Phillip Berryman - OUR UNFINISHED BUSINESS

Liberation Theology: Essential Facts About the Revolutionary Movement in Latin America and Beyond

Inside Central America: The Essential Facts Past and Present on El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and Costa Rica

The Religious Roots of Rebellion: Christians in Central American Revolutions

Copyright 1989 by Phillip Berryman

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Berryman, Phillip.
Our unfinished business: the U.S. Catholic bishops letters on peace and the economy.
1.. 2. Catholic Church. National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Economic justice for all. 3. Nuclear warReligious aspectsCatholic Church. 4. WarReligious aspectsCatholic Church. 5. PeaceReligious aspectsCatholic Church. 6. EconomicsReligious aspectsCatholic Church. 7. Christianity and politics. 8. United StatesPolitics and government1981 9. United StatesEconomic conditions1981 I. Title.
BX1795.A85C39 1989 261.850973 88-15581
eISBN: 978-0-307-83164-4

v3.1

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.s, notion that activism and reform recur in United States history in thirty-year cycles is simple and elegantand attractive to those of us who would like to believe that we are due for another such period. He traces three reform cycles in our century: Progressivism at its outset; the New Deal in the 1930s; and the civil rights, antiwar, and other movements of the 1960s. Each of these was followed by a period of consolidation and then by one of seeming reaction (or at least stasis): the presidencies of Coolidge and Harding in the 1920s, Eisenhower in the 1950s and Reagan in the 1980s.

Interestingly, no uniform economic factor explains these cycles. The New Deal was a response to the Great Depression, while Progressivism and the sixties movements took place in periods of economic expansion. It seems only common sense that a nation cannot sustain continual change and turmoil; it is not surprising that periods of intense activism are followed by periods of consolidation and even apparent reaction, at intervals of roughly a generation in length.

At some point, says Schlesinger, shortly before or after the year 1990, there should come a sharp change in the national mood and directiona change comparable to those bursts of innovation and reform that followed the accessions to office of Theodore Roosevelt in 1901, of Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 and of John Kennedy in 1961. The 1990s should be the turn in the generational succession for the young men and women who came of political age in the Kennedy years.

Such upheavals are not necessarily generated by the presidents associated with them; their presidencies coincide with and are propelled by the exigencies and events of particular periods. In the twilight of Reaganism, there are growing indications that major shifts may be taking place in the public mood. If history is any gauge, the next cycle will not merely reprise the 1960s but will address the new problems the nation has been accumulating over the years when private good was pursued at the cost of public good.

Central to any discussion of a new national agenda are issues connected with the arms race and the direction of the economy. I believe two pastoral letters by the American Catholic bishops, The Challenge of Peace: Gods Promise and Our Response (1983) and Economic Justice for All: Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy (1986), provide a useful framework for discussing the new national agenda.

I am not the first to admire the elegance and insight of these documents; they have in fact been praised by prominent figures of various political persuasions since they began to circulate publicly. George Kennan, for example, wrote that the peace pastoral may fairly be described as the most profound and searching inquiry yet conducted by any responsible collective body into the relations of nuclear weaponry, and indeed of modern war in general, to moral philosophy, to politics and to the conscience of the national state. In congressional testimony, Nobel laureate economist Lawrence Klein called the first draft of the letter on the economy a careful, scholarly assessment and said that the bishops had done a great service by raising many questions that have faded into the background in the midst of overall recovery of the economy. At the same hearing, James Tobin, another Nobel laureate, recognized that although the bishops values were based on Catholic theology, he as an unrepentant secular humanist found them of universal appeal, striking responsive chords among persons of all religious faiths and of none.

While the letters earned high praise from liberals, conservatives were predictably opposed. Writing about the economics pastoral, William F. Buckley, Jr., accused the bishops of intellectual slovenliness, while George Will said the bishops hurl clichs, confuse exhortation with argument, never entertain a doubt about government programs, and sound like just another liberal lobby. Shortly before the peace pastoral was issued, Michael Novak, a well-known Catholic neoconservative, issued a kind of counterpastoral. A few months later, armed with $100,000 in corporate money, he and former treasury secretary William Simon organized a set of hearings to issue a lay letter on the economy in order to influence the debate around the pastoral letter on the economy then being prepared.

Such criticism and organizing indicates that the bishops were opposing key aspects of the agenda of conservatives, who were then enjoying new respectability, influence, and power. Both letters arose out of decisions made at the November 1980 annual meeting of the bishops in Washington, D.C., convened just as the Reagan era opened. The concerns over a growing danger of nuclear war that would result in Jonathan Schells The Fate of the Earth (1982) and the TV film The Day After (1983) were already at work. At that meeting Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit mentioned the conviction of the just-elected Ronald Reagan that the United States must strive for nuclear superiority and Vice President-elect George Bushs belief that the United States must be prepared to fight and win a nuclear war. Concern over the foreseeable human impact of cuts in social spending and overtly probusiness policies prompted Auxiliary Bishop Peter Rosazza of Hartford to propose that the bishops produce a statement on capitalism (like the statement they had recently issued on communism).

That bishops should make pronouncements on the arms race or economic issues was not new. Modern Catholic social teaching traces back to Pope Leo XIIIs 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, on labor. Twentieth-century popes have spoken eloquently on the horrors of modern war. These two letters nevertheless stand out for two reasons. First, in contrast to the usual Vatican practice of releasing final documents in a rather oracular manner, the U.S. bishops engaged in an extensive consultation process, holding hearings, releasing three successive drafts, and considering many thousands of pages of written commentary on each letter. Second, the letters were far more specific than most church documents, and their policy recommendations were directly relevant to ongoing debates, even if the bishops did not endorse specific pieces of legislation.