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The Pope and economic justice

Jeff Trexler | Tuesday 14th July 2009

The Pope's latest social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, has received a rousing welcome from the social enterprise & CSR community. Not surprising, given the document's references to microfinance and business that transcends mere profit--in key respects the encyclical borrows heavily from the rhetoric of social entrepreneurship.

But that's exactly why it's problematic.

This isn't the place for me to launch into a lengthy explanation of everything that's going on in this encyclical--let's just say I know Latin, have a Ph.D. in religious history and have studied a fair bit of the relevant church law, which makes me at once aware of the subtleties at play in this document and a real buzzkill at parties. What you should be aware of is that this encyclical is not the papacy's coming out party as a social entrepreneur--the Church was blending business and social benefit centuries before anyone reading this blog was born. Rather, the encyclical is the latest of a series of attempts to bring the unruly forces of corporate enterprise under control.

And lest you get too enthusiastic, folks, we're a big part of the problem.

In a nutshell, when Caritas in Veritate--Love in Truth--takes aim at social systems that fetishize technology and do not respect the whole human person, it's targeting all forms of reductionistic secularism. Yes, banks and hedge funds are part of it, but so too are environmentalists and other social entrepreneurs who do not grasp that respect for the "human ecology" is the essential predicate for respecting the "environmental ecology." And in referring to respect for human life, the encyclical makes explicit reference to Humanae Vitae, the papal encyclical best known for essentially prohibiting artificial methods of birth control.

That's the rhetoric that gives away the game. The encyclical's repeated references to the need for a social system built on truth, respect for life, and the inclusion of the Church in its deliberations are squarely aimed at remaking social reform in the image of Church social ethics--most importantly, the eradication of the so-called "culture of death" exemplified by contraception, abortion, in vitro fertilization and what the encyclical considers to be the technocratic nightmare of bioethics.

The call for a central institutional authority to manage the economy--the vaunted United Nations with teeth--must be understood in context. According to the encyclical, such an authority would rise above "inhuman humanism" only if it incorporated the Church's voice in its institutional pronouncements. The strategy, in other words, is to circumvent the liberalizing forces of secular democracies by creating a central regulatory power where the Church could concentrate its influence to shut down what it believes to be unethical commerce and international development, such as sexually explicit or religiously offensive media, the distribution of condoms, grant aid for abortions and stem cell research.

It's tempting to respond that such issues are peripheral to the main point of the need for a more humane capitalism, but that's not what the encyclical says--to the contrary, the central point of Love in Truth is that you don't have love without this particular ethic of life. Taken in itself that's fine--it's a Church document, and doing good is a concept that's susceptible to a wide range of interpretations. However, if the progressive social enterprise community thinks that it has a new ally, it's in for a big surprise.

The ultimate takeaway from this is not just that the encyclical reflects a conservative social ethic--is a bear Catholic, does the Pope live in the woods and all that. The encyclical also underscores why it is imperative for social entrepreneurs to understand the movement's complex history. The Church hopped on the blended value cluetrain a thousand+ years ago--for the Pope, the bigger question is what values social enterprise should promote. If we don't face that issue squarely--so long as we pretend that defining social responsibility is not fraught with difficult and unavoidable value conflicts--the less effective we will be in making our own vision a reality.

(Note: the above image was commissioned by & is available for purchase from Animal New York in a special limited edition print.)

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