Jimmy Akin

Sorry I haven't blogged the last few days, but my old laptop died late last week. I was typing along and suddently hit the Black Screen of Death. Not the blue one, the totally black one that you can't even kinda reboot after. Since then I've been struggling with getting a new laptop, data transfer, and getting the new one set up right. (Still working on that. Can't get a couple of programs installed properly.)

Weigel has received a lot of criticism for the piece, some of it justified, some of it not.

Let me begin by saying that Weigel is certainly right and dead on the money about much of what he says.

First, this encyclical is a problem child. That's widely known and can be clearly seen just from what the Vatican has said about it publicly in the run up to its release. We knew that before it even came out.

Once it did come out, the matter was abundantly confirmed.

It's clear that the encyclical was, as Weigel indicates, intended as a 40th anniversary commemoration of Paul IV's encyclical Populorum Progressio, which means it should have come out in 2007. 

But it didn't. It's two years late.

Why?

The Holy See has acknowledged that it was delayed because of the global economic crisis, but if memory served that really didn't hit, not with encyclical-delaying force, until 2008.

It also was delayed because, unlike his previous encyclical Spe Salvi, which B16 wrote all on his own with virtually nobody knowing about it, the pontiff had people from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace drafting it and, as Weigel says, he wasn't happy with the drafts and kept rejecting them. 

How many drafts were rejected is unknown, but once the financial crisis happened, Pope Benedict rejected the then-current draft as simply inadequate to the world situation.

Which is quite revealing. Thank God he pulled that version! Presumably it would have been bolder, more moralizing, less nuanced, and more leftist. It would have been terribly embarassing for the Church to have such a document representing its views in the middle of a world financial crisis or to have it released just before the crisis.

All of this fits with Weigel's narrative of the previous drafts of the encyclical being filled with loopy leftist stuff from the PCJP and Benedict struggling to whip the thing into shape.

And look how long it took!

If this was meant to be in print in 2007 then, given how things work around the Vatican, it must have been in production in 2006 at the latest, and possibly 2005–the same year Benedict became pope. Agreeing to do this encyclical (plausibly, as Weigel says, at the suggestion of the PCJP) must have been something that happened very early in Benedict's reign.

What we're looking at is an encyclical that has been under construction for virtually all of Benedict XVI's four-year reign.

That's a problem child, and we should expect it to show signs of that kind of history.

And it does.

Pope Benedict's ultimate response to the drafts he was getting was to try a hybrid solution in which he drafted certain parts himself but left others alone or only modified them (notably by putting in qualifiers to tone down things the PCJP had proposed). 

The result is a patchwork that, as Weigel says, can be marked "gold" where Benedict is speaking and "red" where the default positions of the PCJP are on display. Weigel is totally correct about this. Anybody with an ear for Benedict's voice (meaning a knowledge of his own distinctive theological themes) and a knowledge of the views common at PCJP, can instantly distinguish between the two voices in reading the document.

It's enough to make you think that the source critics have more going for them than you thought.

There's also another kind of passage that Weigel identifies but doesn't assign a color to, so let's use our third primary color and call it dark blue.

Why dark blue? Because these passages are very hard to undertand, even at present incomprehensible. It may be the PCJP talking, or Pope Benedict, or someone else, but whoever is talking, they're not making themselves easily understood.

Reading the encyclical I was struck over and over by passages that just left me scratchi
ng my head. They weren't Benedict's usual style, and I don't know who wrote them. Some may be so difficult precisely because they are hybridized passages with more than one hand at work.

However that may be, they're definitely there. An example is one Weigel treats well:

[A]s when the encyclical states that defeating Third World poverty and underdevelopment requires a “necessary openness, in a world context, to forms of economic activity marked by quotas of gratuitousness and communion.” This may mean something interesting; it may mean something naïve or dumb. But, on its face, it is virtually impossible to know what it means.

Weigel assigns this to the red category, but on my division it's dark blue because it's just hard to tell what it means in concrete terms other than people ought to be nice to each other in some way. It seems to be an attempt at soaring rhetoric that doesn't so much uplift the reader as cause him to pop right up out of the experience of reading the text and start wondering what the text means.

Regardless of who wrote them, there are many passage in the encyclical that are just dense and hard to make sense of. (Which means they likely aren't Benedict, because he tends to be clearer.)

So far Weigel's take on the encyclical is on course. There is the kind of tension between different viewpoints at the Vatican, including the one that predominates at the PCJP, the encyclical is a fusion of ideas of Benedict's and the standard PCJP positions, and there was a big unhappy behind the scenes process for this encyclical's production.

It may even be reasonable to say that at a certain point Benedict threw up his hands and let the PCJP have its way on some things even though he wasn't entirely happy with the way they came out. 

Benedict might well feel that there is still room for improvement in the encyclical, though he obviously felt it was "good enough" at this point to be released.

And that's where Weigel goes wrong.

Weigel depicts the pope as allowing the PCJP passage to stay in the encyclical just so Benedict could maintain peace inside the Vatican.

Nonsense.

Pope Benedict has no problem telling people "no" or undertaking decisions that leave others at the Vatican absolutely mortified. (Summorum Pontificum, anybody? Lifting of the Lefebvrite excommunications–even apart from the Holocaust-denying tendencies of one of the bishops?)

And then there's the fact that he's apparently been saying "no" to the PCJP about this very encyclical for the last several years.

Maybe they wore him down of a few things that he would have liked to have come out better, but he was entirely capable of saying, "You know, guys, I really appreciate the work you've done here, but given the current state of things, I think it best that we shelve this idea."

That kind of thing happens all the time at the Vatican, and Pope Benedict certainly has the wherewithal to shelve an idea that he thinks isn't working.

Also problematic is Weigel's apparent implication that the "red" passages of the encyclical do not represent Benedict's thought. 

I think it's fair to say that they may not always have the same intensity in Benedict's mind as the "gold" passages that he felt needed to be in there and inserted on his own personal initiative. But even if some of them are of lesser importance to Benedict or even if he isn't happy with the precise way they ended up being worded, surely they correspond to his thought in at least a general way. (And possibly a much, much stronger way than that.)

So I think Weigel is simply mistaken with this implication.

This is not some minor speech that the pope had ghost written and that he read maybe once before he delivered it in public. In documents such as that the pope might, indeed, pass over something by accident that doesn't really reflect his thoughts.

This is an encyclical for crying out loud! 

The pope–and his chosen experts–have been over every single word of this. The pope has spent years wrestling with this thing and personally critiquing the drafts from the PCJP. This thing has been scrutinized by the pope and his chosen experts so thoroughly that anything appearing in the document at this date is something Benedict has made his own.

He or may not be entirely happy with the result, but it's his now, and–to come to the last problem I want to mention with Weigel's essay–it's just insulting to the pope to suggest that the contents of numerous passages in his encyclical do not, at least in general terms, reflect his own views.

I mean, really.

The PCJP is de
finitely a dicastery that can be subject to legitimate and forceful critique, but Weigel simply goes too far in making them out as the villain. In the process he, certainly unintentionally, insults Pope Benedict by portraying him as a man so weak as a Vicar of Christ that he can be bullied by a mid-range dicastery into including in an encyclical (one of the most authoritative papal teaching moments) things that don't even reflect his thought.

Or so it seems from what Weigel wrote.

Perhaps he will clarify.

He's usually very insightful, and I'd love to see him interact more with this encyclical.

A reader writes:

When it comes to the question of interventions in the prudential order, it could happen that some Magisterial documents might not be free from all deficiencies. Bishops and their advisors have not always taken into immediate consideration every aspect or the entire complexity of a question. But it would be contrary to the truth, if, proceeding from some particular cases, one were to conclude that the Church's Magisterium can be habitually mistaken in its prudential judgments, or that it does not enjoy divine assistance in the integral exercise of its mission. In fact, the theologian, who cannot pursue his discipline well without a certain competence in history, is aware of the filtering which occurs with the passage of time. This is not to be understood in the sense of a relativization of the tenets of the faith. The theologian knows that some judgments of the Magisterium could be justified at the time in which they were made, because while the pronouncements contained true assertions and others which were not sure, both types were inextricably connected. Only time has permitted discernment and, after deeper study, the attainment of true doctrinal progress (Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian 24).