In 2008, my 401(k) and IRA
portfolios were reduced to a tenth of their former value. What had taken my
wife and me 20 years of scrimping and saving to accumulate was reduced to
almost nothing in a few days. I was powerless to act and could only watch
helplessly as forces beyond my control destroyed our diminutive nest-egg with
breathless and brutal efficiency. The destruction of my minor wealth was, in
the scheme of things, a trivial event compared to the misery and pain being
felt by others around the globe. In fact, I could not help but be struck by how
many people were so deeply affected. The global financial crisis was, and
continues to be, not simply a problem of governments or multi-national
financial entities, but a dilemma for everyday persons who suddenly realize
that their lives are interconnected in innumerable ways; did the people of
Iceland ever imagine that their existence could be so troubled by a mortgage
company in California whose annoyingly ubiquitous advertisements they had never
even seen? When I learned that Pope Benedict's encyclical Charity in Truth
was written in response to this global crisis, I was anxious to read what he
thought, to see what problems he identified and what solutions he saw.
Benedict begins his encyclical by
identifying Christ's mission to humanity as
the “principal driving force behind the authentic development of every
person and of all humanity” (1) and by firmly committing the Church to
“promoting integral human development” (11). In fact, he describes human
development as a vocation, a definition that raises human development from mere human activity to the level of a
sacred calling, to human and divine activity working in concert. Understanding
human development as a vocation introduces God into an otherwise mundane
process. With God, human development is not merely having more or doing more or
knowing more, but it is being more. Human development then is a matter of
becoming. This, of course, begs the question, “what is it that we are to
become?” In short, we are called to become a whole person, more human, and in
becoming more human to “love our brothers and sisters in the truth” (1). Human
development, in all its facets and varieties, is the vocation of all persons,
and all persons aid and benefit from the doing and the being, from growing and
from helping others to grow. As a vocation, one must understand themselves not
from the point of view of a “giver” alone, as a person who “has” giving magnanimously
to those who “have not,” but as a person partaking in a reciprocal encounter in
which both parties give and receive. Finally, as a vocation, human development
is a calling that one must constantly discern, not as a personal choice alone,
but discerned in and with a community of persons. The discernment process
applied to this vocation, as to all vocations, includes the rational, the
personal, the communal, and the sacred.
Understanding human development as a vocation has implications beyond
one's own personal growth. In fact, it is most important that one's vision
extend to the growth of community and culture. Benedict rightly asserts that,
as a vocation, human development “offers a wonderful opportunity for encounter
between cultures and people” (59) and can be an avenue to become Christ to
others and to discover Christ in others. In the act of performing the vocation
of human development, both the persons serving and being served find Christ in
each other. In being Christ to those of another culture, new ways of
understanding how to be Christ and how to build the Kingdom can emerge. In this
way, cultures interact not on a purely human level, but also on a sacred level
that raises the cultures to the life of the Trinity, to be sanctified in the
life of the divine. What is good in a culture is made better and what is
lacking is exposed to the light of charity and truth. However, charity finds
what is lacking in any culture, so that not only the culture that is being
served but also the culture providing the service benefit from God's truth and
love. Developed nations may rediscover in their roots what contributed to their
level of human development in the first place, and emerging nations may
discover that they have a real contribution to make - a contribution of wisdom
and understanding - and that they are not merely subservient receivers of
charity, as it were, but vocational partners in the growth and development of
persons.
The interactions that occur between cultures frequently take place in
the context of the global economy as transactions between distinct parties.
Benedict identifies commutative justice as regulating “the relations of giving
and receiving between parties to a transaction,” (35) while distributive
justice applies not only to the parties involved in the transaction, but also
to "the wider network of relationships within which [the market]
operates" (35). Transactions in the marketplace can never take place in
isolation: the existence of the marketplace itself attests to this fact, given
that so many are involved in its creation and maintenance. The human activity
in the marketplace occurs in the context of local, regional, national, and
global communities. Therefore, not a single transaction can be thought of as
isolated, but must be understood by the breadth and depth of the various
relationships that support, create, are sustained by, and are affected by the
means and ends of the transaction itself.
In this increasingly diverse and global marketplace, the meeting of
peoples and cultures has yielded the fruit of human development in what
Benedict identifies as “hybrid forms of commercial behavior” (38). In fact,
what Benedict identifies in terms of potentiality is already an actuality, and
rather old news at that. Hybrid forms, that “without rejecting profit, aim at a
higher goal than the mere logic of the exchange of equivalents,” (38) have
already emerged, as is seen in the OpenSource movement in software development.
OpenSource provides a unique model of subsidiarity and solidarity in which
anyone with the skills needed can contribute to the development and use of
sophisticated systems and computer software[1].
Benedict goes on to suggest the need for additional funding for
underdeveloped countries from the more economically developed countries.
However, it should be obvious that additional funding requires reform. The
United States alone sends 5.7 billion USD in financial aid to Sub-Saharan
Africa annually[2]. For
this amount of money, we would expect to see some improvement in conditions in
the continent, in the quality of human life and in human development, but
accountability is lacking, and without accountability there can be no
development. There needs to be cultural development in addition to fiscal aid
and until that occurs, the vocation to human development is simply not there;
it is purely technical aid at this point and aid without justice, at that.
Justice itself cannot be seen as limited to those who exist in one
particular place or time, as Benedict points out in discussing intergenerational
justice (48). Justice is a concept that crosses time and space, past, present,
and future. We have received the fruits of human activity, “ecological,
juridical, economic, political and cultural,” (48) from past generations who
toiled to develop themselves and the world for our benefit. We have stewardship
of the same ecological, juridical, economic, political, and cultural contexts
for this moment. Having received what was given to us, we must remain mindful
of what we intend to pass along to future generations for their own needs and
development. Justice demands that what we do now must take into account the
needs and dignity of future generations.
If we are serious about the task of intergenerational justice, the
environment is one obvious area that will be of continued concern to future
generations. Benedict invites us “to a serious review of [our] life-style” “in
which the quest for truth, beauty, goodness, and communion with others for the
sake of common growth are the factors which determine consumer choices” (51).
As a small-holding farmer, I take the environment and my stewardship of it
seriously. We use green technologies, such as composting and bio-fuels, as much
as possible. We limit the use of herbicides, pesticides, and antibiotics on our
food and animals. We buy locally as much as possible from fellow farmers, and
we buy crops and goods that are grown with the same attention to the
environment that we give. Even so, we can further decrease our environmental
impact by reducing our fuel consumption, especially fossil fuels, through the
pooling of resources, trip planning, and efficiency. However, I must point out
that one of the major sources of fossil fuel consumption in my life is the
weekly 120+ mile round-trip I make to Seton Hill every week. For my job, I am
able to telecommute from home and collaborate on-line with fellow employees
around the world in real-time, so I find it distressing that we waste natural
resources in order to be physically present in a classroom. While I understand
the need for community and formation in relation to ministerial education, new
and more complex understandings of community need to be developed so that
education and formation may be done on-line. This is not going to be optional.
Soon, there will simply be no other choice, and I think it would be better to
get started on making the transition now.
On the topic of technology itself, Benedict asserts “the development of
peoples goes awry if humanity thinks it can re-create itself through the
‘wonders’ of technology” (68). Man has the ability to increasingly identify,
predict, and control the material world, from atoms to weather patterns, from
his own DNA to the forces that ignite the stars. Man's ability to control the
material world has increasingly encroached on what used to be thought of God's
domain alone. These things that we control were proven not to be God's sole
domain at all. The former understandings of God that gave our life context and
a sense of destiny have been lost. However, without God as a context and
destiny, our purely human ability to predict and control the material world
results in such horrors as the Holocaust and atomic warfare, embryonic
stem-cell research and human cloning. Technology alone cannot solve our
problems; we need new ways of understanding God as our context and destiny. We
need to have God involved.
What became apparent to me as I read the encyclical is that reason and
natural law, which form the basis of Benedict's encyclical, must be presented
anew in order to find an audience in the post-modern world. The language of
story, the sharing of an event as opposed to an academic presentation of facts
and argument, is what appeals to the post-modern ears. The arguments that
Benedict makes must be made real and present in terms of people's everyday
lives, in ways to which everyone can relate. This is one of the challenges in
using a document like Charity in Truth in a parish setting. In addition,
the American concept of “rugged individualism” is a major obstacle to the sense
of global community and interdependence that Benedict describes. For a great
many people, human development is seen as a competition between individuals
rather than a cooperative effort between persons. A certain dose of formation
in the nature and practice of Christian community will be required before Charity
in Truth receives a friendly welcome at many American parishes. Until then,
I would continue to emphasize the reality of the very familiar and local forms
of interconnectedness and interdependence that everyone is comfortable with,
and I would work to build on this foundation to help develop a truly global
perspective. For my part, I would hope to gain a new appreciation for the
myriad of ways in which my friends and neighbors are already working to help
each other, by living their vocation everyday, to develop and grow as persons.
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