Populorum Progressio

"The world is sick. The poor nations remain poor while the rich ones become still richer. The very life of poor na tions, civil peace in developing countries, and world peace itself are at stake."

So, last week, declared Paul VI in Populorum Progressio (On the Development of Peoples), the fifth encyclical of his 45-month pontificate. The fourth major document of the Roman Catholic Church in the past six years to deal with socioeconomic problems,* the 12,000-word encyclical was in some ways the Pope's most striking pronouncement. In it, he gave unexpected support to government-sponsored birth control programs (see cover story). Absent from the encyclical was the usual stream of hedging qualifiers that in France have earned him the nickname "the Pope of Buts." Instead, the document had a ringing tone of urgency, as Paul called upon all men of good will to cooperate in achieving economic justice.

Vision of Development. To end the dilemma of great want in the midst of great wealth, the Pope called for a "Christian vision of development" that looked in some ways as if it had been drawn from a U.N. economic report. He suggested that prosperous nations might well subsidize the exports of poor countries by agreements guaranteeing prices of the underdeveloped world's commodities. "Freedom of trade," the Pope contended, "is fair only if it is subject to the demands of social justice." He renewed his call, made during his 1964 visit to Bombay, for a world fund made up of a portion of the money now spent on armaments to "relieve the most destitute of this world." Whatever the channels, he declared, "superfluous wealth of rich countries should be placed at the service of poor nations." Otherwise, he predicted, the "continued greed" of the rich nations "will certainly call down upon them the judgment of God and the wrath of the poor, with consequences no one can foretell."

The Pope coupled his demands for international economic planning with a surprisingly sharp attack on the "woeful system" of unfettered capitalism. "It is unfortunate that a system has been constructed which considers profit as the key motive for economic progress, competition as the supreme law of economics, and private ownership of the means of production as an absolute right that has no limits and carries no corresponding social obligation." By contrast, there was little said about the dangers and evils of socialism or Communism, except for a mild warning that Christians should be wary of systems that are "based upon a materialistic and atheistic philosophy."

Natural Right. Populorum Progressio shifts considerably to the left of previous papal encyclicals in its criticism of private property. In his celebrated Rerum Novarum of 1891, Pope Leo XIII argued that economic reform must take into account "the inviolability of private property"; Pope John's Mater et Magistra likewise termed private ownership "a natural right" of man. Paul, on the other hand, declared that property ownership "does not constitute for anyone an absolute and unconditional right. No one is justified in keeping for his exclusive use what he does not need when others lack necessities. The right to property must never be exercised to the detriment of the common good."

The radical tone of the encyclical and its blunt attack on capitalism were, understandably enough, endorsed with enthusiasm by Europe's Communist press. France's L'Humanite declared that "the evils that the encyclical calls attention to" are those that "Marxists have been calling attention to for more than a century." In fact, parts of Populorum Progressio had the strident tone of an early 20th century Marxist polemic--which, to some readers, was precisely its flaw.

Despised Motive. Although Pope Paul had patently tried to give a Christian message relevant to the world's contemporary economic situation, his encyclical virtually ignored the fact that old-style laissez-faire capitalism is about as dead as Das Kapital. Quite clearly, the Pope's condemnation of capitalism was addressed to the unreconstructed variety that persists, for example, in Latin America. But it was surprising that he did not acknowledge the way in which business enterprise has developed into a creative, socially conscious component of the industrial West. The encyclical took insufficient account of other reali ties--that poverty and hunger have most successfully been attacked where private enterprise has been encouraged, and that even in sectors of the Commu nist world, the despised profit motive is now tacitly accepted as a necessary stimulus to productivity.

U.S. Jesuit Theologian John Courtney Murray eulogized the encyclical as a program for true and complete humanism. Humanistic it was, but its perspective was that of another time. More pertinent than what the encyclical said was what it did not say; lacking balance, it seems unlikely to supplant the judicious pronouncements of Paul's predecessor as a living statement of the church's concern for world justice.

* Others: Pope John XXIII's encyclicals Mater et Magistra (1961) and Pacem in Terris (1963), and the Second Vatican Council's constitution, "On the Church in the Modern World."

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