The Church in the modern world

Over the centuries the Church has contributed to the enlightenment of humanity in various ways: spiritually, through crucial social problems and by inspiring just public institutions of governance. With the publication of Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem In Terris, and the Second Vatican Council papers, the Church put her direct footprint on modern world affairs, because it had become clear that the question of justice is first and foremost a theological question.

“The Church has always been an expert in humanity and has always been on man’s side. Because of this she will always be relevant, unto the end of time.” (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

So she began reminding humanity how the early encounter with the God of Jesus Christ awakened in many a thirst for love and solidarity towards one’s neighbour, and can still do.

This is what gave birth to Christian society and in turn forged a large part of Western civilisation we predominantly live by today.

It is the Church that humanised social and political structures of the world; gave life to a tradition of humanitarian and educational works as well as social promotion initiatives that today are taken for granted in countries that practise human rights and governments of democratic dispensation.

Pacem in Terris was the last encyclical published by Pope John XXIII on April 11, 1963, less than two months before his death. Here the pope addressed all men of goodwill, believers and non-believers alike, for he said the Church must look to a world without boundaries.

The novelty of the Vatican II documents lies in the fact that they established a reciprocity between what the Church gives to the world and what she receives from it: “Whoever contributes to the development of the community of mankind on the level of family, culture, economic and social life, and national and international politics, according to the plan of God, is also contributing in no small way to the community of the Church.”

Henceforth the Church emphasised its contribution in advocating for the defence of the dignity of the human person. This is seen most in John Paul II’s teachings in the encyclical Centessimus Annus.

Here the Church, once again, after criticising the failures of authoritarianism in communism, reminds us that market economics too is doomed if “business as a moral enterprise” does not rise above radical neo-liberal economics.

Economic freedom is only one element of human freedom. When it becomes autonomous, when man is seen more as a producer or consumer of goods than as a subject who produces and consumes in order to live, then economic freedom loses its necessary relationship to the human person and ends up by oppressing him.

The advantage of the Church, what makes her even more relevant today, is that it has never cared much about labels and isms, but rather concentrated on working against the mechanistic vision of man.

Pope John Paul II rejected the Marxist narrative, including the term “capitalism”, which he said focused on structures, labour and capital.

Instead he placed emphasis on the person: “If capitalism means ‘an economic system which recognises the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property…as well as free human creativity in the economic sector’, then it should be defended and adopted as an economic system.”

But if capitalism does not put economic freedom “at the service of human freedom in its totality”, then it is a distorting system.

With the advance of technology, the Church is going to have to hone her “sentinel” prophetic power to speak against the growing mechanisation of humanity; against the world that threatens to be run through drones, and against everything that does not promote positive human freedom.

In our country she will have to speak more and more against the deferment of freedom for the majority; against liberators turned oppressors; against corrupt collusion of business with the elites or politically connected; against the endemic violence on women and children; and against the violence of poverty.

The Church will have to adopt an astute vigilance at a time in which the threats to humankind are not external but actually come from within man and are in his/her very heart.

The Church has always been an expert in humanity and has always been on man’s side. Because of this she will always be relevant, unto the end of time.