Pope Benedict XVI’s Caritas

It is no secret that in U.S. Catholicism these last twenty or so years there has been an increasingly bitter split between two large factions on matters of political economy. Some tilt left, some right. Some favor a Reaganomic approach to political economy and rejoiced in the boom that lasted thirty-some years. Others favor Clintonomics (which in practice looked a lot like Reaganomics), while others favor something more robustly state-run and state-centered on the order of Obamanomics. In his new Encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, Benedict XVI stressed that the Church should be understood neither as holding a particular ideology about political economy nor as imposing specific practical solutions on individual countries or regions. He does not intend to pronounce upon the disagreements in political economy among Catholics or others. On the contrary, his aim is to put questions of political economy in a larger context, theological and philosophical, dealing with such questions as the role of caritas in theology, and in philosophy sound concepts of the common good, the human person, and human community.

Moreover, in his concrete discussions about current affairs, almost every time Benedict seems to give a point to the left, rooted usually in Populorum Progressio (1967), he takes it back or qualifies it by drawing on lessons learned in between 1967 and 1991, as recorded in Centesimus Annus. His practice follows his intention. He lets both horses run, and does not himself choose to side with either one.

In some ways, this openness seems to be baffling many readers, and making this particular piece of Benedict XVI’s writing come across as uncharacteristically waffly and opaque. It often seems to go in two directions at once. Some sentences are almost impossible to parse in practical terms: What on earth does that mean in practice?

This refusal to indulge in ideology has a great strength that compensates for the above-mentioned weakness. Its strength is that it raises the mind to other dimensions of the truth, and avoids squabbles that belong more to the City of Man than to the City of God.

For instance, this higher perspective enables the pope to link the gospel of life to the social gospel, so to speak. That makes immense practical sense. For instance, in the United States about fifty million children have been aborted since 1973. If those girls and boys had been allowed to live, millions of them would now be in the workforce, helping by their social security taxes to close the deficits in our programs for the elderly. Policies regarding the beginning of life profoundly affect the welfare state as the population ages.

Europe, with its failure to keep population at a level of growth, or even bare replacement is condemning its welfare state to accelerating death.

Here is one of my favorite practical passages in this encyclical. The sentences read more like bureaucratic jargon than like Benedict’s usually profound and warm pastoral way of putting things. Still, they reinforce some of the most important gains for Catholic social thought over the past 115 years:

By considering reciprocity as the heart of what it is to be a human being, subsidiarity is the most effective antidote against any form of all-encompassing welfare state. It is able to take account both of the manifold articulation of plans—and therefore of the plurality of subjects—as well as the coordination of those plans. Hence the principle of subsidiarity is particularly well-suited to managing globalization and directing it towards authentic human development. In order not to produce a dangerous universal power of a tyrannical nature, the governance of globalization must be marked by subsidiarity, articulated into several layers and involving different levels that can work together. Globalization certainly requires authority, insofar as it poses the problem of a global common good that needs to be pursued. This authority, however, must be organized in a subsidiary and stratified way, if it is not to infringe upon freedom and if it is to yield effective results in practice. (57)

Within this section, and several other places in the encyclical, a pattern begins to emerge whereby Benedict XVI makes a point important to the political economic left, and then qualifies it in terms important to the political economic center and center-right.

For example, regarding his concern to help the welfare state, the pope first advises that “more economically developed nations should do all they can to allocate larger portions of their gross domestic product to development aid, thus respecting the obligations that the international community has undertaken in this regard.” He then immediately frames this suggestion within the limits of subsidiarity and personal accountability: “One way of doing so is by reviewing their internal social assistance and welfare policies, applying the principle of subsidiarity and creating better integrated welfare systems, with the active participation of private individuals and civil society.” (60)

As for global government, we see Benedict XVI again call for a true world political authority:

To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority, as my predecessor Blessed John XXIII indicated some years ago.

But he is quick to define this authority in terms of restraint and of adherence to the core principles of Catholic social thought:

Such an authority would need to be regulated by law, to observe consistently the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity, to seek to establish the common good, and to make a commitment to securing authentic integral human development inspired by the values of charity in truth. (67)

For myself, though, I love best the starting point in caritas. When I was a young man, I wanted to write a book about the centrality of God’s unique form of love, called caritas rather than the more common, down-to-earth amor, in the architecture of the theology of Thomas Aquinas. I loved his little treatise on charity (the poor English translation of caritas), and often taught seminars on it. And in recent years, prompted in part by challenges from my friend and sometime sparring partner David Schindler of the John Paul II Institute in Washington, I have been developing the caritas underpinnings of my own understanding of democracy, capitalism, and a Republic of Virtue.

The free society is differentiated into three interdependent systems, the polity, the economy, and the moral/cultural institutions of human life. Each of these different types of freedom (political, cultural, and religious) is needed by the other two, in order to be held to the protection of true freedom. You can find essays of mine on this point beginning from at least 1995 at my website.

I have been trying to steer Catholic social teaching in this direction—beginning with my own thinking—for a long time. So watching Benedict XVI write about caritas so beautifully brings me immense satisfaction.

In all candor, however, if we hold each sentence of Caritas in Veritate up to analysis in the light of empirical truth about events in the field of political economy since 1967, we will find that it is not nearly so full in its veritas as in its caritas.

For instance, the benefits for the poor achieved through the spread of economic enterprise and markets (capitalism is for some too unpleasant a word to use) should be more resoundingly attended to. In 1970, for instance, the mortality age of men and women in Bangladesh was 44.6 years old, but by 2005 it had risen to 63. Think what a joy and what vigor such increased longevity means to individual families.

Similarly, infant mortality rate (deaths per 1000 live births) in Bangladesh in 1970 was 152, or 15.2 percent. By 2005 this average had been brought down to just 57.2, or a little less than 6 percent. Again, what pain this lifts from ordinary mothers and fathers, and what joy it brings. There is surely more to do to raise health standards for Bangladeshi. But the progress just in this past thirty years is unprecedented in world history.

There are many more omissions of fact, questionable insinuations, and unintentional errors strewn through this encyclical. The staff work has been rather poor.

Every deficiency of veritas injures caritas. That is the beautiful and powerful linkage in this encyclical.

Michael Novak, a member of the editorial board of First Things, holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book is No One Sees God (Doubleday, 2008).

Published in First Things Online August 17, 2009

The Valiant Karen

+Karen Ruth Laub-Novak, August 25, 1937 — August 12, 2009 Mass of Christian Burial, Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, Washington, D. C., August 17, 2009, 11:00 a.m. Proverbs 31.10-31; Psalm 23; Revelation 8.2, 7-13; 9.1, 3, 5-6, 13, 15-17; 12.1-6; John 1.1-5

Homily delivered by The Reverend Kurt Pritzl, O.P on August 17, 2009

***

The opening of the book of Proverbs, the first nine chapters, contains an exultation of Wisdom as a figure out in the streets exhorting those who would live rightly to be guided by her and to accept her invitation to come home with her. The closing of the book of Proverbs, which we have just heard, is a poem describing the attributes of the “valiant woman” (Proverbs 31,19), that woman of “extraordinary and ceaseless activity” who is beloved and praised as wife and mother.[1] This is the exalted Wisdom of the first nine books, now at home, in ordinary and practical and everyday ways, caring for those who have accepted her invitation to dwell with her. We depend on the sacred scriptures to find God, who gives us in them his revelation of his mind and his promise, something we would not otherwise know of or have. But as the living Word of God, we are also to find ourselves in the scriptures and to let ourselves be cared for by them in all the circumstances of life. And so in these closing verses of the book of Proverbs we know that we find Karen, the valiant Karen, whose funeral we reverently and lovingly celebrate today. This passage gives us Karen in so many ways that her family and friends readily recognize. Among others, one line strikingly fits her: “She hath put out her hand to strong things.” This is clear in the home that she and Michael have built with their children, in the many ways in which she has entered into the lives of countless friends (I am one blessed to be a friend of Karen, who reached out to me in the trouble of my illness before I ever knew how to reach out to her), but also in her art. Here she has “put out her hand” to create forceful and dynamic works of art in several media that invariably deal with “strong things,” not always easy things or pleasant things, but real things of life that we all face. The work of her hands includes a series of six lithographs on T. S. Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday. A critic once wrote of Ash Wednesday that “[t]he result is a poem at once religious in feeling and contemporary in intention: at once thoroughly personal and without concession to sentiment.”[2] So too Karen’s work, whether starting out from Eliot’s Ash Wednesday, Rilke’s Elegies, or from the verses of John’s Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse, that we just shared in our second reading. Karen once said in a lecture: “I often work with literary themes: T. S. Eliot, the Apocalypse, Kafka. Such starting points sometimes give me relief from the overwhelming demands of self expression, the ‘creating out of nothing’ that faces me from an empty canvas.”[3] This is to say, that Karen started with the word given, and then gave it body, shape, texture, color, concreteness, physicality. The gospel for Karen’s funeral Mass takes us to the beginning Word, not any word or a human word, but the Word “in the beginning,” the Word that “was with God” and that “was God” (John 1.1) and through whom “all things came to be” (John 1.3). It is this Word, uncreated and creating all, to which Karen, in the end, responded and reacted, not only in pondering and incarnating other deep words in her art, but also as she faced life and the prospects of death.[4] It is this Word about which Saint John in the gospel writes: “What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1.4-5). It is this Word, as the gospel continues, that “became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth” (charitos kai alêtheias, alternately, “enduring love,” John 1.14). Here at this Mass, where we are gathered to pray for Karen, to thank God for her, to rejoice in her life, and to find and share consolation for her loss, we proclaim this Word, there from the beginning, there first for us, there always, this Word become flesh, Jesus Christ, who shares with us out of a boundless love life never to be overcome by death and light shining in the darkness that no darkness can overcome. T. S. Eliot begins his poem East Coker from Four Quartets with the words “In my beginning is my end” and ends it with the words “In my end is my beginning.” For Karen, as for us, there is the Word as beginning and as end (as the Lord Jesus says in the last chapter of the Apocalypse, Revelation 22.13: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End!”[5]). And so another verse from our first reading from the book of Proverbs fits Karen so well: “Strength and beauty are her clothing, and she shall laugh in the latter day” (Proverbs 31.25). Karen was vivacious and brought joy and laughter to others even in times that were hard for her. One great gift of faith in the living God and in the Incarnate Word is to know the truth of these words of scripture—that Karen laughs in this, the latter day, a day for which no night or darkness may now come. Our minds are on beginnings and ends today and in this homily—the beginning and end of a precious and singular life; the beginnings and ends of texts; the beginning and end that come together; the end that is a beginning forever. There is a special beginning and end in Karen’s life that cannot go unmentioned, a beginning and an end that come together. Karen was born within days of the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which the church just celebrated on Saturday, August 15. She was baptized, confirmed, and married in the Church of the Assumption in Cresco, Iowa, and educated in Assumption grammar school and high school. Karen died within days of the feast of the Assumption, having just weeks before made a moving visit with her family and friends to the home of Mary at Ephesus, in present day Turkey, which is the place of Mary’s dormition and going to heaven, body and soul. At the beginning and end of Karen’s life stands this great and beautiful event, which holds as realized and actual for one woman, Mary, what God has planned and makes possible for all through the life, death, and resurrection of the Incarnate Word, namely, a fullness of eternal life for the whole human person, body and soul. The second reading today from the book of Revelation speaks of “a woman that wore the sun for her mantle, with the moon under her feet” whom God brings “to her place of refuge” (Revelation 12.1, 6). The church has often seen in these words a reference to Mary, Mary who stands at the beginning and end of Karen’s life with that mantle of undying sunlight, the waxing, waning, and reflected light of the moon under her feet. I think of them as sharing in the laughter of the latter day with the angels and saints. As we pray for this for Karen today may we also live so to share in that beginning which is also our end and goal. To Michael, to Richard and Tanya and Jana and their spouses, to Emily and Stephen and Wiley and Julia, to all of Karen’s family, we extend our most heartfelt condolences and prayers. Your friends and colleagues, this parish family, and so many others who cannot be here today cherish Karen and you. We want to be relied on in the days ahead.

***

[1] The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, ed. Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, and Roland E. Murphy (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1990), 461. [2] Derek Traversi, T. S. Eliot: The Longer Poems (New York and London, 1979), 58. [3] Quoted in “Karen Laub-Novak: Painter, Sculptor, Printmaker” at http://laub-novakart.com/biography.html. [4] See T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday, V, 1-9: If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent If the unheard, unspoken Word is unspoken, unheard; Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard, The Word without a word, the Word within The world and for the world; And the light shone in darkness and Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled About the center of the silent Word. [5] Cf. the counterpart of this verse in the first chapter, Revelation 1.8.

Karen Laub-Novak 1937-2009

Karen Laub-Novak August 25, 1937 – August 12, 2009

The wake will be at the Shine of the Most Blessed Sacrament (3630 Quesada Street, N.W. Washington, DC 20015) from 9:00-10:30am on Monday, August 17. The funeral will begin at 11:00am at the same location. The burial service will follow at Rock Creek Cemetery, located at Rock Creek Church Road, NW, and Webster Street, NW, in the Petworth neighborhood of Washington, D.C. A reception will follow immediately afterwards, at a location still to be determined.

In lieu of flowers, the Family requests a contribution to one of the following:

The Karen Laub-Novak Fellowship Fund The Catholic University of America School of Philosophy Aquinas Hall Room 100 620 Michigan Avenue, NE Washington, DC 20064

***

The Karen Laub-Novak Endowed Scholarship in Arts Ave Maria University 5050 Ave Maria Blvd. Ave Maria, FL 34142-9505

Or online.

The Family thanks all the many friends who loved Karen and showed her so much friendship over the years.

Morality and Free Markets

Michael Novak, as part of AEI's series on free enterprise, discusses the relationship between morality and economics. Access the audio and video here.

Lack-of-Progress Report

After six months in the Oval Office, Pres. Barack Obama has a lower job-approval rating than did ten of the last twelve presidents at the same point in their presidencies. Rasmussen reports that the daily tracking poll of the president’s popular standing shows eleven points negative: Twenty-eight percent “strongly approve” and 39 percent “strongly disapprove.” The support for his signature issue, health-care “reform,” is falling by the day. The more that Americans learn about it, the more revulsion they feel against it. His big stimulus bill has not delivered what he said it would. A giveaway stimulus is the Democrats’ usual alternative to tax cuts, on the theory of “increase demand” as opposed to “increase supply.” Unemployment in a few important states has now soared to 17 percent, and nationally it has risen close to 10 percent. Further, while Obama still ranks high in personal popularity, his numbers have fallen from percentages in the high 60s down to the low 50s, and are still dropping. His policies are much disliked: unimaginably high deficits, ever-greater state controls over industry after industry, a certain preference for raw leftist ideology over the needs and feelings of ordinary people.

For instance, Obama showed a cool insouciance recently in telling a televised citizens’ forum that some older patients must hereafter consider whether the health care they are now receiving is really helping them, and perhaps begin to reconcile themselves to giving it up. This means condemning themselves to an earlier and perhaps more painful death. Is complete government control, even of the time of death, supposed to be “reform”?

In a recent dust-up between an African-American Harvard professor and a local Irish-American policeman (of high reputation), Obama made the foolish mistake in a press conference of defending his “friend,” the black professor, and calling the local police (in the person of this one cop) “stupid.”

The great class division in American life is no longer between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (since there is no longer any proletariat, only one huge middle class). It is now between the highly educated elite and the ordinary people of family and neighborhood and common work. So, in calling the cop stupid, Obama pulled the veil back on his own Harvard arrogance. A huge public outcry forced him to step back and telephone both men in order to make peace. To make himself seem like an ordinary guy (the cop, not the professor), he even invited both men to the White House to have “a beer.” Too late! This sudden flash of self-revelation about his own class consciousness was exactly what everyone had suspected for some time.

It was the sergeant who suggested having a beer together (not wine and cheese), and he was the coolest of the three in ordering a Blue Moon. (Blue is the color of cops, and Moon is real, real cool.) I gave the first two rounds to him. Then, in the third round, watching his dignity and unblinking integrity (with the strength of tens of thousands of policemen standing behind him), I gave him round three running away.

This iron-jawed Sergeant Crowley is the man they called racist and hotheaded and stupid. They got the wrong man. They made the wrong charge. The president and the professor came out of this with lower universal esteem, the sergeant with higher, far higher.

Thus, once again, below the president’s honeyed, highfalutin ways of speaking, there is revealed a pretension that is becoming insufferable, a sense of moral and class superiority in office, which he has not yet earned. Moreover, when he is on his own, without speechwriters, Obama is surprisingly unimpressive. He is rambling, fairly boring, error-prone, evasive, and not well-informed.

In addition, President Obama seems to be unable to admit error, to apologize, or to voice what all can see to be true. “Calibrated” is a word he often hides behind, as when he brushed off his insulting remark about the Cambridge policeman — as if he, President Obama, did not use an inexcusable insult. No, the president’s words were wrong, not just imprecisely “calibrated.” Try to figure out the correct calibration of “stupid.”

President Obama no longer persuades.

First published in National Review Online August 4, 2009

The Ethics of Capitalism

Michael speaks at the Chautauqua Institution about the Ethics of Capitalism. Watch the video here.

What on Earth Is Caritas?

The Catholic sense of the world as a gift of God’s love is the central theme of the pontificate of Benedict XVI. For him, caritas means the love proper to God’s own inner life, dispersed throughout The City of God. Yet that City, St. Augustine stressed, is under constant siege by the self-centered, egoistic City of Man, characterized by lies and self-deceptions. That is why Benedict’s new encyclical tightly links caritas to veritas. You can’t have the one without the other. This approach touches on the American experience by its evocations of St. Augustine. No other religious writer so much influenced the realism about man expressed, say, in The Federalist, and in the choice of friendship expressed in the name of Philadelphia. Therein are foreshadowed both “the City on the hill” and the assertion that men are far from being angels. Indeed, men called to form “a Republic of Virtue” are deeply in need of checks and balances, divisions of power, and other practical methods for limiting the great evil of which humans are capable. To this point, Benedict prefers to stress God’s love, rather than the division of powers, open competition, and other checks and balances upon men’s destructive appetites.

Still, against the invisible gas of relativism Benedict does good work in showing the link between the pursuit of truth and a workable democracy. Civilization is conversation — that is, a close listening for the truth in the words of the other, and a bit of suspicion about one’s own undetected blindness. If such conversation in the pursuit of truth is blocked up by indifference, thugs will emerge to enforce consensus. Relativism was a prelude to tyranny in the century just passed. It can always return.

In its practical recommendations about political economy, however, this encyclical appears to be riding two horses — the russet horse of those who think the state is the main road to the common good, and the pale horse of those who think the strictly limited state should spur a thousand free initiatives and civic actions as a surer carrier toward the common good.

But as the pope takes pains to remind us, Catholic social thought does not provide technical solutions and does not prescribe specific programs and policies. On these, Catholics of left, center, and right can continue to disagree. Still, the pope’s own practical reflections on political economy and current perplexities help to sharpen the arguments. Here, too, the parts of the encyclical that most clearly bear the familiar marks of Benedict’s own caritas are the ones most likely to endure.

Published in National Review Online July 23, 2009

A Vision for a Civilization of Love

In 2003, Michael Novak made observations on the essential role that caritas plays in a just civilization. These observations carry particular importance following the release of Caritas in Veritate, the Vatican’s latest social encyclical. “Michael Novak's Recipe for a Civilization of Love” / His "Caritapolis" as the City of the Future

KRAKOW, Poland, JULY 17, 2003 (Zenit.org) — John Paul II has called democratic nations to overcome materialism and consumerism and to erect a "civilization of love."

In response to this call, Michael Novak, the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, has developed a series of lectures which he entitles, "The Caritapolis."

The lectures are a primary component of the curriculum for the "Tertio Millennio Seminar on the Free Society," held every July in Krakow. The seminar brings American and Eastern European students together to discuss the challenges of building a global system of freedom and prosperity.

In an interview with ZENIT, Novak described some of the important features of the caritapolis.

Q: What role does charity, caritas, play in the caritapolis? How does it shape its institutions?

Novak: Caritas is to will the good of the other. If we imagine a civilization based upon caritas, we must be careful to think realistically. For caritas shows itself as mercy to sinners, and it is love aimed at the real, not the apparent, good of the other.

It must be based upon realistic judgments rather than illusions, appearances and sentimentality. With its real conception of human nature, a civilization of caritas is necessarily a civilization acutely aware of, and provident for, human sinfulness.

Caritas has an active role in shaping the institutions of a society. Let us consider the problem of wealth. Well into the modern period, wealth was defined in one of two basic ways: land -- which allowed the owner to draw upon the produce of many -- or gold, silver, precious stones and other treasures.

The rhythms of nature dictated whether local communities experienced famine or plenty; trade was relatively slight and the vast majority lived only at subsistence level. Money itself -- in the form of pieces of gold, silver or other metals -- was in relatively fixed supply. In these circumstances, economics seemed to be a zero-sum game often leading to war and anarchy.

However, the aim of the economic system today is the development of wealth that comes from commerce and industry. This requires peace, rather than war, and respect for law, where commercial and industrial contracts can be carried out and international trade can raise the standards of living of all.

The focus on the creation of wealth bridles human passions providing a new focal point. It has the advantage of bringing to the powerful and the passionate, in an orderly way, the very fruits that under the old system individuals had been seeking through anarchic and warlike means.

Q: Describe the economic system and ideals of the caritapolis. What are its aims?

Novak: First, caritas must direct economic systems to liberate the poor of the earth from the prison of poverty.

Second, it must have institutions that rest upon, and nourish, voluntary cooperation.

Third, an economy of caritas will respect the human person as the originating source of human action, the "imago Dei," "homo creator," the chief cause of the wealth of nations.

Fourth, it must provide the necessary cause for the polity of caritas, whose best approximation in history so far is democracy under the rule of law.

Fifth, the economy of caritas must take realistic precautions against the besetting economic sins of all eras and times, but particularly its own.

Sixth, it must be based upon the presupposition that humans often fail in love, and only rare ones among them base all their actions thoroughly upon realistic love. Caritas must guide institutions in a realistic, not utopian, aim of establishing a free society.

Q: What role does the concept of social justice play in the vision of the caritapolis?

Novak: Social justice rightly understood is a specific habit of justice that is "social" in two senses.

First, the specific skills that it calls into exercise are those of inspiring, working with, and organizing others to accomplish together a work of justice. These are the elementary skills of civil society, the primary skills of citizens of free societies, through which they exercise self-government by "doing for themselves" -- without turning over to government -- those things that need to be done.

The second characteristic of social justice is that it aims at the good of the City, not at the good of one agent only. If we hold that free persons are self-governing, that is, able to live by internalized rules or good habits, they need only a fair and open system of rules in order to live well. In the free society, these rules enable them to act more creatively, intelligently and productively than in any other form of society.

While the free society will never be able to guarantee the outcomes desired by those who speak of "social justice," it does bring more rewards to all, on all reward levels, than any known system.

The aim of justice ought never to be a particular individual but the City, the society, at large. To recapitulate: Social justice rightly understood is that specific habit of justice, which entails two or more persons acting, one, in association and, two, for the good of the City. Understood in this way, social justice can be practiced in caritapolis to great effect.

Q: Can a caritapolis be constructed at the global level or is it only achievable at a local or national level?

Novak: Caritapolis can be constructed at the global level. Central to its development is the agreement upon universal human rights that respect the dignity of the individual person. If in fact the nations of the world ever come to a universal culture of respect for human rights, it will be a world that is much closer to respecting the dignity of the individual person, and at least in that way demonstrating solidarity among all peoples.

The forces of globalization -- political, economic and moral-cultural -- confront us with the need to think through an adequate human ecology.

What are the common habits that are practiced in free societies across the globe and that contribute to human flourishing? Many have not yet been fully imagined, and there is not even a catalogue of the ones we know, but I would offer four cardinal virtues of human ecology.

First, we must possess cultural humility, that is, an awareness that one needs the help of other cultures to see events and circumstances more clearly; for while no one culture possesses the truth completely, all of us stand under the judgment of the truth.

Second, we must have respect for the regulative idea of truth, for within this framework people respect one another's fairness in reasoning and judgment and may submit opposing judgments to the light of evidence.

Third, we must recognize the dignity of the human person, that each person is worthy of respect because he or she lives from the activities proper to God.

Fourth, we must uphold human solidarity, the special virtue of social charity that makes each individual aware of belonging to the whole human race, of being brother or sister to all, and of living in "communio" with all other humans in God.

These four pillars of caritapolis -- cultural humility, the regulative idea of truth, the dignity of the human person, and human solidarity -- guide both the global and the local community.

Q: What does it mean that culture is prior to economics in the caritapolis?

Novak: The dynamic force moving economies forward toward prosperity is the human mind, heart, and will; the Holy Father made precisely this point in "Centesimus Annus."

Economic success depends upon sound habits of initiative, risk taking, creative imagination, and a practical talent for turning dreams into realities. Culture develops these habits -- trustworthiness, courtesy, reliability and cooperativeness -- that are the marks of successful business activities, generating bonds of trust and loyalty among co-workers in the same firm, and between the firm and its suppliers, customers and pensioners.

Capitalism is not a set of neutral economic techniques oriented toward efficiency. Its practice implies certain moral and cultural attitudes, requirements and demands. Cultures that fail to develop the required habits cannot expect to eat broadly of capitalism's fruits.

Economic prosperity, especially in the developing world, depends on the subjective commitment of millions of individuals to a new way of life: They must look around, see what needs to be done, and take the initiative to do it themselves; they must work, invest, take risks, solve day-to-day difficulties, and bring new realities into being. That is, they must practice economic creativity.

The concepts of self-government and human freedom, inherent in a healthy culture, develop in us the moral character to act well in the economic sphere of society.

Q: Do the ideals of caritapolis have precedent in the Catholic theological and social tradition?

Novak: Yes, they do. Let us take social justice as an example. When Leo XIII described in "Rerum Novarum" the tumultuous changes then churning through the formerly agrarian and feudal world of pre-modern Europe, he saw the need for a new sort of virtue -- a reliable habit of soul -- among Christian peoples. He wavered between calling it justice or charity, social justice or social charity.

By the time of "Centesimus Annus," 100 years later, John Paul II had brought that nascent intuition into focus in the one term "solidarity." What is meant by solidarity, then, is the special virtue of social charity that makes each individual aware of belonging to the whole human race, of being brother or sister to all others, of living in communion with all other humans in God.

© Innovative Media, Inc. Reprinting ZENIT's articles requires written permission from the editor.

Stick-to-it-iveness and Grit

The following is Michael Novak's response to the symposium question "Does focusing on failures in the 'system' undermine the psychological basis for economic recovery?" in the Spring 2009 Issue of In Character Magazine: Grit. Read other responses to the symposium here. The entire issue is available online at www.incharacter.org People who are inventors, discoverers, and uncoverers of new ways are a different breed: overtime economic activists, creators of new wealth, launchers of small businesses (of which some become quite large).

When such entrepreneurs look at economic realities, they see something quite different from what economists see. Economists measure the past; creators make new futures.

Even when economists forecast the future, they must base their projections on accomplished fact, on things as they have been. Economic creators see things that do not yet exist. They anticipate new proximate possibilities and have the know-how to make nonexistent things come to be.

What makes economic creators tick? What gets their juices flowing?

Creators see reasons why things that aren’t yet can soon be. They are willing to risk their whole welfare — all their savings, most of their resources — in order to bring these practicable visions into existence.

What gets their juices running is a dream of changing (if only by so little) the present direction of things. By their own creative and risk-taking actions they create goods and services that have not yet been brought to market. They imagine new realities that others do not yet see. Many entrepreneurs leave higher-paying, more secure jobs at major corporations for the pure joy of creating something new. Money is not usually their primary aim, but comes in second or third to enjoying freedom of action and practical invention.

What about skeptics? Of these they meet plenty. “If it could be done, it would have been done already.” “You’re going to lose your shirt!” Behind almost all successful people there stands a loving, trusted mate who tells them they are wrong.

Perhaps that is how people in business come to learn that, in the end, it all comes down to their individual unyielding will and their own thick skin.

Determination, perseverance, and that wonderful American quality (and term) “stick-to-it-iveness”: these must be strong enough to endure opposition, even failures, and audacious enough to see in every failure a new creative possibility.

Entrepreneurs are both idealists and realists. They would like to be loved, but most of all they want to create. Genuine appreciation from others warms up their willingness to bear the cold winds of reality. But they are fairly accustomed to following their own judgments, overcoming adversity, and trusting in their dreams.

And yet. Their judgment about timing may be chilled by official hostility. Ignorant opposition arouses the creators’ well-practiced paranoia about the millions of ways in which what they are trying to do can fail. Official unfriendliness raises risks.

Even so, opposition makes the competitive animal within them stir. Fierce opposition only hardens its feral will to prove to the opposition who is more in touch with reality.

If stick-to-it-iveness is a wonderfully American word, there is also a four-letter Anglo-Saxon word for what it takes: grit. A lot of people in business get pushed back into corners. From there, curled like tigers, they eventually lunge forward.

As I read the narrative our nation is now living through, the White House and its surrounding cast seem woefully ignorant about economic activists, ignorant, resentful, and seething with punitive desire.

So there is some reason for concluding (even tentatively) that the reflexes of unchecked presidential power in Washington will blow through the nation like an ill wind. One senses in it a pestilential and destructive lust to destroy the entrepreneurial class, whose prestige and success they resent.

Some leftists have expressed publicly the wish that the “rich” will be taken down a couple of pegs, so that the “poor” may be lifted up a few. Actually, there seems to be more passion in the fervor to bring down the rich than practicality about how to lift up the poor.

Will economic activists react to this ill wind by hunching down and hibernating until the winter passes? Or will they flip the bird and give our new and inexperienced administration some lessons in reality?

• There cannot be employees without employers, that is, creators, risk-takers, activists of a quite different sort than neighborhood organizers.

• There cannot be profits without expanding, thriving businesses.

• There cannot be growing government revenues unless businesses keep leaping into existence and putting out those cheering notices: Employees Wanted.

It is a small price to pay for a good society to experience in its midst growing numbers of ever wealthier, ever more successful creators of new wealth raising with themselves new employment. The poor can scarcely rise without growing numbers of the “rich.” Arithmetically, greater “disparities” of wealth are an unavoidable consequence. Ten percent of a $200,000 income amounts to $20,000, but 10 percent of a $20,000 income amounts to only $2,000.

The more new wealth created, and the more payrolls mount, the more securely is the common good achieved. As Winston Churchill said, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York recently noted that the top 40,000 income earners in his city pay 50 percent of the city’s taxes. If even 10 percent of them (4,000) move to another state, the city’s shortfall in revenues will hurt a lot.

• The “rich,” then, are the price that a city must pay if it wishes to make life better for all its citizens. Even the rich contribute to the common good. (“I’m shocked, shocked!”)

• Economic creators prefer to be recognized as good and indispensable citizens. If you want fewer of them, show contempt for them.

• Having more small businesses is the cheapest way to generate more jobs for the poor and middle class.

Published in the Spring 2009 issue of In Character Magazine: Grit

'Caritas in Veritate' Symposium

Just after Vatican Council II, Joseph Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) joined others in founding a school of thought called "Communio Theology." The inner life of the Revealed God is a Trinity, a Communion of Persons. So should be the inner life of every image of God, every human person. Thus, the four main ideas in the new Encyclical Caritas in Veritate are communion, gift, caritas, and truth. Undoubtedly, this is the most theological, most specifically Catholic, of all social encyclicals since 1891. Its aim is to show the divine context of political economy and the drama of its upward-leaping tongues of fire: its inspiration, its aspiration.

As Abraham Lincoln pointed out, slavery in the United States could not be overcome by a Lockean fear or self-interest alone, but must be married to a larger and more generous grasp of the reality of the other. Progress and human development always depend upon an upward pull.

Benedict XVI sees political economy today caught in a worldwide updraft, whose possibilities we must read accurately. The world's peoples are becoming ever more pushed together, misunderstanding each other, rubbing against each other. They are called to be one. More and more often, they learn from each other ideas of human rights, protest, free association, free speech, justice, fairness.

The world, in short, groans for inner communion. And some of the most important secrets of human communion spring from the realities of Person and Communion in the free, gratuitous Creator of all. Persons, even in communion with one another, subsist in their uniqueness.

In the distinctively Catholic view of the cosmos, everything begins in the inner personal, communal life of the Godhead. This tallies with our own personal experience that the two most "divine" experiences in our lives, the two that are most God-like, are the kind of love that is perfect communion with another, and the sweet sense of self-control and personal responsibility in moments of great stress. ("Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.")

From this, the Catholic vision concludes that "Everything we look upon is gift." Creation itself flows from a superabundant gift. A shopkeeper who moves into a neighborhood to bake fresh bread and sweets in the morning brings a great gift to one's life. Those who spend their lives bringing such goods to one another bear gifts, especially if their human manner in so doing is kind and considerate. The pope asks us to look at economic life in the light of gift-giving, even when it is conducted according to conventions of exchange and price. It is the human generosity of the thing – the human dimension of commerce – that should not be lost sight of, if the world is to remain (or to become) more human.

Read the rest of the Caritas in Veritate Symposium here. Other commentators include James V. Schall, S.J., Joseph Wood, and Robert Royal.

Published in The Catholic Thing Online July 8, 2009