Friends and Foes of Benedict XVI's New Encyclical

The new encyclical is certainly stirring the pot!

Here are some friends, including Fr. Joseph Fessio, Joseph Pearce, and some interesting praise from Thomas Hibbs at Baylor University and Paul Kengor of Grove City. The comments section that follows is fascinating, too, and my only comment is--economists are . . . interesting.

And here is George Weigel, disgusted with the new encyclical, seeing it as "gentle" Benedict's overture to the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. He writes "those with advanced degrees in Vaticanology could easily go through the text of Caritas in Veritate, highlighting those passages that are obviously Benedictine with a gold marker and those that reflect current Justice and Peace default positions with a red marker. The net result is, with respect, an encyclical that resembles a duck-billed platypus."

Like Benedict's remarks in Regensburg did with the Islamic world, perhaps this new encyclical will initiate dialogue with fellows like Weigel. I am curious about Weigel's understanding of the papacy. What is it for, if you have to go through it and weed out the interpolations that Jesus did not want? It is reminiscent of Thomas Jefferson's version of the gospels minus the interpolations of the gospel writers, for example, stuff like the resurrection(!).

Interestingly, Weigel and the New York Times loved the first encyclical. Here's Weigel and here's the Times in 2006. And here's the Times, echoing Weigel on the new encyclical. Strange bedfellows--"liberals" and "conservatives" united in mutual discomfort with the Catholic Church's Social Teaching. Hasn't been the first time!

My new favorite quotation: "One of the deepest forms of poverty a person can experience is isolation. If we look closely at other kinds of poverty, including material forms, we see that they are born from isolation, from not being loved or from difficulties in being able to love. Poverty is often produced by a rejection of God's love, by man's basic and tragic tendency to close in on himself, thinking himself to be self-sufficient or merely an insignificant and ephemeral fact, a “stranger” in a random universe. Man is alienated when he is alone, when he is detached from reality, when he stops thinking and believing in a foundation[125]. All of humanity is alienated when too much trust is placed in merely human projects, ideologies and false utopias[126]. Today humanity appears much more interactive than in the past: this shared sense of being close to one another must be transformed into true communion. The development of peoples depends, above all, on a recognition that the human race is a single family working together in true communion, not simply a group of subjects who happen to live side by side[127]."