet on the scene. And I believe that Fr Sirico was still a liberal gay activist. So I am talking about Mr Novak, whose opposition to Church teaching on contraception was well known. While it would be interesting to research the historical position of the other, second tier neocons Mr Deco cites, but with baseball season and iconography I don’t have the luxury to do it.
But that is really a side issue, and Mr D is sidestepping the issue, which is whether the Catholic neoconservatives merely disagree on application of principles or the principles themselves.
Before 1991 they were very clearly dissident on Catholic social principle. In that year- or sometime just before that year- they shifted in their strategy, professed their loyalty to and affection for John Paul, and set out trying to portray him as an ally. They did this, it is now acknowledged, by using Rocco Batiglione, the spelling of whose name I no doubt slaughtered as badly as I did the name of the encyclical yesterday, to insert ambiguous phrases into the text of the encyclical when he helped draft it. They furthered their project by then composing their own “abridged” -in truth it was sometimes wordier- version of Centesimus Annos and distributing it widely, including in a special edition of National Review. As I said, my comparison of the original encyclical and the neocon paraphrase can be read on our archives.
Remarkably, I, the editor of an obscure journal with a tiny readership, received letters from all three of the neocon bigshots after I published that piece. Unfortunately, they one and all requested that their letters not be published. None of them addressed the issues I raised, but rather took a hurt or offended tone, more or less “how could you accuse US of duplicity?! This is a grave sin!” etc.
Nowhere have I ever seen the neocons confess to errors committed back when they were in open dissent, and nowhere have I seen them convincingly assent to Catholic principles in the same way the Church has always understood those principles.
To cite the other example, in more recent times, the neocon support for the invasion of Iraq surely was a disagreement with the Church in principle: they held that aggressive preemptive war was justified, and the Church has always held that war must be defensive.
It is important to note that when the last two popes held that the war was not just they were saying that it was not just in principle, not merely that they disagreed with the application of a principle.
Of course, even the justification for the war turned out to be wrong, though whether this was error or deliberate deception we don’t know. I’d like to say the jury is still out, but the jury has not yet convened. Let’s hope it does someday.
Note that the neocons continue to defend the concept of preemptive war, even when they could not pursuade the Holy See to go along with them.
As for NicholsHortonStorck vs the neocon triumvarate, the three have been involved in many more joint projects than Maclin, Tom and I ever have, and have displayed a lot less disagreement in public.
And Mr Deco, I have learned in the past to try and avoid drawn-out controversy with you, which is frustrating. I would respond to your objections with cited sources and comprehensive arguments, which you would ignore or say the equivalent of “Oh yeah, says you!” and move on to your next point. Your comments merit one response.
This was it.
The problem, Dan, is that you are bringing up a subject and making accusations without taking the time to do the research necessary to justify your accusations. This is unfair to your antagonists and not likely to further the conversation. Right now it is simply, “Trust me, these guys are evil.”
For instance, you say, “the neocon support for the invasion of Iraq surely was a disagreement with the Church in principle: they held that aggressive preemptive war was justified, and the Church has always held that war must be defensive.” I would like you to quote me Weigel’s defense of preemptive war. I’m not saying he doesn’t have one, but I’m guessing that it is much more nuanced than the phrase “preemptive” suggests. And I’d probably think he was wrong if I knew his argument. I’m all for the Church’s position.
My point is not about who is right and who is wrong, but about fairness in argumentation. In other words, why bring it up if you can’t take the time to carefully defend your assertions?
My point about the NicholsHortonStork is simply that Weigel, Novak and Neuhaus have distinct paper trails and they need to be dealt with distinctly. My intuition is that mud would stick to Novak much more easily than the other two.
It is not good enough to say, “Check the archives.”
Several people above have asked for specific
quotations, etc. to justify what Dan is saying, but unless one has more time than I do for blogging, it’s difficult to provide these. But I’m going instead to link to some articles of mine that do include citations.
http://www.catholic.net/rcc/Periodicals/Faith/2001-06/teaching.html
http://distributist.blogspot.com/2007/02/liberalisms-three-assaults.html
http://www.caelumetterra.com/cet_backissues/article.cfm?ID=34 (Includes quotes from Novak.)
http://tcrnews2.com/Sirico2006.html
The general thrust of Catholic social teaching has been to distrust the free market as a general means of running an economy, however useful free competition might be within certain limits. From Leo XIII’s explicit statement in Rerum Novarum that market solutions do not necessarily bring about wage justice,
through Pius XI’s pointed remark that the notion that
the economy should be entrusted to free competition for direction (he calls such a notion a “polluted spring”) is erroneous, to John Paul II’s statements in
Centesimus Annus about the dangers of a radical
capitalist ideology that blindly trust the free market as the solution, this is a consistent tradition, and hardly comports well with the economic thought that
Americans call “conservative.” The Acton Institute folks are most explicit about their disagreements on this score, but Novak et al. are right behind them and
in fact differ little. Dan noted above the doctored
version of Centesimus they put out, which was further
printed in a book of theirs, The New Worldly Order. This book plainly shows a rejection of the Church’s social tradition, based on an incorrect reading of Centesimus. (See the first link above for some documentation of this charge.)
NOTE: I’ve edited the preceding comment so that the URLs are links. The way TypePad was displaying them, at least with my video settings, the longer ones were truncated so that you couldn’t even copy-paste them.
Robert- I am online for less than 30 minutes a day unless I am typing a long post. I do not even own a computer. If my posts are to require extensive documentation, like a term paper, I will simply have to cease writing.
At any rate, neocon opinion is a matter of public record, and I did note an article I wrote back when I could spell Centesimus Annus without looking it up:). And Tom has graciously provided more documentation above.
As for Mr Weigel, in fact his take on preemptive war is different than the barebones way I sketched it. He rather bizarrely says that we should all just trust the President to determine if a war is just or not, as the President has a “charism” for making such judgements (read about it at the TCR website). It is not clear if this charism of deciderness rests on Democratic presidents as well, or it is a personal gift of Mr Bush’s. At any rate, given what we know now about WMD and non-existent links with Al Queda, it apparently is not infallible.
I would like to correct one error I made in a comment: while it is true that Rev Sirico was a gay activist- more radical than liberal- in the 70s, by the 80s he was a Paulist seminarian, though he was not a public figure until he founded the Acton Institute in 1990.
Robert Sirico’s is a very strange tale. I have long known of his past, which is hardly secret, but recently Randy Engle has petitioned the Holy See to suppress St Philip Neri House, and Oratory which Rev Sirico founded after leaving the Paulists, and of which he is the superior. She is urging its suppression both because of the scandal of his past and because of allegations of immorality there. She has put together a timeline of Robert Sirico’s life which revealed a lot I did not know about him. It is a strangely fascinating and very American epic: from Brooklyn Catholic boyhood to young Pentecostal revivalist and faith healer to ministry in the gay Metropolitan Community Church denomination- he is reputed to have performed the first same-sex marriage in Denver in 1975- to libertarian priest and darling of the Right. That he did this with such aplomb is fascinating: the guy has a huge dose of, well, “chutzpah” is the nicest way of putting it.
Let me clarify that I do not like Ms Engel’s style, nor would I welcome someone chronicaling every sinful or stupid thing I did and said in the 70s (which thankfully, unlike Sirico, was not done under a media spotlight). And we are bound in charity to take his conversion at face value and to assume that he has lived chastely in religious life. We are further bound in charity to suspend judgement about these latest allegations unless and until an investigation is conducted.
That said, if ever anyone’s background should have precluded him as a candidate for holy orders it is Robert Sirico’s. But then, given the state of religious life at the time, the Paulists no doubt considered him quite a catch.
As I said, strangely fascinating saga. But whether it is a tragedy or a farce only time will tell.
I am not learned in the matter of Catholic social teaching. I have to say I found Mr. Nichols replies and references to be largely unhelpful. Mr. Storck’s references contain a good deal to cogitate on. Like some others, my time is not unlimited, so I have not much to say other than what can be gleaned from a cursory reading.
And that is not much. I think I would have to have the text of Centesimus Annus and the commentaries by Fr. Neuhaus and Mr. Novak in front of me to make a determination about whether they have misread that encyclical and done so in a manner that suggest motives to which they do not admit.
With regard to Mr. Storck’s articles, I think his writing would benefit from more rigorous and precise understandings of such terms as “capitalism”, “market economy”, “free economy”, and “living wage”; from a definition of ‘liberalism’ that was not so tendentious; from some consideration of the distributional aspects of both guild systems and feudal agriculture; and from some explicit discussion of whether the phenomenon of economic development can be reconciled with the conception he presents of the proper ends of economic life.
I have read English translations of several of the social encyclicals (Rerum Novarum, Quadrigesimo Anno, Mater et Magistra). I did not give them a close reading and have not returned to the matter in the intervening years. I can say that my immediate reaction to all three encyclicals was that it would be difficult to craft implementable public policies in execution of the enunciated principles and that the encyclicals seemed informed by an excessively voluntaristic notion of what public policy might accomplish in the economic realm. It is in part for that reason that I tend to be somewhat skeptical of claims that the social encyclicals either provide a blueprint for an alternative economic order or are a motherlode to adjudicate contemporary disputes over economic policy except on certain select points (e.g. concerning the impact of public policy on the family and civil society).
Please keep in mind a proper characterization of contemporary political economy. Virtually all Occidental countries have a ratio of public expenditure to domestic product between .33 and .67 and sport some sort of ‘mixed economy’ – a juxtaposition of private enterprise with public enterprise, state regulation, public provision, and redistribution – qualitatively different from the economic order of the Occidental world prior to 1914 (when said ratio tended to be around .1). It is pretty idle to be uttering complaints about ‘unfettered capitalism’ when the only place it can be said to exist is Hong Kong. Grover Norquist and Ronald Reagan may have maintained the restoration of the status quo ante 1929 as an ultimate goal of social policy, but the mundane disputes between the political parties concern details of how the mixed economy should operate, not the system itself.
If you wish to complain that the mixed economy is not a fulfillment of Catholic social teaching, I think that would be legitimate. Mr. Storck has made a plausible case that some of Mr. Novak’s writings over the years have offered some fairly silly theological propositions. I am not an adept of theology, so I cannot say more than that. What neither Mr. Storck or Mr. Nichols has offered is some reason to regard Fr. Neuhaus, Fr. Sirico, or Mr. Novak as if they were ideologists of the Libertarian Party or did not think amendments to details of the political economy were in order.
Mr. Nichols offered a complaint about the thought and character of people he designated ‘Catholic neoconservatives’. I attempted to offer something of a definition of that term by suggesting the names of contributers to First Things and asking for a comment. One might suggest the appropriate delineation of the term would encompass contributors to First Things, Crisis, Touchstone, The National Catholic Register, and Our Sunday Visitor; and associates of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the Acton Institute. Mr. Nichols complaint was sufficiently stark and categorical that I would have assumed he had digested the output of these agencies and discerned the abiding tendencies thereof. I think he admits that he is concerned with aught but the writings of four individuals. If that be the case, repairing to the genus ‘Catholic neoconservatives’ is misleading and gratuitous.
Much of his complaint against Fr. Sirico concerned the skeletons in the man’s closet. I had not heard of any of that before (and, looking at the timeline to which you made reference, suspect there is much in the way of urban legend mixed in there). If you wish to argue the man should not have been ordained, I think you have a case; I am not sure what the implications of his past should be for discussions of his ideas on Catholic social teaching. Ideas have a life separate from their promoters, and unless it be your contention that their entry into the Church was opportunistic, a complaint that Fr. Neuhaus and Fr. Sirico advocated things incongruent with Catholic teaching during a period of their lives when neither was affiliated with the Church is jejune.
If I am not mistaken, Mr. Novak has repudiated the import of his previous criticisms of Humanae Vitae. I think he has said that the Theology of the Body provides an adequate understanding of that teaching, without need of repair to natural law arguments.
If I recall Dr. Weigel’s argument correctly, it was his contention that the responsiblity of making the factual determinations and actuarial calculations incorporated into assessing whether a war can be considered just adheres to state officials, not ecclesiastics. As far as I can see, that is congruent with the precis of just-war teaching provided in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, but, as I say, I am not an adept of this sort of discourse. I cannot see how discussion of pre-emptive war is not something of a red-herring, since the United States had been in a state of belligerency with Iraq since 1990.
I should say that in general I think the writings of people employed in the business of promoting or considering ideas are not typically so perverse that a discussion of their motives or character is all that tempting.
I’m considerably less hostile to the Catholic neo-cons (meaning, principally, Neuhaus, Weigel, and Novak) than are Daniel and Thomas, which is part of the reason why I’m mostly staying out of this discussion–I would feel obliged to become a lot more familiar with their work in order to state any conclusions very definitely. For me, they’re a group of people who are sometimes wrong and sometimes right; also, there’s a good deal of difference among them (I would rank Novak as the shakiest of the bunch); also, I really don’t have any desire to discuss their possible motives.
HOWEVER–to address one of the many points at issue here: their “editing,” which included a certain amount of rewriting, of Centesimus Annus remains, in my mind, a serious demerit on their records. It really is just as tendentious as Daniel says–so much so that it’s hard not to wonder whether it’s just plain dishonest. It certainly strikes me as intellectually unjustifiable. It also seems to be indefensible–if they’ve ever made an attempt to defend and explain it, I would be glad to give it a fair reading.
I appreciate Mr. Deco’s (very qualified) statement of approbation of some of my writing, and I want to respond to some of his specific questions. He wrote: “With regard to Mr. Storck’s articles, I think his writing would benefit from more rigorous and precise understandings of such terms as “capitalism”, “market economy”, “free economy”, and “living wage”; from a definition of ‘liberalism’ that was not so tendentious.”
As the author of an article (not online) on exactly what capitalism is (in Faith & Reason), I’m aware that in fact most economists do not even try to define capitalism. The definition I always use is taken from Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (sect. 100 in the Paulist translation), that it is an economic system in which ownership and labor are separated. A few economists have had similar definitions, but if you look in standard economics dictionaries/encyclopedias,such as Palgraves or the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, you will not find a definition of capitalism, but simply some sort of historical description. Pius XI’s definition, on the other hand, gets to the heart of the matter in ways that I don’t have time to lay out here. As to my definition of liberalism, I assume Mr. D. was referring to the article linked to above. I see nothing tendentious about my definition at all (actually it is not a strict definition, because it cannot be precisely defined) and depends on such quintessential liberals as Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises. I don’t think I even tried to define “free market,” “living wage” and especially “market economy.” The latter is a slippery term that is probably not too helpful, and depends entirely on what one means by a “market.” I have nothing against a “market economy,” but I do have a lot against a “free market economy,” as did Pius XI and the entire Catholic social tradition, including John Paul II. This of course assumes that a market is a place where things are bought and sold, and says nothing about how prices and other economic indicators are determined. The medieval economy was a market economy, indeed, I think the whole metaphor of “market” was taken from medieval fairs. But it was not a “free market” economy, since prices were not determined by supply and demand, even if sometimes the supply and demand price was taken as a sign of what was the “aestimatio communis,” the common estimation of what something was worth.
“Urban legend”? If so it is an oddly chronicled one: Rev Sirico, unlike most of us, made headlines pretty steadily most of his life, except the time between his career as a prominent gay activist and his career as a prominent libertarian priest. It is all documented from the newspapers.
My objections to the guy are first that he set out on a well-finded campaign to change Catholic social teaching, perverting it into something more compatible with the free market ideas of his wealthy sponsors, originally Calvinist capitalists in that last bastion of Calvinism, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has done untold damage with his offers to seminarians through the years for all-expenses-paid seminars at cushy hotels and conference centers. He has even made inroads in Rome.
Only secondarily do I object that by Rome’s own standards he should never have been ordained. That he was is a great scandal, quite apart from his Randian economics (he has spoken publicly about his admiration for the despicable woman, Ayn Rand).
Daniel, I did not object in toto to that which you referred. I merely said I suspected it was embellished to some degree.
Do you have a reputable source for your contention that he has praised Ayn Rand?
Rev Sirico’s talk “Who is Ayn Rand”, which is admiring with the caveat that her atheism is objectionable, can be ordered online from various libertarian book services.
Weigel’s clarification on the “charism” comment. Well, he was being sloppy, but not simply incorrect, if his correction reveals what he really meant. The virtue of prudence, of course, can be enhanced by a gift of the Holy Spirit.
Weigel’s clarification on the “charism” comment. Well, he was being sloppy, but not simply incorrect, if his correction reveals what he really meant. The virtue of prudence, of course, can be enhanced by a gift of the Holy Spirit.
His comments, notably, were in the context of a piece of writing that endorses “revitalizing”; ie, changing, the just war tradition to allow preemptive, aggressive war. I rest my case that this neocon does not merely differ with the Church on implementation of principle, but on principle itself.
Several days ago, Daniel Nichols wrote the following:
Remarkably, I, the editor of an obscure journal with a tiny readership, received letters from all three of the neocon bigshots after I published that piece. Unfortunately, they one and all requested that their letters not be published. None of them addressed the issues I raised, but rather took a hurt or offended tone, more or less “how could you accuse US of duplicity?! This is a grave sin!” etc.
I am curious as to why you never published these letters. It certainly doesn’t seem that you owe it to these individuals in moral terms to accede to their wishes in this regard, since their letters were completely unsolicited. Are there some legal issues involved here? Or were you just trying to be charitable to them, and grant them a request that it doesn’t seem to me they deserve as a way of helping them save face?
Michael- It seemed honorable to respect their wishes, though I wondered why they did not want their comments published…
Daniel,
Consider posting the letters here now. It’s not too late.
First, while I did not throw them out, I have no idea where they are. Secondly, it still would seem dishonorable.
I tend to agree that it would be unseemly, at least, to publish them. The only one I remember you reading to me was the one from Fr. Neuhaus, and from that I mainly recall his apparent misunderstanding of “the sin of presumption,” which he seemed to be using to mean presuming to know another’s heart and/or motives.
For what it’s worth, my conjecture as to their desire to keep their responses private was that a public response would have only drawn more attention to the problems with their editing of the encyclical. Since the group of complainers was pretty small and obscure, they were better off, p.r.-wise, not publicly acknowledging it. Like I said, a conjecture.
That’s right, I had forgotten about Rev. Neuhaus’ misunderstanding. You are probably right concerning their motives, though it always amazed me that no one else (apparently) ever analyzed their Centesimus Lite rendition of the encyclical. They really were given a free ride, weren’t they? And I always was amazed that they dared to so misrepresent the encyclical in the first place. Like Rev. Sirico’s career moves, the nicest word for this is “chutzpah”.
For what it’s worth: It seems to me that the stakes here are very high, since we are dealing with the profound misrepresentation of manifestly anti-Christian economic ideologies as being firmly rooted in the Gospel. And it seems like the means whereby these misleading ideas are being propagated by Catholic intellectuals of considerable public stature involves dishonesty which is sufficiently egregious to warrant public exposure. (A good model to follow here in terms of publicly embarrassing someone of prominent intellectual stature in a charitable way, I have recently discovered, is the devastating exposure by Protestant Creation Scientists of the gaping evidentiary holes and glaring logical circularities lying at the heart of standard evolutionary dogma – using the writings of the very exponents of this dogma!)
But maybe what I am saying speaks more to the sinfulness of my own motives than to the actual requirements of justice and truth in the whole affair. And in any event, Daniel, I admire the charitable restraint you displayed at the time in respecting their wishes. I know from experience how difficult it can be to arrive at the best possible judgments in situations like that.
Micheal- I don’t see what good it would do to publish their response, as they did not address in any way the criticisms I leveled in the article that can still be read on our archives: http://www.caelumetterra.com/cet_backissues/article.cfm?ID=56
Daniel,
As an old editor of periodicals, I agree it would be wrong to publish letters that were sent as private correspondence. Analysis of their published work is far more important. The fact that someone may be a jerk has no bearing on what he actually says.
Click here for the article Daniel links to above. I don’t know about everybody else but with my browser and display settings the text of the link in his comment is truncated.
While I continue to admire your restraint in electing not to publish the letters, I disagree that it is intrinsically pointless to do so. One of the things that can be very revealing about the inherent intellectual weakness of someone’s position in a debate is if they resort to ad hominem attacks, rather than addressing the substance of the points and arguments raised by their interlocutors. It sounds like this resort to ad hominem attacks, in the absence of substantive debate, happened with wild abandon in those letters. I would consider that to be an inherently important part of the evidentiary record in the broader public discussion over the proper understanding of CENTESSIMUS ANNUS, etc.
And, again, I would add to what I just wrote the thought that Neuhaus, Weigel, and Novak are highly influential and therefore very dangerous ideologues who urgently need to be discredited as authorities of repute in contemporary American Catholic discourse.
I just read Daniel’s eloquent article, thanks to Maclin’s link, and doing so merely reinforces the convictions I articulated in my previous two posts. I would like to cite some pertinent quotes from the article itself to buttress my contention that these urgently need to be discredited, due to the ill effects of their grave distortions of the truth:
“It is apparent that the neo-conservatives are not truly interested in being formed by Catholic social doctrine, but rather in selectively appropriating aspects of it for their own ends. To a large degree they have accomplished this, at least in terms of public perception. Most otherwise orthodox Catholics in this country seem to have joined in this perception.”
“These are crucial times, when America and its allies dominate the world economically, politically, and militarily. International corporations extract consumer goods from poor countries who have no unions, minimum wage standards or environmental laws to hinder profits.”
“It would be a tragic blow to the Church’s credibility and to its mission of a new evangelization if the impression is given that the Pope has blessed this exploitative dominance and the attendant destruction of the world’s economies, ecologies and cultures.”
With a little bit of thought and editing, these three quotes alone could be transformed into a powerful argument for the urgency of doing everything possible – within the limits of truth, justice, and charity – to discredit the propagators of such dangerous falsehoods and distortions as Daniel has revealed Novak, Weigel, and Neuhaus to be.
What theme is this? Love it!