By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Government allowing innocent humans “to be attacked and killed” cannot continue, an official of the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix said as he gave a talk on St. John Paul II’s mission to defend and ennoble the human person. It was titled, “John Paul II’s Contributions to Catholic Social Teaching.”
Mike Phelan, director of the diocese’s Office of Marriage and Respect Life, reviewing some of the twentieth century, recalled that Germany’s morally weak Weimar Republic, which followed World War I, already showed disgust toward the handicapped and mentally ill, so the successor Nazi-ruled government didn’t have to change any language about how to treat them.
He added later, “We could be in the United States at our Weimar moment. . . . Our country cannot continue to coincide” with the destruction of human life, nor can the rest of the world, including Communist China, with its forced family-limitation policy.
Phelan looked over some of the major developments of the twentieth century, in which St. John Paul spent 80 of his nearly 85 years of life, and which he spoke to as Pope in encyclicals on topics including labor and the worker, socialism and capitalism, and human life.
“It’s well-said that Catholic social teaching is one of the best-kept secrets in the Church,” which includes addressing the development of the individual person and of society, said Phelan, who spoke on February 20 for a Zoom session of the Institute of Catholic Theology (ictphx.org), an evangelization program based here at St. Thomas the Apostle Church.
He said the Church’s social message “is not for Catholics only,” but is open for dialogue with all “men and women of good will.”
Asked by a member of the Zoom audience at the end of the talk if abortion is worth being “a one-issue voter” for, Phelan replied, “I think it’s kind of a red herring” to ask this.
In language reminiscent of the Pope’s, Phelan said that if a person doesn’t have life, no other issues can be addressed for him.
“The thing we know about the Nazi era is that six million people were killed,” even though other issues also were at hand, Phelan said. “If we don’t deal with life,” society can’t continue.
Near the start of this talk, Phelan said, “Modern Catholic social teaching was born” with Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which addressed labor and capital among its topics and defended possession of private property.
Marxist doctrine was becoming widespread, and socialism was a popular and fast-growing ideology, Phelan said, adding that Leo XIII condemned socialism although he understood what was giving rise to it.
The “early free market was not great for workers,” Phelan said, citing English author George Orwell’s book The Road to Wigan Pier, about the suffering of northern English workers, who lived “barely above slave conditions.”
Not so long after John Paul II’s papacy began in October 1978, he issued the encyclical Laborem Exercens in 1981, regarding the nature of human labor, Phelan said. “He was uplifting the human person,” which he always did.
The twentieth century already had seen major changes in industry, technology, and, through the introduction of the “anti-ovulent pill,” between men and women, Phelan said.
St. John Paul “wants us to think through work” and to realize it’s not punishment after the Fall from the Garden of Eden because “work was given to Adam and Eve before the Fall,” Phelan said — to steward creation.
As a young man John Paul had been a manual laborer and was amid other workers, Phelan recalled, saying that in this encyclical the Pope sought to show the proper relationship: “Work is for man, not man for work. . . . It’s a good, but it is not to dominate us.”
St. John Paul “is explicit” in condemning socialism, Phelan said, where “the state takes all aspects of work under its control,” ending in a slave state. He wrote against “collectivism,” whether it was Nazism or Communism.
The Pope recognized the right to private property and the right to a living wage, Phelan said, but called for responsibility by those who were very successful materially. “If I have a great amount, I am responsible for sharing.” He encouraged free markets but warned against “the powerful energies” the free market creates, Phelan said.
Less than two full years after John Paul II became Pope, the Solidarity labor movement against the Communist government in his native Poland burst into the news in August 1980.
In Solidarity, Phelan said, everyone takes responsibility for the plight of the worker. Within a year, it had more than 10 million members, and within eight years, Communism “began to collapse,” he said, adding that this came about largely peacefully “because it came out of Catholic social teaching.”
In 1987 the Pope issued Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, an encyclical on the social concern of the Church, in which he reflected on the “horrible disparity between the poor and the uber-rich” and recognition that “access to wealth is changing,” Phelan said.
John Paul II was hearing from the Third World of its inability to more forward, but the Pope “never fell into liberation theology,” which was leading to socialism and Communism, especially in South America, Phelan said, adding that the Pope “clearly rejects collectivism” and says a person “has a right to try to make their life better,” without inadmissible collectivist control.
His 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, released on the one-hundredth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, was intended to take Christian social teaching toward the twenty-first century, Phelan said, adding that Communism was falling and the Berlin Wall came down because Communism was based on “a terrible error . . . an anthropological misunderstanding of who the person is . . . Communist regimes cannot stay in place. . . .
“The Chinese government is not immortal, it’s not going to stay in place,” Phelan said, because this dictatorship thinks “the human person cannot be trusted. . . . They need the controlling state. . . . Freedom cannot be trusted.”
Freedom Is A Virtue
On the other hand, John Paul II saw “the potential for the human person” to become great, and favored a free and democratic society with a basically free economy, or what he called “a business economy,” Phelan said, with a crucial role played by a strong moral culture.
The Church’s primary role isn’t to get into politics, but to form souls for the moral culture, Phelan said — which doesn’t mean the Church doesn’t have a moral role to play in society.
The nature of freedom is “not just the ability to choose . . . to be willful,” the Pope said, according to Phelan, who added that “two- and three-year-olds have the concept of freedom,” but that doesn’t mean they can just run all around the church building while their parents are trying to attend Mass.
John Paul II said, “Freedom must be tethered to truth…or it will self-destruct,” Phelan said. “. . . Freedom is for excellence. . . . Freedom is a virtue that must be exercised.”
The Pope saw the need for “middle organizations” between the government and the individual, Phelan said, such as Scouting, the Knights of Columbus, local schools, even the family itself. “The future of society and the Church goes through the family,” Phelan said, adding that the middle organizations are schools of freedom that teach people to grow.
Laborers have a right to organize to negotiate, the Pope said — although, Phelan said, this can lead to abuses, like Chicago teachers’ unions.
Phelan raised the question of why Poland was so impervious to its Communist rulers’ lies. Because, he said, of strong families and the Church.
It’s important to understand “structures of sin. . . . Our sin impacts the world,” as do acts of virtue, Phelan said, noting a desire in society to stop thinking of sin as sin.
He asked why abortion centers exist. “It does make sin seem easier to do. . . . The structures of sin have to be replaced by other structures.”
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