Sense and Nonsense: Centesimus Sextus Annus

John Paul II issued his encyclical, Centesimus Annus, six years ago, on the feast of St. Joseph, May 1, 1991. Thus, the year 1997 is 106 years after Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, sixty-six years after Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno, forty-six years after John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra, and twenty-six years after Paul VI’s Octogesima Adveniens, less than three years before the millennium.

Centesimus Annus begins by recalling aspects of Rerum Novarum. In some eerie sense, the six years since Centesimus Annus almost seem, in retrospect, to witness a more radical change in society than the previous hundred years. “Why might this change seem so pronounced?” I ask myself. If I said, “it has to do with the way God has asked to be acknowledged and worshipped by human beings,” I would be close to my meaning.

What occasioned these thoughts was an unexpected letter I received the other day from a student I had in class the year Centesimus Annus was issued. Evidently, he had somehow come across a book that I recall having had read at table when I was in the novitiate at Los Gatos during Pius XII’s tithe, namely, Father John Gerard, S.J.’s An Autobiography of a Hunted Priest, concerning the fate of Catholics during the English Reformation. It upset me somehow, when I first read it in a biography of Sir Thomas More, that the only English bishop not to apostatize at that time was St. John Fisher. Campion, Southwell, Olgivie, Briant, and others heroically paid the price.

“Most Americans, even Catholics and especially college students,” the student wrote, “would find the concepts of fidelity to faith and conscience discussed in the book completely foreign. That Catholics allowed themselves to be fined and tortured rather than ‘merely’ give a written renunciation of their Faith and attend the Church of England, would undoubtedly strike them as incredible (and probably mark them as zealots!). Martyrdom is definitely inconvenient and, therefore, conventional wisdom counsels its avoidance.” I wonder if anyone but me has noticed how often John Paul II has written of martyrdom of late? Even more, I wonder, why?

The day before receiving this letter, I came across, in a lecture that my friend Brian Benestad gave at St. Vincent’s College in Latrobe, this sentence: “The dependence of justice in society on order in the individual soul is surely one of the most neglected aspects of Catholic social teaching on the virtue of justice.” We are not followers of Rousseau, who tells us that our peace comes from without, from reorganization. Statecraft comes from soulcraft.

No one has thought more wisely than John Paul II about what is possible in the upcoming century. Yet I wonder less about why he has been so concerned about the year 2000 than why he has been concerned about martyrdom. His Tertio Millennio Adveniente indicated a strenuous effort on his part to alert a lethargic Church to the need to make known specifically, even to its members, what it held about God, what it is that has been revealed to us about his inner life, the Trinity.

Is it not unpopular to claim that any “idea” about God makes any difference? Does God give a hoot how we think about him? So what if our thoughts are fuzzy and confusing. God is so merciful. He cares little about what we think. Or so we like to presume. Yet Scripture gives us reason to suspect that God is attentive to our minds, to the accuracy of what we consider him to be. We are to avoid idolatry in any form.

So we read in Centesimus Annus: “Politics then becomes a ‘secular religion’ which operates under the illusion of creating paradise in this world. But no political society—which possesses its own autonomy and laws—can ever be confused with the Kingdom of God.” Did not First Things devote several issues to underscoring how our democratic courts do in fact think they “possess (their) own autonomy and laws?” Are we not to worry about this?

“Obedience to the truth about God and humankind is the first condition of freedom, making it possible for a person to order his needs and desires and to choose the means of satisfying them according to the correct scale of values,” the Holy Father made Benestad’s point in another way. John Gerard surely understood that “obedience to the truth about God and humankind is the first condition of freedom.” This is why he was imprisoned in the Tower. “I wondered to myself,” the student concluded and I with him, “how many Catholics today, lay or religious, possess that amount of confidence in the Faith and its embodiment of Truth?”

Author

  • Fr. James V. Schall

    The Rev. James V. Schall, SJ, (1928-2019) taught government at the University of San Francisco and Georgetown University until his retirement in 2012. Besides being a regular Crisis columnist since 1983, Fr. Schall wrote nearly 50 books and countless articles for magazines and newspapers.

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