Last Updated:Friday - 09/24/2010

The Church's best-kept secret

There is a silver lining in the dark cloud that is the controversy between media magnate Conrad Black and Bishop Fred Henry over the six-month-old strike at the Calgary Herald. The silver lining is that Black at least takes Catholic social teaching and episcopal pronouncements seriously enough to lash out at them.

It is not for nothing that the Church's social teaching is known as its "best-kept secret." Even when the Canadian bishops' 1983 Ethical Reflections on the Economic Crisis stirred controversy across the nation, Pierre Trudeau, the prime minister of the day, was able to casually brush aside the bishops' teaching with a couple of off-hand remarks. The bishops' letter, however, upset Black enough that he wrote a lengthy rebuttal.

Indeed, Canada has had a succession of Catholic prime ministers, virtually uninterrupted, for the past 32 years. Whether any of them had ever read a papal social encyclical is a mystery. Certainly no serious efforts were made in that time to make the ethical principles of Catholic social teaching a cornerstone of Canadian public policy. Those elected politicians, such as Warren Allmand, Doug Roche and Father Bob Ogle, whose political vision has been inspired by Catholic social teaching have also been out of the centre of political power.

So it is of more than passing interest that the Vatican is now consistently referring to Catholic social "doctrine" in its preparations to release a Catechism of Catholic Social Doctrine later this year. The linguistic switch from "teaching" to "doctrine" carries a clear implication that this realm is not an optional part of the Church's understanding of God and the human person.

The Church's pronouncements on, say, poverty or the environment, are not as central to its proclamation of the Good News as its teachings on Jesus and the Trinity. But their lack of centrality does not mean they can be dispensed with. They are part of an integrated vision of faith and life. Accept the Church's doctrines about Jesus and the Trinity and logically you should also accept its social doctrine.

Nor is this understanding a recent innovation. Some of the early Fathers of the Church were fervent promoters of social justice. In the fourth century, St. John Chrysostom, patriarch of Constantinople, wrote, "The sin of the rich consists in not sharing their wealth with the poor. In fact, the rich person who keeps all his wealth to himself is committing a form of robbery. The reason is that in truth all wealth comes from God, and so belongs to everyone equally."

This is simply an early formulation of the doctrine Pope John Paul has called "the universal destination of all goods." One can only wonder what Conrad Black would say if St. John Chrysostom were his bishop.

Still, Black does take the Church's social doctrine seriously. So should we all. Read it, reflect on it, fight with it and even reject it if you must. But don't ignore it.

Committed Catholics, of course, will accept it . . . and, accepting it, will then do what they can to implement it. The goal of producing the social catechism is clear enough - to take Catholic social doctrine out of shadows and to make it the basis for action by the laity to permeate society with the light of the Gospel.

Many groups and individuals are doing that now. With a serious effort to spread that social teaching in the coming decades, many more will join them. The Gospel is the hope of the world. And an integral part of the Gospel is the Church's proclamation of its social teaching.

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