Shortly after John Paul II’s new encyclical, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, was released to the press, it was widely rumored that several leading neo-conservatives had phoned William F. Buckley, Jr. (who, alas, had already jumped the gun with a negative column on the encyclical) urging him to withhold final judgment on the document until he had read the complete text. How strange, I thought, that his friends should have felt it necessary to give such elementary advice to a seasoned journalist and editor. But one never knows. After all, even the prestigious New York Times had already provided the equally seasoned William Safire with his regular slot of invaluable op-ed space for a slashingly mean spirited attack on the encyclical even though it was obvious that he had not read the document in toto. Whatever of that, it was said that the real purpose of the rumored phone calls to Buckley was to urge him to accentuate the positive in his future writings about the encyclical — i.e., to play up the “good news” in the document so as to neutralize the “bad news,” or at least to put it in perspective.
Experience has taught me to give little credence to unconfirmed rumors of this kind. A few days later, however, Buckley himself confirmed this one in spades. In a follow-up editorial in National Review, he reported playfully that “In the day or two following the release of Pope John Paul’s encyclical . . . the telephones rang across continent and oceans among the faithful. The consensus was that no dispositive words should be written on the encyclical until the whole of it (it is 102 pages long) were read. One scholar said that what one might with affectionate irony refer to as the ‘good parts’ were not conspicuously mentioned in the leading news stories on the encyclical. Indeed (added this scholar), he predicted that the encyclical would in fact give him an easier time in coping polemically with the anti-capitalist nitpickets in the Christian communion.” No reasonably informed observer would need more than three guesses to identify the scholar in question here — but that’s beside the point. The point is that discussion of the encyclical in neo-conservative circles, as Buckley’s puckish editorial clearly indicates, got off right away to a bad start. Almost from the word go, the document has been used polemically (Buckley’s word, as attributed to one of his callers) to make ideological points in support of “democratic capitalism.” It is clear that Buckley himself (see, e.g., his March 18 National Review editorial and the transcript of his March 12 weekly talk show, “Firing Line”) thinks that his solicitous neo-conservative friends have overextended themselves in searching for a few elusive needles in a huge haystack. That is to say, he thinks that the encyclical is almost all “bad news” and that it is only with “affectionate irony” that one can speak of its having any “good parts.”
I understand Buckley’s point, but I think that, characteristically, he has grossly overstated it. In my judgment, his neo-conservative callers were correct in directing his attention to those sections of the encyclical which stress the importance of economic initiative, human rights, political democracy, etc. On the other hand, I think they are exaggerating when they assert rather self-servingly that this is the first papal document to have made these points. To my mind, they are also being embarrassingly provincial or parochial when they suggest, as some, in my opinion, have done, that the encyclical is to be judged basically on whether or not and to what extent it endorses — or, short of that, can be reconciled with — their own understanding of the essential elements of American-style democratic capitalism.
I am reminded, in this connection, of Richard John Neuhaus’s dictum in The Catholic Moment that “the specifically Christian proposition, and the community of faith it brings into being, must be held in relentless and dynamic tension with all other propositions, including the American proposition.” By and large, in my judgment, neo-conservative commentators on the encyclical have, no doubt unwittingly, come close to doing the opposite of that. I may have missed something, but I have yet to see a neo-conservative assessment of the encyclical which relentlessly or, for that matter, even gently examines the American system in the light of the encyclical. On the other hand, I have read a number of commentaries which critique the encyclical almost exclusively in terms of the American experience, as though that were the central, if not the only, valid standard of comparison or point of reference.
Neo-conservatives are wont to complain — to some extent perhaps with good reason — that many Latin American and European intellectuals do not really understand the American system. Their sensitivity (in the view of some, their hypersensitivity) on this point would, I think, be more compellingly persuasive to their real or alleged intellectual adversaries on other continents if the neo-conservatives themselves were to show a greater willingness to hold the American system, as they understand it, in relentless and dynamic tension with the Christian proposition. Instead, if I am not mistaken, what their intellectual adversaries around the world (who are not exactly stupid, you know) will hear them saying about the encyclical is that the American system is or ought to be normative for the rest of the world and also, of course, for the Pope himself. To be sure, neo-conservatives are willing to admit — although seldom to volunteer right up front and loud and clear — that the American system has its failings. In the main, however, these are said to be, not structural or systemic in nature, but, rather, the inevitable personal failings of the fallible and sinful human beings who live and work in the system. Michael Novak, in his own column on the encyclical, puts it this way: “According to the encyclical’s stated prescriptions, the world of the Pope’s desire would in structure have something very like the institutions of the United States. Of course, he would want its people who live more disciplined, self-controlled and virtuous lives than Americans now do.”
Predictably, those people around the world who allegedly do not understand the American system will not read this to mean that the American system as such is being held in relentless and dynamic tension with the social teaching outlined in the encyclical. Rather, I strongly suspect they will read it to mean that the encyclical is being qualifiedly hailed by the neo-conservatives, with at most two cheers, because it will give them “an easier time in coping polemically with the anti-capitalist nitpicking in the Christian communion.”
I have no doubt that this approach to the encyclical will be perceived as being tendentious and provincial by many non-Americans, including some who are sympathetic to democracy. It’s anyone’s guess, of course, as to what the Pope himself will make of it all. My own guess is that, given his global perspective and his long view of history, he is likely to be turned off by our narcissism.
Speaking of the Pope, I cannot resist saying, with all due respect, that Novak’s explanation, in his syndicated column and again on “Firing Line” as to why the Holy Father “should so often place a collectivist system on a rhetorical level with the West,” is, in my opinion, purely fanciful. “But maybe,” Novak writes, “the explanation is human. When the Pope watches ‘Dynasty’ and ‘Dallas’ on Italian television, he probably feels contempt . . . for the way our media present us to the world.”
I don’t know, and neither, I must assume, does Novak, what the Pope does with his free time, if indeed he has any. Nevertheless, I would be willing to give unlimited odds (and willing to make my winnings, if any, payable to Crisis) that he has never in his entire lifetime looked at so much as a segment or even a snippet of either “Dynasty” or “Dallas.”
In any event, even if I am wrong about that, it needs to be said, again with all due respect, that it is rather patronizing to suggest that the most widely traveled pope in the entire history of the Church and one of the most intellectually sophisticated of modern pontiffs is so far out of the loop that he has to fall back as a last resort on two of the most vulgar and meretricious American soap operas for his information about our system and our culture.
Again, he is not exactly stupid, you know. He may sometimes get his facts wrong — who doesn’t? But surely we cannot be expected to believe that his sources of information are as superficial and unreliable as Novak has made them out to be. It is superfluous to add, in this connection, that those neo-conservatives who feel perfectly free to say what they think about conditions in Latin America, for example, would undoubtedly take it as a personal insult if the Pope, hypothetically, were to turn the tables on them and archly suggest that they have been watching too many soap operas.
Be that as it may, the intensely felt concern that neo-conservative commentators on the encyclical have expressed regarding the moral equivalence or parallelism between the East and the West which they find in the encyclical is a genuine concern on their part and one that they have a perfect right to raise in the public forum. I happen to think that the encyclical’s treatment of this subject is more nuanced than some have made it out to be. Nevertheless, Novak cannot be faulted for saying that “serious dialogue requires that the Pope’s facts be challenged.” So be it. But the Pope’s facts — and, needless to add, our own facts as well — should be examined objectively in the light of the overall structure and purpose of the encyclical. In other words, let the dialogue be a true dialogue, which, by definition, requires all the parties, and not just the Pope, to listen as well as to talk. Moreover, it rules out any attempt to use the encyclical for ideological purposes. More specifically, it rules out, for example, trying to prove polemically as some have done (to what end, I fail to understand) that the underlying ideas of the encyclical, apart from its debatable treatment of the East-West problem, are more supportive of the Novak-Simon Lay Letter than of the U. S. Bishops’ Pastoral on the Economy.
Quite aside from the relatively unimportant fact that I happen to disagree with this line of argument, I find it, to repeat, an embarrassingly provincial approach to a document which deals essentially with the need for international solidarity and is addressed, not only to Washington, D. C. or South Bend, Indiana, but to the Church Universal and indeed to the entire world community. It seems to me that a decent respect for the opinion of mankind, of which we are, let’s face it, only a small part, makes it incumbent on all of us to do better than that.