Pope Paul VI pleads eloquently for the downtrodden masses in his fifth encyclical. The 20,000-word message entitled Populorum Progressio (On the Development of Peoples) calls upon “all men of good will” to give “a loving response of charity” to the cry of the hungry for help. It was dated Easter Sunday and issued two days later.
The pontiff shakes an accusing finger at prosperous lands and wealthy citizens. “The superfluous wealth of rich countries should be placed at the service of poor nations,” he says. He urges special compassion for those who are “struggling to free themselves from the yoke of hunger, misery, disease, and ignorance, who seek a larger share in the fruits of civilization and a more active realization of their human personality.”
The encyclical’s most provocative paragraph, however, is the one in which the Pope concedes that population growth is a problem. His reference to population control is ambiguous, though some headline writers inferred an easing of the Vatican’s strictures against contraceptives. This is what the Pope said:
“The size of the population increases more rapidly than available resources, and things are found to have reached apparently an impasse. From that moment the temptation is great to check the demographic increase by means of radical measures. It is certain that public authorities can intervene, within the limit of their competence, by favoring the availability of appropriate information and by adopting suitable measures, provided that these be in conformity with the moral law and that they respect the rightful freedom of married couples.”
The encyclical deals with numerous economic issues. Among other things, it:
♦ Insists that the right of private property is not “absolute and unconditional” and asserts that the common good may sometimes require “expropriation of property.”
♦ Condones revolution in extreme cases as a means to social justice.
♦ Criticizes the profit motive and competition as determinative factors in economic activity.
♦ Calls for reform in the system of pricing for agricultural products and raw materials that are the major resources of developing countries.
Populorum Progressio frequently appeals to the Vatican Council’s statement On the Church in the Modern World. It repeats a suggestion the Pope made while visiting Bombay that a “world fund” be established to alleviate misery, and that money now being used for arms be channeled into it.
“Too many are suffering,” the Pope declares, “and the distance is growing that separates the progress of some and the stagnation, not to say the regression, of others.”
He says that “urgent reforms should be undertaken without delay. It is for each one to take his share in them with generosity, particularly those whose education, position, and opportunities afford them wide scope for action.”
The pontiff contends that “both for nations and for individual men, avarice is the most evident form of moral underdevelopment.”
“If the world is made to furnish each individual with the means of livelihood and the instruments for his growth and progress, each man has therefore the right to find in the world what is necessary for himself,” the Pope says.
He suggests that “the new name for peace is development.”
The papal plea for the underprivileged comes at a time when Christian leaders generally are demonstrating new concern for the apparently growing imbalance between the “haves” and the “have-nots.” It recalls last summer’s Conference on Church and Society, conducted in Geneva by the World Council of Churches, in which many current economic practices came under fire.
The week before the encyclical came out, evangelist Billy Graham told reporters in Puerto Rico, “I am against any give-away program and against any program which causes people to depend on the government where they should depend on themselves. But I do favor much of the poverty program, and, in the light of our total budget, my criticism is that it is too small.”
Pope Paul’s indictment of the rich includes a demand for more taxes on the wealthy to meet the cost of aid programs for the poor. Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the whole document was that it failed to give any indication that the Roman Catholic Church was willing to submit its own vast resources and income-producing ventures to taxation. Reports from Rome several weeks ago said a secret agreement had been reached between the Vatican and the Italian government exempting Roman Catholic enterprises from taxes.
The potential of Roman Catholic wealth is cited by Episcopal Bishop James Pike, whose choice of a medium (this month’s issue of Playboy) is questionable but whose arguments are eye-opening. He trains most of his guns on the Jesuits, who, he says, own controlling stock in the Bank of America, Phillips Petroleum Company, Creole Petroleum Company, and the Di Georgio Fruit Company. He says the Jesuits also are heavy investors in Republic Steel, National Steel, and four of the largest aircraft companies: Boeing, Lockheed, Curtiss-Wright, and Douglas. From these and other holdings, the Jesuits are said to realize a yearly income of at least $250 million, on which they pay no taxes at all.
If Pike’s report is exaggerated, as the Jesuits are likely to argue, the fault lies as much with the Catholic Church as with the controversial bishop. Unlike virtually all Protestant groups, Roman Catholics never issue public financial statements to indicate the extent of their earnings or holdings. Reports in British newspapers last year estimated Vatican securities alone are worth at least $5.6 billion dollars. Not long ago the Wall Street Journal said the Vatican had sold the U. S. Treasury $4.5 million worth of gold.
Southern Baptists And Society
At last year’s Southern Baptist Convention, social isolationism was so strong that delegates drowned an attempt to put contemporary problems on upcoming convention programs. A resolution supporting America’s Viet Nam policy was thrown out, on the grounds that the SBC can’t speak for its membership.
But at this spring’s convention in Miami Beach, the Christian Life Commission—the SBC version of a social-action avant-garde—plans to have Senator Mark O. Hatfield speak on war and peace as part of its report.
Hatfield is a theologically conservative Baptist, all right; but his criticisms of the Viet Nam war1Hatfield told Harvard Young Republicans last month that President Johnson is “falsely redesigning the war as a war of aggression.” Hatfield said it is basically a civil war, not a contest between democracy and Communism. are hardly in tune with the views of the SBC constituency, and raising such a topic at the national meeting is something of a milestone in itself.
But then, maybe the SBC isn’t the fossilized giant described by its liberal critics north of Mason-Dixon. The April edition of Home Missions offers ten guidelines for increasing the ecumenical contacts between Southern Baptists and Roman Catholics, advocating a middle ground between “wholesale condemnation” and “naïve optimism.” Then there was ex-SBC President Wayne Dehoney’s invitation to Roman Catholics to join the SBC-promoted Crusade of the Americas in 1969. Dehoney later explained that he wasn’t thinking of a formal tie-in but he hopes the Catholics will preach New Testament grace and stress evangelism at the same time the Baptists do.
Then last month came Ross Coggins, director of communications for the Christian Life Commission, urging that social action be an integral part of the crusade.
A Coggins speech contended that “total evangelism” will refuse “to allow irrelevant barriers like race, class, and nationality to close the doors of the church.” He declares that Southern Baptists should either generate support for President Johnson’s fair-housing law or come up with an alternate solution to “the awful problem created by segregated housing.” And he says Baptists could accomplish great good if the $670 million they contribute to their churches every year were totally cut off from businesses that discriminate.
The crusade’s focus is Latin America, with its extremes of wealth and poverty. Coggins says that without economic reform there, “violent upheaval, Marxist opportunism, and national disruption are inevitable.” Coggins also urges more Christian interest in fighting poverty in the United States.
The Coggins credo will be codified in a forthcoming book. This critique—by a loyal SBC staff member who accepts its conservative theology and is just as likely to attack the new morality as the old racism—will be difficult to ignore.
A similar book, recently published, falls into another category. Southern Churches in Crisis by Samuel S. Hill, Jr., a Southern Baptist who is chairman of the religion department at the University of North Carolina, expresses dissatisfaction with the status quo. But Hill’s distaste doesn’t end with social symptoms; it goes straight to the theological roots of the South.
Hill notes that when Southerners do get interested in social ethics, they pour their efforts into the problems of obscenity, gambling, and alcohol, while neglecting discrimination, poverty, and ignorance. Despite their biblicism, Hill charges, Southern Protestants are highly selective about which passages they use and thus distort the content of the Bible.
Lawsuit On ‘Larger Catechism’?
A legal snarl looms over efforts to change the confessional standards of the United Presbyterian Church. A leading Philadelphia law firm has produced a twelve-page brief challenging the proposed deletion of the Larger Catechism from the church constitution.
A package proposal due for final ratification vote at the United Presbyterian General Assembly in May provides for establishment of a Book of Confessions that includes the new Confession of 1967, the Westminster Confession, the Shorter Catechism, and six other creeds. The Larger Catechism, which until now has been one of the creedal standards of the church, would lose official standing.
The legal question is whether the power to alter and amend a constitution includes the authority to remove altogether an integral part of it. A paper distributed by the Fellowship of Concerned Presbyterians, U. S. A., contends:
“State and federal courts throughout the United States have almost invariably ruled that amending a document in a constitution, such as the Larger Catechism, implies the continued existence of the thing to be amended, and not its extinguishment, as is the case with the Larger Catechism.”
The Olympia Presbytery of Washington state, which approved the Confession of 1967 by a vote of 36 to 34, subsequently voted 26 to 22 to send an overture to the General Assembly requesting a study of the constitutionality of the confessional package in view of the deletion of the Larger Catechism. More than twenty-five other presbyteries are said to be considering similar overtures.
The new confessional package has been approved by more than the necessary two-thirds majority of the presbyteries. The final vote scheduled for the assembly in Portland next month must be a yes or no. No further amendments can be proposed. If the church has to get around the legal problem, it must adopt a new overture and then submit it to another vote of the presbyteries.
The Larger Catechism, which dates back more than three centuries, consists of 196 questions and answers that exhaustively cover the precepts of the Christian faith. It is replete with scriptural references. There is little in contemporary Christian literature to compare with it. It has fallen into disuse partly because of its archaic language.
The Shorter Catechism, which also dates back to the mid-seventeenth century, is basically a condensation of the Larger.
No civil action against the United Presbyterian Church has been threatened as yet. But there has been speculation among conservatives that churches wishing to withdraw from the denomination after adoption of the new confessional standards may have some legal grounds in the deletion of the Larger Catechism. The legal brief prepared by Pepper, Hamilton, and Scheetz cites numerous court decisions and asserts that “almost without exception” the courts “have treated a power to ‘amend’ as a power to modify, add to, or delete front an existing document, without abrogating the existence of that document thus amended.” It argues that “the courts have recognized that, of necessity, the concept of ‘amendment’ implies the continued existence of the thing to be amended.”
