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The Helder Camara Lecture, given at Newman College, University of Melbourne, June 2017.

Delivered by Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego, USA LISTENING TO POPE FRANCIS: CHALLENGING NATIONALISM, MARKET RULE AND OVERCONFIDENCE IN TECHNOLOGY

Catholic social teaching is an integrated reflection on the implications of

the gift of God’s creation to all humanity and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It

is framed explicitly within the context of faith, yet advances a vision of the

human person, the nature of society and the glories of the universe which

seeks to bridge differences of religious perspective. Catholic social

teaching is rooted in four enduring moral principles: the dignity of the

human person, the pursuit of the common good, the principle of

subsidiarity, and the call of solidarity. The Church’s doctrine is founded

upon ancient insights into the nature of the human person, but is also

renewed and expanded in every age to integrate new moral realities that

processes such as industrialization, secularization, globalization and

environmental deterioration have produced. Central to the vision of

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Catholic faith is the conviction that the framing concepts in society and

government must always be moral in nature and must serve to promote

the deepest levels of justice and freedom in society.

At this moment in international social and political life, three potent

framing forces are at work which have no moral identity and are often

directive in societal and economic life. The first of these is the imperialism

of free markets. The second is nationalism. The third is the technocratic

paradigm which seeks dominance over the environment and culture. None

of these currents is rooted in a philosophical or theological system. None

has any deep-seated sense of moral substance. In a very real way they

have been evacuated of moral substance and operate autonomously from

any moral anchors as principles of politics and governance in societal and

international life. In a very real sense, each of these three trends is a form

of false autonomy from moral norms, claims in society which pretend to a

moral legitimacy but in actuality corrupt the moral substance of a just

society. It is this notion of false autonomy which has been at the heart of

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Pope Francis’ prophetic condemnation of each of these impulses in the

modern world, for he correctly sees that these forces are purely

instrumental in nature and yet claim moral legitimacy and autonomy in

reshaping society.

The Sovereignty of Markets

In his Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis speaks

powerfully about this theme of inequality and the urgency it presents to

the nations of the world:

The need to resolve the structural causes of poverty cannot be delayed, not only for the pragmatic reason of its urgency for the good order of society, but because society needs to be cured of a sickness which is weakening and frustrating it, and which can only lead to new crises. Welfare projects, which meet certain urgent needs, should be considered merely temporary responses. As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems, or, for that matter, to any problems. Inequality is the root of social ills. (EG 202)

Pope Francis identifies this inequality as the foundation for a process of

exclusion that literally cuts immense segments of society off from

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meaningful participation in social, political and economic life. It breeds a

financial system which rules rather than serves humanity, and a capitalism

which literally kills those who have no utility as consumers. Inevitably,

such exclusion destroys the possibility for peace and security within

societies and globally. The cry of the poor in Evangelii Gaudium is a

challenge to “the individualistic, indifferent and self-centered mentality” so

prevalent in the cultures of the world to confront the evil of economic

exclusion and begin a process of structural reform that will lead to

inclusion rather than marginalization.

Commentators from the worlds of politics, economics, and business have

weighed in to identify the defects and limitations of the Pope’s prescription

for justice in the world. Some of these commentaries have been

superficial and highly politicized; others have been thoughtful and incisive.

The emergent critique of Pope Francis’ message about inequality focuses

on three major themes. The first is that the Pope does not understand the

importance of markets. The second is that Francis’ critique is aimed at a

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type of capitalism far different from the economy of Australia or the United

States. The third is that the Pope’s perspective has been skewed by his

Latin American roots and is out of step with the teaching of prior popes.

Thus Pope Francis’ criticisms of world economies are alternatively naïve or

misplaced or doctrinally extreme.

But a sustained reading of Pope Francis’ words on inequality and the

barrage of criticism which has greeted them raises another possibility,

namely that the negativity toward the Pope’s message did not emerge

because the he failed to recognize the centrality of markets, the nature of

economies like the Australia, the United States and the European Union

and the trajectory of authentic Catholic social teaching, but precisely

because he did recognize the these realities and in doing so has raised the

most fundamental questions about justice in our economic systems.

Specifically Pope Francis’ writings on inequality and economic justice

point to the fallacies inherent in a series of major cultural assumptions

which have become deeply embedded in free market societies. These

assumptions touch upon the meaning and significance of economic

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inequality itself, the moral standing of the claim for free markets and the

relationship between economic activity and membership in society. Only

by examining the legitimacy of each of these assumptions in turn can the

importance of the critique which Pope Francis has raised be understood.

Only by examining the cultural mindset which these assumptions taken

together have created, can it be understood why they collectively undercut

the possibility for greater justice in the world community today.

First Cultural Assumption: Existing Levels of Domestic and International

Economic Inequality are Best Viewed as a Part of the Natural Order of

Economic Life.

The logic behind this assumption is simple. Any economic system which

seeks to enhance growth must incentivize individual initiative and effort.

For this reason alone, economic inequality will be evident and substantial

in every nation that values growth and opportunity.

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But the legitimacy of economic inequalities does not rest solely upon this

foundation. For economic inequality arises from the free rights of men and

women to use their talents as they choose, and from the claims in justice

that reward individuals for their contributions to specific enterprises.

Societies may have an obligation to provide threshold economic supports

to their citizens, but to go farther and seek to limit economic inequality in

society would cripple economic growth and violate fundamental norms of

justice. Thus inequality is best seen as a necessary part of economic life.

But in Catholic thought this assumption is utterly unacceptable.

Catholic thought begins not with the need to maximize economic growth or

with individual claims to recompense, but with the equal dignity of every

man and woman made in the image of God. In the words of the Second

Vatican Council:

Their equal dignity as persons demands that we strive for fairer and more humane conditions. Excessive economic disparity between individuals and peoples of the one human race is a source of scandal and militates against social justice, equity, human dignity, as well as social and international peace.

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Grave inequalities within and among nations are automatically suspect in

Catholic thinking and constitute not the legitimate natural order but a

profound violation of that order.

It is vital to note that the Council is not talking about threshold rights to

income in this passage; it is talking about disparities in income. Catholic

teaching has long recognized that the most profound effects of economic

inequality lie not merely in the material realm, but in the social,

psychological and political effects that flow from great economic

inequalities. Those who are marginalized economically are also

marginalized educationally, residentially, and in their opportunities for

meaningful work. As a result, as Pope Francis concludes, they are actually

excluded from society. “Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means

to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are not longer

society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer

even a part of it. The excluded are not the exploited, but the outcast, the

“leftovers.”

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Pope Francis’ assertion that existing levels of inequality constitute

profound injustice rather than a necessary part of the natural order is the

central friction that underlies the rejection of the Pope’s message by so

many of his critics. When the dire poverty that ensnares one billion people

in the world today could be largely eliminated by official development

assistance amounting to less than one percent of the gross domestic

product of the world’s rich nations, that is injustice, not a necessary part of

the natural order. The cultural currents that treat grotesque levels of

inequality as inevitable in a market economy constitute an ideology of

justification and complacency which is irreconcilable with the imperative to

reform that flows from any meaningful application of the Gospel to the

economy of our world.

Second Cultural Assumption: The Freedom of Markets Is a Categorical

Imperative Rather Than an Instrumental Freedom

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No element of Pope Francis’ teaching on justice and the economy has

received more criticism than his call for the rejection of the absolute

autonomy of markets. Critics have advanced two separate arguments. The

first is that the economic systems in the Western world are not in fact

absolutely autonomous, but instead have a series of restrictions in law

which safeguard important human rights. The second is that free markets

are the best engine for generating wealth for all segments of society and

for embodying the fundamental human right to contract and undertake

economic initiative.

Both of these criticisms have important elements of truth. Western

markets are not free in an absolute sense, but reflect elemental safeguards

for human dignity. In addition, markets are a central mechanism for

wealth creation which have sharply diminished poverty during the past two

decades, especially in China and India. Finally, free markets do express and

nurture the important human freedom of economic initiative and contract.

For all these reasons relatively free markets are necessary for establishing

economic justice in the world.

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But as Catholic social teaching has made clear throughout the past half

century, free markets do not constitute a first principle of economic justice.

Their freedom is merely instrumental in nature and must be structured by

society and government to accomplish the common good. In Centessimus

Annus, where Saint John Paul II skillfully integrated a modern appreciation

for markets into Catholic social teaching, he made clear that any market

system must be “circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which

places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as

a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and

religious…” And pointing to the financial wreckage of the collapse of

2008, Pope Benedict observed in Caritas in Veritate that both distributive

and social justice were essential to complement the commutative justice of

markets because “if the market is governed solely by the principle of

equivalence in value of exchanged goods, it cannot produce the social

cohesion that it requires to function well.” The sustained conviction of

Catholic doctrine is that the dignity of the human human person is the

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mean and the measure of every system and institution, and that markets

must be structured to reflect that perspective.

It is in light of this fundamental stance that Pope Francis speaks to the

question of markets and condemns the absolutism of those who resist

structural reforms that will bring greater fairness and serve human dignity.

He identifies a “sacralized” approach to existing market structures which

resists all calls for change and reform in the name of freedom and

efficiency. Seen through this sacralized prism, any attack upon existing

arrangements is portrayed as a pathway to state centralization, an

encroachment upon personal freedom or an invitation to economic

stagnation.

The freedom of markets is essential to a vibrant and just economy, but it

is an instrumental freedom, not a categorical imperative. Markets exist to

serve the human person and human communities. It is society and

government which have the obligation to structure markets so that they

best carry out that role.

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Nationalism

The world is experiencing a merger of populism and nationalism in the

cultural and political wave which has threatened to engulf and undermine

the principles of solidarity and the common good which are so central in

Catholic social teaching. The elections in the United Kingdom and the

United States were surprising in their outcomes and explicable only as the

product of a widespread sense of grievance located in national, and at

times ethnic and racial, identity. It is possible, of course, to view this clash

as the conflict between cultural and economic elites and working class

members of society who have become dispossessed in the modern

economic environment, and in part this is true. But at its root, this

nationalist impulse confronts us all with a deep moral challenge: how can

we distinguish between the moral claims of patriotism, which Catholic

teaching has traditionally seen as a virtue, and nationalism, which our faith

has regarded with deep suspicion.

In Catholic social teaching the love of country is a virtue. The

Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church states that “the principle

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of solidarity requires that men and women of our day cultivate a greater

awareness that they are debtors of the society of which they have become

a part.” And in his moving message to the people of Poland entitled “My

Beloved Countrymen”, Pope John Paul II spoke of true patriotism amidst

the cauldron of oppression and upheaval: “Love of our motherland unites

us and must unite us above all the differences. It has nothing in common

with narrow nationalism or chauvinism. It is the right of the human heart.

It is the measure of human nobility.”

But if love of country is a virtue and a moral obligation in solidarity, the

nationalistic impulse itself has no moral identity. It can signal the most

virtuous patriotism which integrates the love of country into the spectrum

of moral obligations that accrue to our humanity or it can be rooted in

pride, isolationism and discrimination. As a consequence nationalism as a

directive force in society is an example of false autonomy; it is a moral good

only when it is connected and subordinated to the order of justice and

freedom. It is immoral when it functions autonomously from that justice

and freedom.

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One of the most important struggles which both our nations have faced

in their history is to understand through our immigrant routes that our

unity is founded not on ties of blood, but those of principle. In a very real

way we have repeatedly had to reject mono-ethnic and mono-cultural

views of nationality. Nationalism, in its historical embodiment in both of

our countries and throughout the world, has the devastating tendency to

rest upon precisely such a mono-ethnic prism in evaluating citizenship and

legitimate membership in society. Culture and heritage become not

sources for unity within our nations, but sources of distinction and

marginalization. Each of our countries has seen far too much of both these

social sins within our histories. Nationalism inherently drives our societies

apart and violates the core doctrine of Catholic social teaching that it is the

universal dignity of the human person which is the most powerful and

comprehensive claim for rights and source of unity within a society, not a

manufactured cultural identity which is designed to exclude and categorize.

Jonah Goldberg noted this corrosive effect of nationalism in society which

he recently wrote that “nationalism is ultimately the fire of tribalism;

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having too much of it tends to melt away important distinctions, from the

rule of law to the right to dissent to the sovereignty of the individual.” It is

this ugly face of nationalist trends in culture and politics which Pope Francis

has excoriated repeatedly during the last two years, pointing continually to

cultural and political actions that seem intent on identifying “the other”

rather than “the brother.”

A second problem with nationalism is that, as George Orwell noted,

nationalism, as opposed to patriotism, is inevitably linked to power.

Catholic social teaching proposes that the pursuit of the common good is

the central role of government, and that governments need power only to

the degree commensurate with the need to pursue the common good in a

given historical setting. Nationalism begins with the pursuit of power and

links it with the question of identity to forge an ever expanding drive for

power – power for the dominant social group in society, power for the

nation in the international area. Societal and global life are seen not as

centers for pursuing the common good, but as arenas of conflict revolving

around the acquisition of power.

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As President Trump embarked on his first international trip last month,

his chief foreign policy and economic advisors published an essay

emphasizing the contrast between the Trump Administration’s worldview

and that of its predecessors: “The president embarked on his first foreign

trip with a cleareyed outlook that the world is not a “global community”,

but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses

engage and compete for advantage.” It is this Darwinian view of both

domestic and international politics which corrodes nationalism and

challenges the most fundamental assertions in Catholic social teaching that

a global society has indeed emerged and that moral claims are binding

upon nations in the order of justice.

The Technocratic Paradigm

One of the most penetrating themes of Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato

Si’ critiques the manner in which the technocratic paradigm has taken hold

in the modern world as a form of mastery over the earth which claims to

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make infinite progress possible for humanity. “This paradigm” Francis

writes “exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational

procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external

object.” This control is achieved using scientific concepts and an

engineering perspective, which inevitably bring with them a sense of

possession, mastery and transformation.

Pope Francis asserts that the central myopia of the technocratic

paradigm springs from the fact that it reduces complex realities of the

human person and the universe to the plane of instrumentalization and

scientific abstraction. “Technology tends to absorb everything into its

ironclad logic, and those who are surrounded with technology “’know full

well that it moves forward in the final analysis neither for profit nor for the

well-being of the human race, that ‘in the most radical sense of the term

power is its motive – a lordship over all.”

The most important external object which the technocratic paradigm

threatens is the earth itself. Even as ever more compelling signs of the

deterioration of our planet emerge, the ethic of mastery denies that this

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deterioration is real, and proposes that if the earth does deteriorate

technology will produce a solution. The technocratic paradigm is an

especially strong current in American culture because it resonates with the

American tendency to believe that there are no limits to human

achievement and the assumption that enlightened engineering provides

the soundest pathway for human progress.

The technocratic paradigm is a devastatingly corrosive form of erroneous

autonomy. It claims moral status through its ability to capture one element

of reality and promises that this one element has the capacity to produce

human flourishing. Yet the exhaustibility of the earth’s resources, the

rapaciousness of human appetites unleashed in the ever expanding

competition for material goods and the bankruptcy of a notion of human

flourishing reduced to any one dimension of our existence all testify to the

emptiness of that promise.

Laudato Si’ is the fire bell warning the world that it must reject the

technocratic paradigm and treat the earth as our home, a sacred gift

bestowed upon us by our Creator as a grace destined to benefit all of

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humanity and every generation. Pope Francis testifies to the reality that

we are called to be the stewards and servants of creation, rather than its

masters. We are called to have an awe for the environment in all of its

magnificence, vitality and fragility. Policy decisions must proceed from this

sense of awe and stewardship, and technological perspectives must be

seen as mere instruments of a much richer order of justice.

While the devastating effects of the technocratic paradigm are most

evident in the assault upon the earth which is our common home, the

application of the technocratic perspective to culture has also proven

injurious in the present day. Catholic theology teaches that culture is a

spiritual and ethical enterprise, richly interwoven with the lives and

heritage of a people. While every culture must be subjected to the

demands for renewal and reform based upon the deepest ethical

exigencies of the human person, the technocratic perspective in the

international system has frequently resulted in attacks upon cultures which

demean them and victimize their societies. Pope Francis has stated that

these interventions often have the mark of neo-colonialism, in their

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imposition of the values of the dominant international culture upon

economically challenged societies.

The Challenge of Erroneous Autonomy

The past year compels us to pay greater attention to deep cultural and

political currents which rage within our world, rather than to carefully

thought out ideologies and political programs. It has also alerted us to

central cultural forces which claim moral legitimacy, but which are in

themselves morally neutral or even devastatingly destructive when

disconnected from a moral and political framework tied to the order of

justice, freedom and solidarity.

It is not in their internal structures that the drive for free markets, the

technocratic perspective or nationalism are dangerous. It is when they are

morally autonomous, when they in themselves are directive of cultural

thinking and public policy, that they become perilous for the well-being of

our nation.

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It is our task as a Church and as a people to reconnect these cultural

currents to sound moral anchors. It is a task of dialogue and solidarity,

honesty and openness. And ultimately it is a task of grace and hope.