Teacher Yes, Mother No

Protestants may be galled by the pretensions of the Roman Catholic Church, but they can ill afford to sneer at Catholic social doctrine, because it is vastly superior to Protestant vacillation between pragmatism and perfectionism. So holds Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose perennial willingness to stick out his political and theological neck is one of Protestantism's glories. To make his point, he analyzes Pope John's recent encyclical, Mater et Magistra (Mother and Teacher), which broadened Catholicism's alignment on the side of the welfare state and endorsed a measure of "socialization" (TIME, July 21).

The Roman Catholic Church, Niebuhr writes in the Christian Century, "is not entirely foolish" when it sees rebellion against the law of God in the disintegration of the medieval mixture of Scripture and philosophy, political power and spiritual prestige. "From the standpoint of the Mater et Magistra encyclical," he says, "what could be clearer than that the path from the Thomistic theory of a just price based upon labor value, to the theory of Adam Smith, guaranteeing social justice by the automatic balances of a free market, descends steeply from the heights of justice to the morass of private greed?"

Justice & Love. Pope John's encyclical ignores its own indebtedness to some of the moral achievements of the welfare state and foreign aid, says Niebuhr. But, he writes, "before we ungenerously attribute to conscious and unconscious cribbing from a culture it ostensibly abhors the massive achievement of modern Catholicism in adjusting to the realities of modern industrialism," it is necessary to recognize that Catholicism has traditions that make this adjustment possible.

The Roman Church, writes Niebuhr, balances concern for the individual with concern for the health of the community, which is to be achieved by what the encyclical calls "objective justice and its driving force, love." Says he: "To assert that justice is the norm and 'love the driving force' is certainly a theory of the relation of...love to the social order preferable to some Protestant and secular theories."

"Impressive Survival." Niebuhr, who has long lashed out against the perfectionist strain in Protestantism, further admires the Roman Catholic Church for having relegated its perfectionists and ascetics to the monasteries, where they cannot mess up the proper processes of society, full of contingencies and compromises.

"Both the Cromwellian and French revolutions were corrupted by utopian illusions and the confusion of contradictory visions of social perfection. Abraham Lincoln was dogged by the absolutistic demands of Horace Greeley, William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, and he had more genuine charity than all of them. In the interventionist controversy preceding World War II we were confronted by a frequently noxious combination of nationalistic and perfectionist isolationism, trying to persuade the nation to remain pure by remaining irresponsible ...Some of the soberness of Catholic social theory certainly derives from its exclusion from the political realm of the yearning for the absolute."

Pope John's encyclical displays "dated rather than eternal wisdom," Niebuhr believes, in opposing birth control and ignoring the fast pace of population increase. But he refrains from laboring the point, "lest the professional anti-Catholics take too much courage. They regard the Roman church as a monster. It is really a very impressive survival from medievalism, which has managed to apply its ancient wisdom to the comfort of a harassed generation in a nuclear and technical age."

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