The church and economic justice for the poor

In our church there is an odd misconception even among educated adults that the church is perfect and beyond improvement and reform. While these folks admit that church members sometimes sin and need the several sacraments of forgiveness, the church itself is fine just as it is. It is as though it floated down from heaven one day exactly as it is today, without any need to fix anything.

Evolution is a concept that scares some believers, especially if you tell them that the church itself evolves and develops as time goes on. It sometimes progresses from something problematic to something resolved. The trouble is, if Catholics do not know the history of this or that development, they will assume that things were always the way we find them today.

In about the year 225 a holy man named Origen wrote in his “First Principles” to describe Christ as people then understood him. He said, “In regard to him it is not yet clearly known whether he is to be thought of as begotten or unbegotten.” That is because he was a century before the great ecumenical council of Nicea. The council fathers settled the question definitively: “Begotten, not made, one in being with the Father.” So if the church needed a couple centuries to come to a firm credo about Christ, around whom all our faith revolves, why should we be alarmed if we see the church today slowly arriving at a teaching position about, say, economic justice for the world’s poor?

That is why we see Catholic writers who bristle about cafeteria Catholics picking and choosing about church doctrines on chastity now fulminate when Pope Benedict issues his “Charity in Truth” encyclical. One pundit, not unknown to Star Herald readers, called the Holy Father’s July document on world economic structures a “duck-billed platypus,” seeing it as a bad combination of Pope Benedict’s true thought with those “passages that reflect [the Pontifical Council for] Justice and Peace ideas and approaches that Benedict evidently believed he had to try and accommodate.”

Full disclosure: this Vatican curial office is directed by Cardinal Renato Martino. He invited me to serve at New York’s United Nations Mission of the Holy See several years ago. If our unnamed pundit thinks Pope Benedict has to twist Catholic social teaching to assuage a loyal member of his staff, he knows neither man. But if, instead, his real objective is to belly up to the buffet and selectively choose which Catholic teaching conforms to his love of capitalism before he will subscribe to it, he is as guilty as those whom he has been known to excoriate for smorgasbord theology.

The classical definition of the Greek word “haeresis,” from which we get the word “heresy,” is picking and choosing. I’ll take the dessert but I’ll skip the broccoli. I’ll take the parts of Catholic social doctrine that praise democratic capitalism but walk away from those that command the making of legitimate space for the poor as God’s creation who are not to be deprived of their economic rights by ruthless mogul and Bernie Madoffs.

Such holy heresy emanates from someone who cannot abide the development in social thought of a needed better awareness of how financial and economic structures were left to strangle both the poor and the middle class because regulators were shorn of their power to regulate. Government of, by, and for the rich had systematically stripped regulators of their charge to regulate. Greed took over and felled the world financial network as fictitious supervision allowed a whole raft of phony derivatives and detritus were bundled and sold by some of the largest and most respected brokerages and banks.

Now watch the letters to the editor. They will accuse me of class warfare, the fallacy of Marxism. They will say I want the poor to rise up and decapitate the rich. But where were their cries of unfairness when the bubble was building, when the warfare waged by the magnates and tycoons massacred the middle class and the poor? Greed is its own punishment. It is not the homeowner or the investor but the captains of the financial industry whose greed gives us this economic quagmire, this class warfare.