The World Gonna Be Great Someday
<>The following paper sketches some important developments in Roman Catholic moral theology at this time and looks at some foundational directions in social ethics. I hope that these remarks can be helpful for those that support the Catholic Labor Network and are involved in worker and environmental justice.
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In the 2000 edition of Sal Si Puedes: Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution Peter Matthiesen quotes an anonymous African American fieldworker. “But you know what I really think. I think one day the world will be great. The world gonna be great someday (p. 355).” One cannot know this with any degree of certainty. Undoubtedly, the traumas that stretch from 9/11/01 to 12/26/05 could conspire to belie the fieldworker’s sanguinity. In fact, so much pain and disaster, suffering and injustice, anguish and war have stalked our world that one could easily posit a God that is absent and one could narrate a vision that is apocalyptic.
<>Jon Patocka, the Czech intellectual, explored the brand of nihilism that denied any possible meaningfulness to history. He spoke of “the solidarity of the shaken” and investigated the possibility of a stable, comprehensive world-view. A few decades after Patocka’s work, the world finds itself reeling, rudderless, and shaken. The world seems poised between trauma and hope.Still we humans keep on keepin’ on. We acknowledge the trauma. We break bread with sister hope, the oft-neglected middle child between faith and charity. We attend to her wisdom and vision. We entertain the possibility that the world is gonna be great someday.
This paper will sup with sister hope and enter into convivial table-conversation with her. I shall proceed in three steps. First, I sketch briefly a few points that strike me as anchor-holds in the theological anthropology and the social teaching of Pope John Paul II. Second, I state the methodological and theological project and its challenges that lie ahead. Third, I present a new and imaginative horizon, the dream of the earth as our way into the future.
1. The Theological Anthropology of Pope John Paul II
Three papal encyclicals feature prominently in the social teaching of Pope John Paul II. Laborem Exercens, Solicitudo Rei Socialis, and Centissimus Annus offer a late 20th century reading of the situation of workers and worker justice. They stand in the tradition of Leo XIII and Rerum Novarum and Paul VI and Populorum Progressio. These three papal documents stress the following points about humankind.
First, the human person: the theological anthropology of John Paul II is rooted in an appreciation of the human person as an acting subject. Because the Church considers herself an expert in humanity (SRS 41), she proclaims that the person is made in the image and likeness of God. This is the basis for personal dignity and worker justice. This iconicity exposes those forms of duplicity that demean a person’s worth. It also rejects terms that label the working person as redundant, expendable, or disposable.
Secondly,
the person-in-community: the human person is not an unencumbered and
autonomous
individual pursuing her or his own telos.
Each person, eminently social by nature, exists in primary and
functional
relationships within the family, the neighborhood, the religious
community, the
nation, the world, and the earth. Persons share kinship with an ever
widening
circle of humankind: with the privileged and the poor, with the least,
the
last, and the left out, with family and friends, with colleagues in
work and in
circles of conviviality, with the lettered and unlettered and with an
ever
widening circle of the body social. People living in a pluralistic
society, as
the Church proclaims in its second Eucharistic Prayer of
Reconciliation, have
much in common with those of other races, languages, and ways of life.
The
foundation for this commonality is the dignity of the person and the
social
nature of humankind.
Thirdly, the human person as worker: all people have a right to work because work is constitutive of the human vocation.
Work is
a fundamental dimension of man’s existence on
earth. … Man is the image of God partly through the mandate received
from his
Creator to subdue, to dominate the earth. In carrying out this mandate,
man,
every human being, reflects the very action of the Creator of the
universe.
Work (is) an activity beginning in the human subject and directed
towards an
external object (LE 4)…. (Man) is a person, a subjective being capable
of
acting in a planned and rational way, capable of deciding about
himself, and
with a tendency to self-realization. As a person, man is therefore the
subject
of work (LE 6).
People have a responsibility to join hands
with co-workers and with
management in the workplace and in the marketplace. Each worker “is
fully
entitled to consider himself a part-owner of the great workbench at
which he is
working with everyone else (LE 14).” Associations of various kinds and
labor
unions promote human rights, protect well being, enable workers to
negotiate
contracts through collective bargaining, encourage workplace democracy
and
participation, and contribute to the common good of humanity (see CA 15
and
34). People bond with one another in order to honor the holiness of
creation
and to transform nature, to have a stake in production, and to insure
that
“workers will not only have more,
but above all be more
(LE 20 and
see CA 35).” Each worker “is fully entitled to consider himself a
part-owner of
the great workbench at which he is working with every one else (LE 14).”
The
idea is slowly emerging that the good to which we
are all called and the happiness to which we aspire cannot be obtained
without
an effort and commitment on the part of all, nobody excluded, and the
consequent renouncing of personal selfishness (SRS 26).
This has significant consequences for
personal worth and communal
commitments. Every person has an
equal
right to be seated at the table of the common
banquet, instead of lying outside the door like Lazarus…. Both peoples
and
individuals must enjoy the fundamental equality which is the basis … of
the
right of all to share in the process of full development (SRS 33).
Fourthly, working people have regard for the common good: the great virtue for our time is the virtue of solidarity. Thinking about this virtue emerged at the Second Vatican Council and continued to develop in papal and theological literature (see Marie Vianney Bilgrien below).
Solidarity
is not a vague compassion or shallow
distress at the misfortunes of so many people…. On the contrary, it is
a firm
and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good;
that is to
say to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all
equally
responsible for all. This determination is based on the solid
conviction that
what is hindering full development is that desire for profit and that
thirst
for power already mentioned. These attitudes and ‘structures of sin’
are only
conquered … by a diametrically opposed attitude: a commitment to the
good of
one’s neighbor with the readiness … to ‘lose oneself’ for the sake of
the other
instead of exploiting him, and to ‘serve him’ instead of oppressing him
for
one’s own advantage (SRS 38).
Solidarity enables us to envision the other
as neighbor with a right to
share at the banquet of life. This virtue is an antidote to the vices
of
exploitation, oppression, xenophobia, and the annihilation of others.
In
short, the four plinths upon which our social teaching rests are: the
person as
acting subject, the person in community, the person as worker in the
company of
other workers, and the person in solidarity with others for the sake of
the
common good.
The
social thought of Pope John Paul II is a rich treasure for the
churches. One
can only be grateful for the principles that these encyclicals offer
for a more
socially just world. But much still beckons our attention. The project
that
lies ahead is practical. How does the Church act in its lived situation
to
enhance humankind and to enable all persons to flourish? The project is
both
global and local. Its starting point is person-centered. We need to
address
this project on two levels: methodological and theological.
Papal
encyclicals, by their nature, appeal to the
universal church and the global community. Each encyclical lays out a
set of
principles. It can appear that official teaching considers the person,
the
person-in community, the working person, and persons in solidarity in
an
a-historical and abstract fashion. In addition, the encyclicals
originate in a
first world setting, a place of privilege and power, competition and
choice for
many. Analysis of the actual social situation can seem bloodless and
the
theology espoused can seem dispassionate. Those that read and ponder
Catholic
social teaching, coming from their own social location and
hermeneutical perspective,
must apply the principles by a careful social and cultural analysis,
always
appreciative of the learning that comes from praxis.
The
methodological challenge is this: what kind of document would be
written if its
starting point were “from below?” How would the experience of lived
religiosity
and the struggle for justice, liberation, and full development affect
the tone
and nuance of the document? One suspects that writing the document on a
full
stomach, in relative comfort, and with ample technological resources is
quite
different from crafting a document in the midst of penury and poverty.
What
seems to be required is a new kind of orthopathema,
i.e., a new way of feeling with and for the shattered, the dirt-poor,
the
hungry, and the homeless. In short, those on the margins offer a
theological
reflection that is rooted in the two-thirds’ world and an orthopathy
that
colors and shapes the theological principles enunciated in an ecclesial
document.
B.
The
Theological Challenges
Catholic
social teaching, especially when done “from
below,” presents four distinctive theological challenges.
First,
social justice begins with the core community,
the family. Here is where the life of virtue is cultivated and
encouraged.
Recent theologies of marriage indicate that the primary locus for
discipleship
and justice, social outreach and authentic learning is the family. The
family
is the domestic church, the cherished place for putting on the virtues
of
compassion and justice, mercy and love. A rereading of the marriage
ritual,
i.e., the biblical lessons, the rubrics and ritual enactment of the
sacrament,
and the blessing prayers could fortify a new orthopathy. Even this
perspective
betrays a first world and privileged bias. So many families struggle
just to
survive that the more noble tasks stated above are in peril.
Secondly,
narratives of testimony and truth telling
enliven the soulscape of the two-thirds world. Stories of contemporary
witnesses and the anguished experience of crucified peoples bespeak
courage, manifest
simple gratitude, and tell tales of gifts present in the family, the
parish,
the union hall, the agora, and the commons. An epistemic revolution of
how
persons live in relationship is now emerging. How does the person move
away
from isolation and individualism to discover personal agency and
intentionality? How does the individual establish ties that cement just
and
wholesome relationships and create communities of altruism,
self-donation, and
love? Leaving behind one’s fear and distrust of the other,
persons
can approach universal community if they do
not deliberately exclude other persons from the potential for or
possibility of
direct personal relationship in a communal setting. As long as one is
open, …
one is expressing the fundamental motivation by which genuine community
is
built (Kirkpatrick 75).
Thirdly,
the gift of tears is the only way to move the human heart. Our
liturgical
assemblies have resounded with exalted praise and hymns of
thanksgiving. But
the world can only be great when the full-throated voice of threnody
rings out
and abundant tears water human hearts. Ours is an age of lament.
Terror,
hunger, malnutrition, AIDS, abandoned babies, orphans, trafficked
people, and
dying children all point out that something is wrong in our world. As
Jon
Sobrino and Ignacio Ellacuria have reminded us, it is time to take the
crucified peoples down from the cross. This principle of mercy must
accompany
efforts for justice. The crucified Jesus prayed words of abandonment
and then
was embraced by sister hope. Denise M. Ackermann, a feminist theologian
from
South Africa, writes
I am
pleading for a church that laments suffering and
injustice…. More of the language of lament and less the language of
pious
rectitude can make the relationships in the church more authentic and
more
durable (Ackermann 123-124).
I, a person of privilege, learning, and
influence, wonder: do I feel
the urgency and do I feel the profound depth of human (and earth)
plight? Does
it motivate me to active engagement on behalf of transformative change?
Fourthly,
we need to plumb more deeply what solidarity
and the common good are all about. Self-referential individualism
threatens to
overshadow the common good in first world societies. David Hollenbach
writes
about an intellectual solidarity necessary for our world.
A
principal characteristic of our era is a loss of
confidence in the ability of human understanding to grasp the real, a
waning of
the aspiration to know what a human being truly is…. In the face of
such
agnosticism about what human beings are, the idea that all people share
a
common good must seem a mirage. Pursuit of the good we human beings
share in
common is not only unlikely because of distortions of the will, as
Augustine
knew it could be. Nor is it problematic simply because knowledge of
what we
share in common is minimal or incomplete. For some post-moderns, it has
become
… impossible. We cannot know
more
than our social location teaches us; the languages we speak shape who
we are
‘all the way down.’ We do not share any common ontological structure
that is
transcendent of our social particularities. So not only do we not know
what the
human good is, there is no good of all human beings as such. Human
beings are
as different as the languages they speak and as the particularities of
the
world they inhabit (Hollenbach 1996:5).
Despite
the dizzying pluralism and particularization
of the postmodern era, we need the blessing of a liberating human
reason that
can sustain a sense of community and shape a genuine humanism. The
language of
the natural law, once the bedrock of Catholic social teaching, must
move beyond
sectarian bias and must learn from human narratives, especially those
of the
poor, in order to craft a common vocabulary and reasonable discourse.
Mutual blessing,
open sharing, the willingness to listen, and the ability to dialogue
are all
part of intellectual solidarity. Our construal of the common good must
move
beyond religious sectarianism so that we might parse the good life,
human
flourishing, and moral choice for the sake of the human and the earth
communities. We need a
humanism
that stakes its hope on a conviction that
compassion, not malevolence, is the ultimate attribute of the One
Presence
within the shards of our fractured world. The sign of the cross … opens
up the
possibility of compassionate solidarity (Hollenbach 2003:63-64).
3. The Dream of the Earth
as our Way into the Future
What
I have written above is based on a person- and humanity-centered
anthropology.
The human person, persons-in community, and working people are at the
center.
This has been the case since the time of Pope Leo XIII. For
generations, the social
question focused on worker
justice. That focus has been shifting. We see the beginnings with Cesar
Chavez
and the United Farm Workers. Chavez was the first labor leader to
campaign for
economic and environmental justice. Today economic and environmental
justice
goes hand in hand. Minority communities have recognized the injustice
of
environmental racism for a long time.
We
are at a turning point of impressive magnitude. The earth, our home, is
in
peril. Environmental theologians envision a radical and new paradigm
shift. The
earth has to be at the center. This re-imagining does not exclude the
human. It
merely resituates and repositions the human within a wider horizon.
Contemporary
environmental thinkers – Thomas Berry, John E. Carroll, Sallie McFague,
James
A. Nash, Larry L. Rasmussen, Brian Swimme, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and Mary
Grey -- suggest that the earth is
God’s original and primary revelation. The Book of nature does not
displace the
Bible and the revelation that it offers. Instead, it repositions it.
The earth
is primary revelation; the Bible is derivative. The Christ of the third
millennium is not only divine and human; he is the cosmic Christ, Lord
of
heaven and earth. The basic tenets of a new environmental spirituality
are the
following.
According
to Thomas Berry, a new story is emerging. It is a new cosmology and a
new
religious history. This story reveals divine involvement when the earth
first
flared forth. It continues through an ongoing process of cosmogenesis.
The
human persona is not only an earthling, but also a worldling. We do not
live on
the earth. We are part of the earth. We bear the universe in our being,
just as
the universe bears us in its being. The two have a total presence to
each other
and to that deeper mystery out of which both the universe and us have
emerged.
A
new paradigm of what it means to be a human person, a
person-in-community, a
worker involved with the matter of the earth is now emerging. The new
story
expresses intimacy and kinship. All species are organically linked as
subjects
in a universe that is sacred from its very beginnings. The universe is
a
communion of each reality in the universe with every other reality in
the
universe.
The new
story involves a revolutionary shift that
inculcates a reverence for the interiority and the mystery of every
other being
in the universe. The new story, therefore, is a journey into a new
consciousness
of the psychic-spiritual (as well as the psychic-material) dynamics of
the
universe and the external pilgrimage of subjects seeking communion in
an ever
evolving, still emerging universe. Solidarity becomes a cosmic virtue
in its
concern for a planetary common good.
The
new story, according to Thomas Berry, provides the mythic and
imaginative basis
for the dream of the earth. The dream moves humankind from the Cenozoic
Age,
the time we have all known, into the Ecozoic Age, a time that is still
being
born. The Ecozoic Age will invite us into a spirit of compassionate
reverence,
mutual presence, and benevolent kinship. Every creature becomes an icon
of God
with rights to life and flourishing. Every being reflects the gracious
presence
of a power that animates the universe. Every being in its subjectivity
is
associated with the numinous quality that has been associated with
every
reality of the universe. Every being is called to be in communion with
every
other reality in the universe. To destroy wantonly any species is to
silence
forever a divine voice. The ancient hubris of humankind, focused on
human
choice and freedom, is now exposed as a kind of autism, a
self-referential
narrowness that promotes a civilization of death.
Justice
now demands that humankind must assume adult responsibility and action
for the
future. This calls for new modes of thinking that harmonize a
theological
anthropology with a new cosmology. This also calls for new modes of
presence.
Justice flourishes as the human community grows in its sense of awe,
wonder,
and numinosity. Justice wraps the human and the cosmic in its shawl.
Justice
happens when humankind awakens from the trance that it has lived in for
the
last one hundred and fifty years of the Cenozoic Age.
This
spiritual vision is an antidote to the consumers’
republic where the lure of consumption and the entrancement of the
petroleum
age have dominated. The hubris that privileges the human over the rest
of
creation must be rejected. The temptation to retreat into religious
tribalism,
sectarian superiority, a sexist one-up-man-ship and patriarchal
dominance must
be avoided.
Humankind
is being called to compassionate action and
advocacy for all creation. Responsibility for the earth and its future
requires
a new jurisprudence for the sake of that which is fragile on earth.
Humankind
must exercise responsibility for the life of the entire local
community,
especially for the well being of the bioregion where one lives.
In
short, the Ecozoic Age is birthing a new time and a new spirituality.
The move
is from anthropocentrism to biocentrism. The beginnings of this
conversion are
evident when people take the time to contemplate the numinous, the
wonderful,
and the magnolia Dei that
surrounds us. The human community repents when it looks at the
wasteland that
has been created. It weeps over a suffering universe. The human
community
arises out of the ashes and claims new life by reclaiming our roots in
the
earth. The entire community will rise or fall together.
Environmental
justice demands that humankind live up to its unique vocation. We are
the only
species that is self-reflective. We have been naming creation from the
beginning and we make decisions that affect the commons all the time.
We are
the only species that can articulate our relationship with other life
forms and
can celebrate cosmic mystery in ritual and song. We are the cantors of
creation.
Lives
devoted to economic and environmental justice invites each person to a
new mode
of presence in the world and a new orthopathy. Our task is to align
ourselves
with the fecund, nourishing powers of life. Thomas Berry asserts, “The
universe
is for us rather than against us (The
Great
Work 201).” Perhaps, in the end, we shall find that we can
be truly
at home here in the universe. How will we know this? Thomas Berry says
that we
shall recognize this through smell. The earth smells like home.
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