SOLLICITUDO REI SOCIALIS:

A Call to Solidarity

By Fr. Michael Ryan
March 1991

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When the most recent social encyclical, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, appeared in 1988, someone W remarked that it must be a document well worth reading because all the right critics had spoken out against it. In fact, almost as soon as this encyclical was published, William Safire, a right wing columnist for The New York Times, and William Buckley and Michael Novak, two of the more articulate spokespersons for American Catholic conservatives, expressed open disagreement with parts of it.

The observation that such opposition was a good sign turns out to be quite accurate because this encyclical comes as a great source of consolation to those Catholics, and others, who were afraid that "the new right" was causing the Church to draw back from positions it had taken at the Second Vatican Council, or even from its commitment to a century of Social Teaching. This document makes it abundantly clear that this is not the case.

This encyclical, the pope's seventh, was released on February 20, 1988, but it is backdated to December 30, -1987, so that it can serve as a document marking the 20th anniversary of Pope Paul VI's letter Populorum Progressio, the great prophetic encyclical on the rich nations and the poor nations that was published in Holy Week of 1967.

Sollicitudo, we said, is a message of reassurance. Such reassurance was needed because there has been a growing number of Christians in recent years who felt that the Church was drifting into "secular humanism." They resented the many Church pronouncements on social issues. They thought that the Church needed' to adopt more of an attitude of withdrawal from the world in order to bear witness to the next world. They were convinced that it needed to assume more a stance of confrontation with our world, attacking it from without rather than seeking to penetrate it from within. Possibly the most intelligent presentation of this position came from the distinguished Cambridge University historian, Edward Norman, in his 1978 BBC Reith Lectures, where he accused the Church of having "politicized" the Gospel.

This encyclical shows us a pope who totally rejects such sentiments. He states unequivocally that those who oppose the Church's involvement in social issues have a "superficial" (his word!) understanding of the Church. In dealing with these human issues and in working with others in the world to improve the human condition, the Church, says the pope, is carrying out "the mandate received from the Lord" (No. 8). What this encyclical does very clearly, is to reaffirm without question the position taken by the Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council when it said, in The Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, that "the joys and the hopes, the grief’s and the anxieties of the people of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, are the joys and the hopes, the grief’s and the anxieties of the followers of Christ." In fact, in this new document the pope goes so far as to say (No. 31) that the Church's vocation of service to the world implies that it should be ready even to sell costly furnishings intended for divine worship, in order to feed the hungry!

What, though, is the principal message of this new encyclical? Well, if we are looking for a name to give this document, then it is without question the solidarity encyclical. The pope calls on all people to develop a keen sense (he even calls it a virtue) of solidarity. That call, as the Jesuit scholar Aloysius Fonseca has shown, is especially timely –has in light of the more recent signs of interdependency that have appeared in our world.

This is a particularly prophetic message because what many writers have tended to stress in recent decades is not the interdependency of our world, but rather the dependency of the poor nations on the rich nations. This too is an important fact, of course, and we should examine it first.

Two examples can serve to illustrate the phenomenon of third world dependency.

First, in July 1990 The New York Times Magazine ran a feature article on the maquiladoras, the factories clustered along Mexico's border with the southern United States. A picture accompanying the article told the whole story: it showed a large modern factory that assembles automatic garage door openers for a major American department store chain and, clustered around that factory, the packing-crate huts of the workers who earn about one dollar an hour, barely enough to support their families at subsistence level. It is a clear example of the poor subsidizing the lifestyle of the rich. It demonstrates an international division of labour in which the economies of the periphery, those of the poor nations, produce for the economies at the centre, those of the rich nations, and so are dependent on them.

Take a second example. The food study specialist, Susan George, writes of corporations that use the agricultural resources of poor countries, for example in Africa, to produce pet food for the 65 million American cats and dogs rather than to produce staple foods for the local people, because the dogs and cats can "afford" to pay whereas the local people cannot.

The dependency of poor countries on rich ones takes many forms: dependency on transnational corporations that enjoy the kind of power and mobility that enables them to blackmail poor countries into doing their bidding or else lose their investment; dependency on international lending agencies, like the IMF (International Monetary Fund) that can dictate a country's social and economic policies as a condition of getting much-needed loans; dependency on foreign processors because tariff barriers effectively prevent many poor countries from processing their own raw materials before exporting them.

Dependency is so obvious a fact of life in today's world that it has given rise, during the past 25 years, to what is called "dependency theory." The lives of people in the poor nations are seen as having been reduced to a dependence on the wants and whims of people in the rich nations. Dependency theory, with its clear focus on the exploitation of the poor by the rich, easily lends itself to a class conflict view of history. Not surprisingly, neo-Marxist social analysis has often been associated with it. Perhaps as a consequence of this, dependency theory has tended at times to acquire the status of a rigid dogma and may have prevented some people from paying sufficient attention to the important reality of interdependency among nations.

There is, of course, a great deal of truth in dependency theory, and also in the response to it that many have recommended: the development of self-reliant economies. These are economies in which countries concentrate their greatest effort on producing essential goods for their own people, using locally available resources, and treating international trade as only an extension of such production rather than as the principal object of it. The call for self-reliant economies is one with which we ought to be very much in sympathy. On his 1989 trip to Madagascar, the pope called on people there to work for "self-sufficiency" in that poor nation.

At the same time, the major point made by Pope John Paul in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis is that while the dependency of the poor nations on the rich nations is a fact, and while measures to deal with that fact are important, it is above all the case that there is a great deal of interdependency between them.

This interdependence manifests itself in many ways. Think of the impact that the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973 had on the economies of both rich and poor countries.

There is also the new industrial capacity of many poorer countries, with the potential this involves for the export of manufactured goods, and at the same time the growing dependency of richer countries on the raw materials and potential markets of the poor countries. Increasingly, rich and poor countries need one another. Perhaps this interdependence is most clearly illustrated by the huge burden of third world debt. As has been well said: "If you owe me $100 and can't pay it, that is your problem, but if you owe me a billion dollars and can't pay it, then that is also my problem."

In calling our attention to the growing interdependence in our world, the pope is in tune with the observations made in the Reports of the Secretary-General of UNCTAD VI (the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) in 1983 and UNCTAD VII in 1987 (as Fonseca also observes).

This interdependence in today's world has three important consequences and the pope deals with them at some length. In fact those consequences are the heart of this encyclical's message. They might be summarized as follows: first, we're all in the same boat; second, we all have the same enemy; and third, we all depend on the same resource.

We're All In The Same Boat

Interdependence constitutes a strong piece of secular evidence to support the moral assertion that we really are one family in this world. Solidarity is needed because we truly are in one world together. Whatever its divisions, our world really does have a fundamental unity. We really are sisters and brothers. Hence it is both foolish and profoundly immoral to submerge ourselves in our North American consumer society and ignore what is happening in the rest of the world. It is like the person who locks him/herself in the house and ignores those who are fighting the fire next door. That fire may soon spread to the person's house.

For example, when we look at the poverty of a country like Mexico with a population four times the size of ours, a population that could well reach a level of social and political awareness that would result in serious upheaval, or when we reflect that the population of a poor country like India increases by the amount of our population in Canada every two years, how can we ignore what is going on in the rest of the world? Again, when we look at squatters' communities in much of the third world and see all those beautiful children who will never receive a decent education or proper health care or a decent job, how can we fail to recognize them as our brothers and sisters? Here is a genuine life issue that should call forth our moral indignation just as much as any social issue here in Canada. So Christians have a serious call, the pope says, to develop the virtue of solidarity. That virtue should incline us to know the facts about our world, to influence our country's policies toward the third world and to be involved personally in whatever ways we can. "These observations should make use reflect on the ethical character of the interdependence of peoples." (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, No. 19.)

We All Have The Same Enemy

It is a major consequence of the interdependence of our world that genuine human development anywhere in the world is going to depend on a similar change of attitudes in everyone. Human development, in other words, is a moral issue because it depends not just on the change of social structures but also on a change of attitudes in human beings everywhere.

Thus the pope appeals to the fact of interdependency in our world in order to explain why the worst social problems of poor countries crop up in rich countries as well. They crop up in both kinds of country, he says, for the very same reasons. Rich and poor countries both have housing problems because both tend to favour a disordered form of urbanization. Rich and poor countries both have to contend with grave unemployment because both regard and therefore organize work in the same perverse way. Both rich and poor countries have huge debt problems because they use high interest rates to turn what should be the social benefit of lending into a force that works against social development.

Rich and poor countries have similar social problems then because they face the same kinds of causes. When we speak of "causes," we need to remind ourselves that "development" is not just an economic category but is also a moral one. Here we confront another of the weaknesses in dependency theory. It is true that we need to bring about some profound structural reforms in our world and the pope speaks boldly about them. Yet, much as we need to reduce and eliminate certain forms of structural dependency, this will not by itself produce "the new man and the new woman." Development is a profoundly moral category and it calls for the overcoming in ourselves of two attitudes: the all-consuming desire for profit and the thirst for power. It is these two attitudes that work against true human development everywhere, in the rich world as in the poor world. In the poor world, for example, "the desire for profit" has led rich Mexicans to take out of their country almost as much money as Mexico has had to acquire in the form of foreign debt.

Whether in poor countries or in rich ones, it is that love of money and that thirst for power that works against genuine human development. And, very important, the pope points out that these attitudes tend to become institutionalized in social practices, in what we have learned to call "social sin." In Mexico I met a very prophetic priest who put it very simply. He said: "You have to love the poor more than you love money or power." This comment surely speaks to all of us in some way.

We All Depend On The Same Resource

The third consequence of the interdependence of our world is that we cannot save our common environment-something on which all of us depend for life itself-without the help of one another. The facts of global warming, acid rain, desertification, dangerous chemical emissions and toxic waste are well known. The 1987 United Nations Bruntland Report suggests that we should be at least as concerned right now about environmental security as we are about military security.

The pope appeals to our sense of "solidarity" to get us working seriously together on the environment issue. The 1971 social documents, Octogesima Adveniens and Justice in the World, had both devoted sections to the environmental question, but the pope deals with the issue at greater length and in more depth in this encyclical.

Some popular writers have attempted to root our present environmental problems in the Church's own preaching of the command in Genesis to "subdue the earth." In actual fact our problems stem rather from the sinful misinterpretation of that command than from the command itself. In this sense, our modern problems can be traced much more accurately to the social acceptance, in the 14th and 15th centuries, of a picture of the human as a "will" that stands over the world. Several thinkers of our own day have shown this convincingly.

What the pope brings out in this encyclical is really meant to be a continuation of ideas he first enunciated in his 1981 letter on human work, Laborem Exercens. It is the fact that human work is not just animal activity, but is rather a sharing in God's activity, made possible by the fact that humans are "the image of God." Humans are called therefore to be "stewards" of God's creation, "managing" that creation in God's name. The world, says the pope, is a cosmos, which means an ordered whole, and it is the role of human work to respect and extend this "order." We can think of the example of good medicine which helps nature to accomplish what it would do if it could.

In the first of the social encyclicals, Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII rejected paternalism. People, he said, should not be treated as dependents. They should have the chance to stand on their own feet. Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, this most recent social document, goes one step further. It insists that we must recognize the truth that we are interdependent. While according one another the dignity of standing on one's own, we need also to acknowledge the ways in which we need one another and must support one another as individuals and as nations. To do this is to practice the virtue of solidarity.

Fr. Ryan is a professor of Philosophy and Theology at St. Peter's Seminary in London, Ontario, and author of Solidarity: Christian Social Teaching and Canadian Society (1986). Last month Scarboro Missions featured his article on another of the Social Teachings of the Church, Rerum Novarum.

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