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Comments on social teaching Of the Roman Catholic Church |
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14-10-6 |
BRINGING POPULORUM PROGRESSIO INTO THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY
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James P. Hynes 23 September 2006 |
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Next year is the fortieth
anniversary of the publication of the encyclical POPULORUM PROGRESSIO 1967,
(The Progress of People) issued by
Paul VI. Preparations are being made by some Catholic , organisations
led by CAFOD to remind people of their obligations arising out of this, a
document, which set out to discover why there are such great differences
between rich countries and the poor countries ravaged by hunger, poverty,
endemic disease and ignorance. As, one of the “Vatican’s best
kept secrets”, Populorum Progressio
will be taken out of the closet and re-presented to the faithful, most of
whom will never have heard of it. So is it important for them to hear about
it now? Yes, because its warnings about the growing gap between the
‘have’ and the ‘ have not’ nations widening still, even as the
economic power of America gives way to the growing powers of China and India.
Within nations the gap between the wealthy and the poor is becoming a chasm
to the shame of us all! Furthermore despite the encyclical’s identification
of the economic sources of war, the
current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are still wars of gain waged by
the wealthy nations against ill equipped poor ones under the pretext of
liberating them. Little has changed
in that respect. In fact in a recent statement in the UN Kofi Annan,
Secretary General, gloomily told the assembly that over the past ten years
the problems of an unjust global economy, disorder and contempt for human
rights and the rule of law had considerably worsened. The encyclical’s warnings to the
wealthy still apply as the number of millionaires and billionaires has grown
along with their conspicuous spending within our new consumerist society. Few
heed the encyclical’s remonstrance, “But the acquisition of worldly
goods can lead men to greed, to the unrelenting desire for more, to the
pursuit of greater personal power. Rich and poor alike—be they individuals,
families or nations—can fall prey to avarice and soul stifling materialism.”
Further, the encyclical warned the wealthy that, “Continuing avarice on their
part will arouse the judgment of God and the wrath of the poor, with
consequences no one can foresee.” Were they, are they, listening? The
big problem about getting this encyclical out of the drawer is that much of
it is desperately out of date. In fact parts of the document were out of date
or inappropriate at the time of its publication. In seeking the ‘agents of
change’ the Pope was recommending
change from the top down. But hope for such a change is a vain hope if
ever there was one. For that to
happen we will need eternity… and longer! Hell would have to freeze over. The
encyclical acknowledges that people with power yield reluctantly but the Pope
hoped that by consensus they would being a measure of justice for others. But
the rich and powerful do not bring social justice. They hang on to what
wealth they have and continue to grab more from the poor. They are masters of
avarice. The people at the top of what the later encyclical, Solicitudo Rei
Social [Social Concern] 1987 calls ‘structures of sin’ are out of the
redemptive frame. Forget them! Change will have to come from those working
near the bottom of political and socio economic structures. They are the Men
[and indeed the Women] of Good Will, mentioned in the encyclical. They will be the people who
have traditionally led revolutions: the artisans, artists, poets, teachers,
professors and lawyers but not the
corporate ones. Forty years ago greed was hard at work in the
post colonial relationships between the former master and servant nations and
it is still active within the New World Order. Greed, the primal sin, has
been around for a long time and no doubt will stay around for a long time
yet. It has taken its place in a changed world order, a neo colonial
era, but appeals to the powerful and their
servants will not curb it. Donal Dorr writing in Option
for The Poor in 1983 pointed out that there was no sign in Populorum
Progressio that the poor themselves had been called upon to transform
society. That was yet to come. There was no encouragement for the poor to
organise themselves politically but at the same time the encyclical warned us
that if gross inequalities continue then the poor might resort to violence
and the Church knows from experience that it will always be the poor who
suffer most in any war. In his
commentary, Dorr wrote, “This is not to say that ‘option for the poor’
necessarily means approval for violent resistance to oppression; but it could
mean refusal to make a blanket condemnation of all such resistance; and that
is what we find in Populorum Progressio.” Confrontation cannot be
avoided at any level of human relationships but it does not have to be
violent. The Bolivian peasants refusal to accept water privatisation is a
case in point. Peace
without justice is no kind of peace at all. There was nobody more confrontational
than the carpenter from Nazareth. Witness the incident in the Temple when He
showed His anger at the oppression of the poor, in the very place where God
was to be found. The Temple was a place where monetary transactions of an
oppressive nature took place and Jesus decided that out- and- out
confrontation was necessary so he plaited a whip and drove the moneychangers
off the premises! Today several such Temples are to be found dedicated to the
worship of money and they too have to be confronted. Head on confrontation of
the money market is impossible for people without power but quiet subversion
could work. People themselves can sometimes opt out of the structures of sin
and opt into structures of virtue: fair trade initiatives, credit unions, farmers’
markets, co-operatives and the like. One of
the most effective confrontations with global power would be to recover some
of those teeming billions of monetary units sloshing about in the money
market by lobbying hard for the implementation of a Tobin Tax. Populorum
Progressio asked for a world fund to relieve destitution so that could be it.
A Tobin Tax, a world government tax on speculative deals in the money market,
would fill the need beautifully. Such a tax, first proposed by the Nobel
Peace Prize economist James Tobin in the 1970’s, would ensure that small
charges would be made upon currency transfers. The tax would calm damaging speculations while
raising big sums of money for third world development. http://www.ceedweb.org/iirp/
and http://www.waronwant.org/?lid=2 Populorum
Progressio was an apt analysis of the conditions of its time and prophetic of
things to come, but now forty years later inevitably aspects of the
encyclical have dated. Things have moved on at a frenetic pace and much
has worsened. It would be very
dfficult indeed to measure how much impact Populorum Progressio has had upon
Catholic top down decision makers. If any!
When the encyclical was written the International Monetary Fund and
the World Bank had been in existence for about twenty years and few realised
just how much those two structures needed reform to achieve justice for the
poorer nations. Many activists now believe that they should be abolished
altogether and replaced by structures which are not simply reflections of the
one-size-fits-all monetarists who run them. What
other features of Populorum Progressio dates the document? The word
‘globalisation’ did not appear in it.
Of course it could not have done so because the word had not yet been
coined although the encyclical picked up on the beginnings of the process of
globalisation. For example, “Unless the existing machinery is
modified, the disparity between rich and poor nations will increase rather
than diminish; the rich nations are progressing with rapid strides while the
poor nations move forward at a slow pace.” (n8) The word ‘globalisation’ first appeared around the years 1981 and 1983 in
the Harvard Business Review. Since then the supposed benefits of
economic and political globalisation have been: increases in the standard of
living; increased prosperity in developing countries and increases in wealth
for all living on this globe. This view claims that economic prosperity
brings about social prosperity too. With all emotive language stripped away
from the word and the process globalisation has been described as economic,
social technological cultural and political changes showing up as increasing
interdependence, integration and interaction between and among people and
companies world wide. Is all sweeetness and light then? Have we entered an
era of the kingdom of God on earth? Certainly not. There is much evidence to the contrary convincing
us that globalisation is like a roaring lion prowling the earth seeking whom
it may devour. Roaring lions are
easily seen but one of the worst aspects of globalisation emerged some years
ago more like a thief that comes in the night! The Multilateral Agreement on
Investment (MAI), negotiated among members of the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development between 1995 and 1998 was to be that thief. The United States, determined to
avoid interference and resistance from poor countries, worked on the drafts
of the MAI at the OECD Council whose
membership was restricted to the rich countries only. There was no
publicity. National governments and their citizens would not be let into the
secret. They were to wake up one morning and find that they had been taken
over completely by the global corporations. Fortunately for us all, copies of
the draft agreement were leaked to a Canadian citizens’ group and the secret
was out. The aim of the MAI was to draft new universal investment laws
guaranteeing corporations unconditional rights to conduct financial
transations world-wide unchallenged by
national laws and citizens’ protests. If implemented corporations and
multinationals could sue governments when national health, labour or
environment legislation threatened their interests. An MAI in place would have been a gigantic structure of
sin spread like a cancer across the globe. As it is, even now, few
governments exercise any real power in the face of the global corporations.
An MAI would have made total slaves of them all! Confrontation
began from the bottom up. Hundreds of grassroots organizations and individual
activists protested again and again with much of the protestation passing
through and along the Internet. Few governments had woken up to what was
going on with the MAI. One alert government, the French, acted decisively,
standing alongside the people in their opposition. Activists in many other
countries gave lessons on the MAI to their elected members of parliament who
had, for the most part, remained totally ignorant of the threats to their own
limited powers. Opposition was such that the MAI beast was forced back to its
lair to await a transmogrification which would allow it to emerge sometime in
the future. This action towards the development of peoples, Populorum
Progressio, began not with the agents of change mentioned in the encyclical
but with the humble masses who could recognize an enemy when they saw one! What
else has happened to place Populorum Progressio into the historic past? There
was of course the foundation of the European Union in 1993 and a couple of
years later, the World Trade Organisation, 1995. Both have had the most
tremendous impact upon the progress of peoples and both have made positive
moves towards playing a part, as the encyclical advised, “ in the
construction of a new world order.” Unfortunately too, some of their policies
have impeded the progress of peoples by giving heavier weighting in
subsequent legislation to the thousands of big business lobbyists in Brussels
rather than to the common good. For example, who needs the MAI when you can
impose the privatisation of water through European legislation? Of
course post-1967 encyclicals have picked up on socio-economic and political
changes since Populorum Progressio but surely it is now time for another
social justice encyclical analysing the world order at the beginning of the
twenty first century as the gap between the rich and the poor widens ever
more. Surely such an encyclical would boldly criticise all the features of
modern socio-economic and political life which oppress and diminish human
life, especially the rampant hedonism of the western nations. Perhaps it
could point the way towards alternative ways of being human, closer to what
Jesus would have asked to bring good news to the poor. It should do it
without being too prescriptive. Unfortunately
the tenor of first two social justice encyclicals, Rerum Novarum and
Quadragesimo Anno, were adopted by various fascist regimes who put
corporatist spin on them. The 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno of Pius XI encouraged
corporatism. Corporatism was a kind of class collaboration, thought to be
better than class conflict. Arising out of Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum
Novarum corporatist ideas were
adopted by Catholic trades unions to
counterbalance the socialist ideology of other trades unions. At the
time, both church and state as traditional supporters of feudalist and
aristocratic traditions opposed unrestricted
capitalism on the one hand and Marxist socialism on the other.
Corporatism was suggested as a Third Way. (Haven’t we heard that Third Way
recently within New Labour!) Corporatism became badly tainted in the hands of
Mussolini’s fascists, Hitler’s Nazis and Salazar’s Portuguese Constitution of
1933. Austria, a very conservative country, also dallied with it. To some extent
it was redeemed by Roosevelt whose New Deal was modelled upon corporatist
ideology much to the dismay of out-and-out capitalists in America, the ones
who owned the country, the unrestricted capitalists. We feel sure that any
new social justice encyclicals would avoid expressing any alternative ways of
being human that could be misinterpreted for use by the powerful against the
powerless. What then should we get
from the re-presentation of Populorum Progressio? We should get reminders of
our duties in meeting our obligations towards a positive option for the poor.
As we go about our liturgical practices will we be asked to sell that second
home in the Algarve or the Cotswolds and give the money to the poor? “For as
many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the price of the
things they sold…. and distribution was made to every one according as he had
need.” Douai, Acts 4:32-37. As St. Ambrose put it: "You are not making a
gift of what is yours to the poor man, but you are giving him back what is
his. You have been appropriating things that are meant to be for the common
use of everyone. The earth belongs to everyone, not to the rich." Will we be asked to cease
playing over indulgent consumers as determined by our masters in the global
economy? Will we give up our three of four TV sets, two or three computers,
two or three cars, Ipods, and high carbon emission journeys to the Maldives
or shopping sprees in New York? Will
we rejoice in buying clothes at ridiculously low prices because they have
been made by wage slaves in other parts of the world? Will we buy Fairtrade; call megastores to
account about slave like worker conditions among their suppliers? Will we buy
locally to support our high street shops and insist that our trades unions
work in solidarity with the poor abroad? Will we call our politicians to
account for starting wars which blast human lives and neighbourhoods to
shreds? Will we get any reminders from the pulpit? And why not? Are we merely liturgical
Christians or are we the salt of the earth? Go ahead then and prove it! |
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