Reflections on Magnifica Humanitas, part 4

I just finished reading the second chapter of Magnifica Humanitas, continuing my series of reflections upon it in real time as I read it. Chapter 2 was entitled, "Foundations and Principles of the Social Doctrine of the Church." Largely, Pope Leo XIV attempts to set forth the framework of how Catholic Social Teaching is understood and applied to the Church itself. I presume so as to then be able to pivot in the next chapter on how these same principles might be applied to greater society outside the Church.

There was nothing too remarkable, in my opinion, about this chapter. He sets about laying the foundations of Catholic Social Doctrine. He grounds this Social Doctrine in paragraph 48 in being centered and following out of the Trinity. Being an Augustinian priest, this does not surprise me as St Augustine wrote an entire book on the Trinity where he partially goes through nature looking for triads found in all levels of society and nature that prove the Triune nature of God the Creator. With this Trinitarian grounding, Pope Leo means that because the nature of God is community in relationship to the three persons of the Trinity, so, too, the nature of the Church is community. We are not monolithic islands of the self, as a true monotheistic god who has no need or nature to be anything other than a oneness unto itself that is completely and utterly self sufficient and closed off from the world. 

To this line of thinking, I heartily agree. I think the Trinity is precisely where Christian theology should begin. A lot of people think the Trinity is some weird unexplainable doctrine that, frankly, they find embarrassing. You see this in parishes (Catholic and otherwise) that celebrate Trinity Sunday on the yearly liturgical calendar. I refer to Trinity Sunday as "National Bad Preaching Sunday" because preachers are very prone to either feel the need to explain the whole of the infinite Trinity in a 5 to 10 minute homily or they chicken out and preach on something else entirely and ignore talking about the Trinity. In either event, you end up with a dreadful sermon that fails miserably because it quite misses the plot, as our British kinfolk like to say. 

The Trinity, on the contrary, is the very basis of all reality. The communal nature of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a life giving triune, one God in Three Persons. St Augustine reckons that the Trinity is, by one analogy, the Father loving the Son, and the Son loving the Father, with the Holy Spirit as the Love. As with any analogy, it breaks down if you start to over analyze it because any analogy, no matter how good, can never be as good as the thing itself. An analogy is simply a way of trying to express in words we can understand a much greater Truth for which there are no adequate words. But, in St. Augustine's analogy, there is so much love within God that the love spills out, to be shared by all creation. 

As such, this is the basis of Social Doctrine because every human being is made in the likeness and image of God. If God is social by nature, then so are we. As such, the Church is by extension also social and called to be a model for all good things of the social order. By modeling that ourselves, we share our Social doctrine with the world in need of a better model because there's is marred with sin. 

One concept of hell, which CS Lewis illustrates so clearly in the final Narnia Chronicle, is that hell is the final place of isolation. We often see cartoons depicting hell as a bunch of people standing around in a collective group in some cave that is on fire. But, hell is actually isolation both from God and from the people of God because people in their communal nature are reflections of their God who by His nature is a Trinity community of persons. 

CS Lewis in his allegory of the end of time, Narnia is coming to an end. Aslan has returned to bring people to the new Narnia and offers salvation to all who would follow him. Many like Shift the Ape and the Dwarves choose to reject Aslan's offer, choosing instead to, freely choosing of their own free will to go off into their individual huts in a shadowy realm and remain isolated from each other and from Aslan for eternity. In that image, we see one theological understanding of Hell as a separation from God, not because a wrathful God intentionally sends us there but because we freely choose to separate ourselves from the Love of God for eternity.  If that is truly what we wish, God grants us what we want. 

 In this encyclical, Pope Leo, while he does not talk about hell directly, that inference is made because Augustine very much saw the City of Man, i.e. civil society and government, as at best a shadowy reflection of the City of God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and at worst, the City of Man as nothing more than a reflection of hell itself. The siren call of hell, if we take the CS Lewis vision of it, is that it is the final appeal to the isolated self. Come here and you can finally and eternally be free of God to do as you choose in this world of painful solitary shadows, isolated from both God and man.

The remainder of Chapter 2 lays out fairly clearly the ideas that underpin Catholic Social Teachings in that that there is a supreme value in human rights which are endowed to us by the Creator because we all share in the equal dignity of all human beings. This is the foundation of the idea of the centrality of all people and governments to work for the common good as a whole people of God, not as a collection of rogue individuals that are not connected to a greater community, nation, or government. 

The City of Man begins to look more like hell when it starts to view certain segments of the population as inferior. Society begins to cordon groups and individuals off because they are "not productive" or "poor" or "not like us" and isolate them. If a powerful elite, whether an actual government or a powerful corporation, can divide and splinter enough of the group against each other, it can achieve and maintain a monopoly of power so as to enrich and empower the few at the expensive of the many. No Social Justice ever comes from a system that serves the elite and treats the individuals as cogs in the machine of power and money, which it can achieve by denying anyone the rights due to them by virtue of each person being made in the likeness and image of the Trinity.

The encyclical goes on at that point to go into discussing why concepts like the universal destination of goods is important. I would quibble a bit at some of the curious dancing around he does about why the Church is so adamant about supporting concepts like private property (with which I agree) but then hedges by saying that "Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable." That is not true historically, as the Church recognized for centuries the divine right of kings who were duly placed as true and Christian rulers. Many kings saw all property of the realm as theirs by right, hence the blow up in England when Henry VIII closed all the monasteries as property belonging to the Crown. By that point, Henry VIII had separated himself from the Church in Rome, but even before him, there was no hunting, for example, on public lands because all wild animals were the property of the King. That was policy going all the way back to the Normans after the Battle of Hastings in 1066. 

Regardless, Pope Leo shifts back to a discussion of saying we hedge against such incursions against the common good by balancing the principles of Subsidiarity and Solidarity. He has a fairly extensive discussion of that from paragraphs 68 through 76. He muffles a bit on his definition of subsidiarity, but ultimately comes to the point in that subsidiarity is "the principle according to which the role of individuals, families, local communities, and intermediary organizations should not be supplanted by higher-level authorities." (paragraph 68). In other words, the lowest level of the community that can actively address and remedy a social problem is the correct one to deal with it. Otherwise, people have their dignity revoked if a high level bureaucracy or centralized government attempts to deal with the problem because the higher you are removed from the ground level, the less such arms of government are really, at best, any longer working for any sort of common good and, at worst, become dictatorial and further abusive and restrictive to the common man. 

This is balanced with the idea of solidarity (see paragraphs 73-76). The Church often couches this concept in the more flowery theological language of "preferential option for the poor." Basically, it is the idea that if there are policy options that could either benefit the poor or the powerful or rich, the Church, Society, and Government should generally err on the side of picking policies that help the poor and not further enrich the wealthy and/or powerful as a greater common good.   

The two key principles of subsidiarity and solidarity have to be in balance to have any hope of having a just society. Erring too much on one side or the other creates imbalances and injustices. Not enough subsidiarity and you get centralized authoritarian states, and too much subsidiarity and you get anarchy with no effective government body that can deal with any problem of any size. Likewise, too much solidarity, and you get rule by an angry mob and tyranny of the majority, and too little solidarity and you end up with some place like Chavez' Venezuela. 

In Venezuela several years ago, the dictator came to power under the mantle of solidarity, seized all the private businesses and corporations without compensation, and tried to run all those industries through a dictatorship "for the good of the poor." Well, Chavez had no idea how to run any of those industries, all the people who did fled the country, and the economy collapsed because of too much solidarity. 

Likewise, when you have too much subsidiarity, you end up with the horrors of something like the Industrial Revolution in England. There were virtually no regulations. Businesses in laissez faire capitalism created horrific working conditions where 7 year old children were often working 14+ hour days. If a worker lost his hand in a machine and could no longer do the job, they were fired and left completely destitute as there was no Worker's Comp or insurance policies for death and dismemberment. There was no OSHA. There were no social security disability or unemployment checks. You could either go to a work house (if you could work) or starve. That was society's solution.  

What is interesting in the concepts of subsidiarity and solidarity is that if either is out of balance, you end up with an unjust society. Oddly, the end result in either scenario is a society that looks the same in that no matter whether subsidiarity or solidarity was not being taken seriously, you end up with a system were people are merely exploited cogs in the machine with no voice and no rights. 

One point that I think Pope Leo brings up in this chapter that is somewhat unique to the discussion of Catholic Social Teaching in previous encyclicals is the new virtual world in which we live. We can call it the internet, but it comprises elements like social media, online news, big data, etc., but the point Pope Leo makes, and I think he is absolutely correct in pointing this out for further discussion and thought, is that unlike in days of yore when either multinational big businesses like Dickensian industrial textile factories or authoritarian governments like the Soviet Union were controlling people's lives, there is a new twist (a new kid on the block, if you will) to what controls our lives in the 21st century: and that is the internet and all things online.

Instead of 'goods' as solely physical commodities like steel, clothing, food, etc., Pope Leo posits that the internet as a whole should be classified as a good in the discussion of the concept of the universal destination of goods. It exists ideally for all people and not just the few. It is a transnational force that increasingly controls our lives, whether we want it to or not. It controls or has access to virtually all of our personal data. It often gives us our information as most news and research comes from online sources now. Even physical libraries have to have access to the internet and computer databases to look up if a physical book is on the premises, as virtually no libraries have physical card catalogs anymore. If you want to buy something, fewer and fewer places like theme parks or sporting events are accepting cash. Internet based technology controls all our lives, whether we like it or not. 

Ironically, for the most part, we like it. We are addicted to our phones. People line up to post any and everything about our daily lives to social media. If for whatever reason we get locked out of our social media accounts, our world becomes a nightmare labyrinth of trying to reset passwords for which we have to be texts a pin code to reset our password to get back into Google to access our credit card account. It really can become a dystopian nightmare because most of the internet from servers to e-mail accounts to online banking, at least in America, is run by or in conjunction with tech companies.   

My one major knock on this chapter is the very last passage of Chapter 2, where he tries to bring this discussion back around and apply it to the structures of the actual Catholic Church. He kind of gets sucked in to talking about the Church as the "historical subject of synodality and mission." I remain skeptical of the whole Synodality discussion going on in the Church, particularly the asinine "Synod on Synodality" they had some months back. There is a serious danger in what I have heard in those discussions that certain crazy Bishops and Dioceses are taking synodality to mean "we can do whatever the heck we want" and chuck teachings of the Church we don't like or find inconvenient or unpopular. I found this last section to be Pope Leo throwing a little shade at people like myself who are rightly concerned that the Synodality movement will snowball out of hand into open rebellion and schism.

That concern aside, I do believe what Pope Leo is gradually getting to is the idea in this encyclical that this online world and its online economy must likewise be subject to the ideas of a Socially Just society where subsidiarity and solidarity must likewise be applied to the internet and online entities themselves. Let they become too powerful and take over our lives in very unhealthy and detrimental ways. He will continue this discussion into Articifical Intelligent (AI) in the next chapter, but I believe he is laying the groundwork in this chapter by laying out the premises of Catholic Social Teaching so that he can begin to apply them en masse to AI and it's problems and promises. We will see where he goes with that, but I think thus far, it is an interesting premise.