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13th October, 2008.
‘In spite of the shadows that there may be, we are confident that Africa will be able to walk the road of development with full respect for Gods rights and human dignity.’
-Pope Paul VI: 1967
There is a story told, and it might indeed be apocryphal, of a professor of Christian ethics who set his class the task of the reading the Bible from cover to cover and with the help of a pair of scissors, cut out any reference to justice, to peace, to aiding the poor or the widow or the orphan or the stranger or of setting the oppressed free or any kind of social responsibility, just relationship or altruistic gesture. He asked them to write up their observations in a single paragraph. And as expected the point they reached was simply that Bible without the insistence on justice, without right relationships, without the stewardship of the earth, without a hermeneutic of care, without an option for the poor and marginalized, simply did not hang together, it made no sense, it was pure idiocy.
Paul VI understood this very well in contemporary terms and reminded the Church that:
“Action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of preaching the Gospel or in other words, of the church’s mission for the redemption of the human race and its liberation from every oppressive structure.’ 1971: Justice in the World #6:
The point is well made; there is a fundamental warranty for an engagement in the structure and content of our life together in the polis, according to our foundational texts, not least because this is where the kingdom of this world is transformed into the kingdom of our God. I say this against the continued post Enlightenment assertion that religion has no place, no authority in the public domain.
Timothy Radcliff quotes Nicolas Lash the first Catholic professor of theology at Cambridge since the Reformation described the crises like this:
‘The legacy of the Enlightenment left us with we might call a crises of docility. Unless we have the courage to work things out for ourselves, to take as true that which we have personally ascertained or perhaps invented, then meanings and values, descriptions and instructions, imposed by other people, feeding into other peoples power will inhibit and enslave us, bind us into fables and falsehoods from the past.’
Many people think that the crises lies in the Enlightenment between the activity of thinking on the one hand and tradition on the other. The Enlightenment posited a fundamental opposition between them, the thinking person, the enlightened person was the one who thought for himself, who accepted nothing on trust, whose first instinct was to doubt. The tradition especially that of the Church, was the symbol of intolerance, prejudice and the failure to think for oneself. This puts into doubt the role of the teacher or preacher or indeed of the Church
And we need to read this not only because of the critique of the Enlightenment, but also against the rise of (often but not always) conservative ideologues who seek to discredit contemporary democratic discourses and undermine processes by pointing to particular failures in morality but whose real fight is the critique of analysis which question systems from which they benefit.
So Vatican II insists against such attempts to deconstruct the Church’s involvement:
"In their patriotism and in their fidelity to their civic duties Catholics will feel themselves bound to promote the true common good; they will make the weight of their convictions so influential that as a result civil authority will be justly exercised and laws will accord with moral precepts and the common good."
Second Vatican Council, Apostolicam actuositatem 14
And very recently Pope Benedict has said:
‘To days democratic societies call for new and fuller forms of participation in public life by both Christian and non Christian citizens alike. Indeed all can contribute by voting in elections for lawmakers and government officials and in other ways as well, to the development of political solutions and legislative choices which in their opinions will benefit the common good.’
This is interesting because it underlines the fact that the church looks to the world of politics as a valid place for searching for the solutions of societies problems and as such as the church has said officially, in the Catholic tradition, responsible citizenship is a virtue and participation in the political process is a moral obligation and all citizens are to become informed, active and responsible participants in the political process.
Hence my first point (and I think that I will make four points) is that, with full cognizance of and compliance with the rules of sound argumentation there is a legitimacy to the Church’s participation in political life. We hear well Pope Benedicts nuance in this regard, which is important: ‘in applying its social doctrine the church does not seek to make this teaching prevail in political life. Rather the church wishes to help form consciences in political life and to stimulate greater insights into the authentic requirements of justice as well as greater readiness to act accordingly.’
Indeed Pope Benedict XVI has recently spoken of ‘politics as a demanding form of charity.’
It was St. Augustine who said that charity is no substitute for justice with held, reading that with Benedicts assertion of politics as being a demanding form of charity, one can readily conclude that politics has at its core, (for the believer) the quest for justice since that is the demand of charity, and thus one of the contributions of CST is hold at the center stage of political discourse the demands of justice. It (justice) is in CST tradition the solid content of politics.
This challenge of justice is concretized/ helped by the fact that as the USA Bishops have pointed out we have very specific assets which we bring to the public domain:
• We have a consistent moral framework for assessing situations, for developing criteria for judgment etc
• We have a broad experience of serving the needs of many across a broad spectrum of human situations and in many different creative ways thus giving us a matrix /praxis out of which to understand our interventions.
• The Catholic community is large and diverse across all sorts of divides, giving us an experience of diversity but at the same time a common commitment to the same moral principles thus allowing us to work principles that hold under a variety of circumstances.
That is my second (brief) point.
Just some months before he died Pope John Paul II, speaking about Africa, and his intention to convoke another Synod on Africa, challenged the church in Africa to support the search for democratic reforms, to curb corruption and to find new ways of cooperating in order to fight the negative effects of globalisation. He also warned that continued widespread poverty was fuelling conflicts and pushing people towards extremism and violence.
In essence what the Pope was affirming, is the truth that, to all intents and purposes, the present political discourse, the attempt to understand the human predicament, is at best inadequate and at worse, flawed. The church, therefore, amongst others, in the political domain is duty bound to contribute towards ensuring ‘a different approach rather than just different strategies and policies. Fundamentally, it requires another vision of what is valuable, another perception of what is possible, another recognition of what is required.’
My third point, thus, revolves around the notion that CST leans inevitably toward the task of broadening the political, spiritual and indeed the social imagination in its search to find new, appropriate answers to the complex issues of our time which have to be resolved in favour of justice. It challenges the dogmatic, narrow paradigms in which politics seems to be constructed.
So on the latter point for example, Noam Chomsky can say
‘The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats. There are differences between them. In his study Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels shows that during the past six decades “real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working-poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans”.
Differences can be detected in the current election as well. Voters should consider them, but without illusions about the political parties, and with the recognition that consistently over the centuries, progressive legislation and social welfare have been won by popular struggles, not gifts from above.
Those struggles follow a cycle of success and setback. They must be waged every day, not just once every four years, always with the goal of creating a genuinely responsive democratic society, from the voting booth to the workplace.’
One years the same sort of comment in the UK where Gordon Brown seems to have a tenuous grip on the party at the moment and yet commentators say a Tory victory will be Labour’s plan B. the point is people see very little creativity, difference in political discourse, its more of the same.
Yet if the church sees politics as a place of solutions then it must be at least in part because she has the confidence that it is within human capacity locate or retrieve deeper source of wisdom appropriate for the task.
We are challenged to use fully our imagination in the service of social transformation and to interrogate our faith symbols as sources for thinking about a more just and co operative future. And participate in dialogues and debates which shape our common life
Imagination is at the heart of the vision of what is valuable and possible. Reflecting on its positive, re creative power Paul Ricoeur has written that the imagination is the centre of the profound workings that impel decisive changes to our vision of the world. Arguing that every real conversion occurs first at the level of our directive images, Ricoeur believes that human beings can alter reality by altering their imaginations and that in imagining possibilities, human beings act as prophets of their own existence.
Albert Einstein once said that logic will get you from point A to point B but imagination will take you everywhere.
As I understand it, both these commentators remind us that if we are going to survive as a global community, if we are not going to allow the growing disparities to drive us into conflict and patterns of destruction, then we are compelled to give birth and open spaces to cultivating the moral imagination in human affairs. We must face the fact that , for example, much of our economic thinking and indeed our current systems for responding to poverty and to the violence that so often flows from it, is in fact incapable of overcoming these ills; also because our imaginations have been corralled and shackled by the very parameters and sources that create and perpetuate poverty. Our challenge is how to invoke, set free and sustain innovative responses to the roots of poverty while also rising above it.
One of the contextual impasses that we need to help liberate is that even while the poor and those of us who commit to being close to the poor, the problem is that even while we seek more than a life of poverty or even of economic competition, we are caught in particular economic language and constructs. The language of individualism makes it difficult for us to think about what a more co operative, just and equal social order might look like because the context in which we discuss ideals like freedom, justice and even success are skewed by the hidden weight of homogenous discourses of individualism and greed and racism. Yet CST is built on a firmly communitarian foundation where solidarity is a fundamental virtue. We are challenged to asses the economic and the political consequences of this fundamental belief, to quote but one example.
I want to suggest today in the light of the abject poverty that we face everyday, and that is worsening even as we speak, in the light of political instability, it belongs to the very logic of CST that we need to bend the arc of our imaginations towards the following horizons if our imaginations are going to contribute to a more moral measure of the economy and political life:
We need to move from isolation and attitudes of ‘dominate or be dominated’ towards a capacity to envision and act on the bases that we live in and form part of a web of interdependent relationships, which include our oppressors and enemies and exploiters and that we keep ever in mind the truth that our grand children’s destinies are one.
We must not fall prey to the narrowly defined dualisms which severely limit the framing of our challenges and choices. We must find ways to nurture an inquisitive capacity that explores and interacts constructively with the complexity of the realities and the relationships that face our communities.
Below and above, outside and beyond the narrow walls with which poverty of choice wishes to enclose our human community, we must live with trust that creativity, divinely embedded in the human spirit, is always within reach. Like a seed in the ground, creative capacity lies dormant filled with potential that can give rise to unexpected blossoms that create turning points and sustain constructive change. We must expose and break the false promise that places trust in greed and selfishness as the defender and deliverer of security.
Accepting vulnerability we must risk the step into the unknown and unpredictable lands and seek constructive engagements with those people and things we least understand and most fear. We must take up the inevitably perilous but absolutely necessary journey that makes its way back to humanity and the building of genuine community.
It has been correctly argued that the ongoing conversation between CST strictly defined and practitioners has resulted in creative new locations bearing influence on political life ranging in examples from Lech Walesa to Dorothy Day to Julius Nyerere, two of them in the formal political sector, Day on the other hand as an activist engaging policies on the picket line. Their familiarity with CST opened up on three continents critical political discourses which shaped policy over time. And more importantly contextualized CST
My fourth point is a key CST consideration, namely, that political involvement and especially our advocacy takes place in and flows from a very specific world view, from how, in this case, the church views society or as it is known particularly in that intersection between CST and advocacy type work, Catholic social theory. Again, three values seem to define this view. It is what Andrew Greeley calls the ‘three cardinal principles of Catholic social theory’ namely: personalism, subsidiarity and pluralism.
(a) personalism, the conviction that the human person possesses a dignity which cannot be reduced or denied in the name of some collective good. It is to maintain that the goal of society is to develop and empower the individual human person in community.
(b) Subsidiarity holds that no organization should be bigger than necessary and that nothing should be done by a larger and higher social unit than can be done effectively by a lower and smaller unit. There is an obvious bias towards the grass roots, the local setting. This is not to oppose the state or other large entities for these are necessary. This is strongly linked to broadening participation in public life
(c) Pluralism affirms that a healthy society is characterized by a wide variety of intermediate groups freely flourishing between the individual and the state. Within society there needs to be a plethora of organizations which allow for social interaction and promote the individuals participation in group activity. A good society fosters such mediating structures so that public life is not equated with the state or governmental life.
The important point is that these characteristics together with the value of human dignity forge a communitarian outlook in Catholic social theory. Hence any policy issue must be interrogated against a communitarian outlook and therefore against the spirit of self interest of bold individualism. This ‘thick theory’ of communalism is ultimately rooted in the Trinity and is a serious tool for discernment in the quest for aligning our politics to our ethics. It gives to political discourse some basic constants which prevents political/public life from being totally arbitrary, an arbitrariness that usually disadvantages the poor and marginalized.
We are indeed given a new and creative paradigm in which to think our politics through and contribute to the emerging political discourses especially in Africa as more and more countries ride the second wave of democracy.
But CST also has very specific challenges for political discourse. Pope John Paul II in 1996 highlighted some of the specifics that need special attention.
‘Last year, on this same occasion, I had asked for more international solidarity for Africa, and in the present circumstances I cannot but earnestly renew this appeal. But today I would like to direct my comments most particularly to the consciences of Africa's political leaders: if you do not commit yourselves more resolutely to national democratic dialogue, if you do not more clearly respect human rights, if you do not strictly administer public funds and external credits, if you do not condemn ethnic ideology, the African Continent will ever remain on the margin of the community of nations. In order to be helped, African governments must be politically credible. The Bishops of Africa, meeting in the Special Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, underlined the urgent need for the competent management of public affairs and the proper training of political leaders—men and women—who "profoundly love their own people and wish to serve rather than be served" (Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation
Decisions about candidates and public policies require a clear commitment to moral principles, careful discernment and prudential judgments based on the values of our faith.
Again, according to the USA bishops: ‘Politics provides a definite opportunity and space for bringing together our principles, experiences and communities in effective public witness.’
Once we begin to take these challenges seriously with a deep sense of courage, commitment, competency and consistency then we would have begun to play our role in this very demanding form of charity.
Peter-John Pearson
Director: SACBCPLO,
Cape Town
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