I have said it many times in the past, but now I have confirmation: According to the editors of the New York Times, the Pope is not permitted to make moral judgments because only the Editorial Board of the New York Times (all genuflect here) is permitted to pontificate:

Read more on The Paper Pope…

The President of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, visited Pope Benedict XVI in the Vatican yesterday, and the Vatican’s daily newspaper L’Osservatore Romano carried a front-page article by Piñera on “Economic Development and Integral Development,” a theme of great interest to us at Acton and the subject of our current conference series Poverty, Entrepreneurship and Integral Development.

Read more on Chilean Model of Integral Development Visits the Vatican…

Joe Carter wrote a good piece on poverty and Christian charity over at the First Things site with some good quotes from Abraham Kuyper.

Carter writes:

The problem of poverty, at least in America, is not just that it makes it difficult for people to fulfill their material needs, but rather that it blinds us all to what we really need. After all, what the truly destitute—those without food and shelter—need most isn’t a handout or a redistribution of wealth. What they need is for Christians to heed Jesus’ command. As Kuyper points out,

Read more on Poverty, Charity, and The State…

Steve Connor in The Independent (HT: RealClearReligion) speculates about some happenings at the Vatican with regard to genetically-modified (GM) food. It’s important to note, as is the case in this article, that things that happen in various committees and study groups at the Vatican do not by default have some kind of papal endorsement.

Read more on The Morality of GM Food…

Last Thursday at Rome’s (but technically part of Vatican City) Pontifical Lateran University, Istituto Acton held a day-long conference on “Ethics, Aging and the Coming Healthcare Challenge.”

It was a successful event, if a bit unusual compared to some of our other Roman gatherings. It’s not often that an Acton conference is so focused on the finality of death, after all; we often stick to the other “inevitability” of life, i.e. taxes. Yet in both spiritual and economic terms, there’s no sense in denying it.

Read more on Acton Rome event on Ethics, Aging and Health Care…

Today is my last day at the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) meeting in Atlanta. I plan to make my purchases from the various book sellers this morning, having already reconnoitered the exhibits and mapped out my plan of attack.

One thing that has struck me is that there are a number of new books discussing ecumenism and Christian unity from host of different perspectives. On the one hand this shouldn’t be surprising. The unity of the church is a constant theme, one that is confessed in the Nicene Creed (“We believe…in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.”).

But for a period of time it seemed that ecumenism was in decline. After all, it used to be its own area of theological specialization; there have been (and still are some) professors of ecumenics. On the broader level one thing that breathed life into the ecumenical movement in the last half-century was the founding of what is now known as the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity (I had the pleasure of meeting the pope’s representative, Fr. Gregory Fairbanks, at the WCRC Uniting General Council earlier this year in Grand Rapids).

An ENI story notes a recent address from Pope Benedict XVI regarding ecumenism: “Today, some people believe that this journey has lost its impetus, especially in the West,” the Vatican Information Service quoted Pope Benedict XVI as saying. “Thus do we see the urgent need to revive ecumenical interest and give a fresh incisiveness to dialogue.”

Now this story is in the context of Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican dialogue. But “new energy” needs to be found in the mainline ecumenical movement as well. I outline some of the reasons for the decline of groups like the WCC, LWF, and WCRC in my book, Ecumenical Babel. And as the Vatican celebrates fifty years of institutional ecumenical efforts, we have seen a corresponding decline in vigor in the mainline Protestant groups. Some evidence of this is the consistent outreach and emphasis on engaging “evangelicals” from the WCC, whose new president expressed such sentiments at both the WCRC Uniting General Council and the recently concluded Cape Town 2010 meeting of the Lausanne Movement.

So says Mark Tooley of IRD. “Sadly, over the last 50 years, it (the ecumenical movement) has faded into the sidelines and is now largely ignored,” he said. In the 1980s Ernest Lefever, founder of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, observed that “the ecumenical movement’s social witness has become obsolescent, marginal, irrelevant, or worse.”

I outline some of the things needed to reinvigorate the mainline ecumenical movement in my book. I outline correctives on three main levels: the ecclesiastical, the social ethical, and the economic. But I conclude too that

Without pursuing correctives along these general lines, the answer to Gustafson’s challenging question, “Who listens to the moral teachings of Protestant churches?” will continue to be indeterminate, and deservedly so. Without doing the hard work of serious ethical deliberation that engages a variety of conflicting perspectives, the ecumenical movement has little claim to possess authentic moral authority in the public square or among the churches.

After the break you can read the full ENI story on the fiftieth anniversary of the Vatican secretariat (now council) for promoting Christian unity. Read more on The Ecumenical Future…

Dr. Paul Oslington, professor of economics at Australian Catholic University, has a piece up today that examines the scope of social encyclicals, beginning with Rerum Novarum in 1891 and focusing especially on the similarities and differences between John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus and Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate.

Read more on Oslington, Economics, and the Social Encyclicals…

On May 21, 2010, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops released a media statement which sought to identify the way forward for Catholic engagement in the healthcare debate in light of the passage of healthcare legislation. The USCCB stresses that at the core of the bishops’ advocacy throughout the debate was a concern for three principles: (1) the protection of innocent life from the use of lethal force from conception to natural death; (2) the maintenance of conscience protections; and (3) the realization of universal access to healthcare for all, especially the poor and migrants. These, the USCCB stresses, will remain at the forefront of its contributions to the healthcare discussion. The USCCB consequently asks America’s “Catholic community to come together in defense of human life, rights of conscience and fairness to immigrants so we will have a health care system that truly respects the life, dignity, health and consciences of all.”

Read more on What is the USCCB’s Problem with Subsidiarity?…

A while back, Bevan Sabo and Ariel Goldring at Free Market Mojo interviewed me on a wide range of subjects. They’ve kindly granted us permission to post some excerpts:

FMM: Capitalism requires a large degree of selfishness. Though there is certainly room for charity in a free-market system, individuals and firms must pursue their own selfish interests in order for an economy to thrive (or even succeed). How does a Christian love his neighbor as himself and still function as a capitalist?

Father Sirico: I do not share the use of the word selfishness in the way that it is employed in this question. A proper self regard is based on the belief in my own inherent dignity and this requires “self love” but not an inordinate self-love or self-preoccupation which is willing to subordinate others to my own ends, either coercively or in a manipulative manner which disregards the same dignity of others. The word selfishness as it is used in common parlance does not reference rational self-interest but rather a self preoccupation and disordered priority.

From a Christian anthropological point of view the human person (who is much more than “the individual”) is a combination of his individuality and his sociality, his autonomy and relationships. From the first moment of our existence we are simultaneously autonomous (in that we are genetically distinct from our mothers), yet in relation to her while in the womb. The whole of our existence following is a working out of this interplay of our autonomy and our social nature. A Christian’s love for his neighbor is rooted in solidarity which is the recognition of a profound connection between human beings. It is, in a sense, a recognition of myself in the other. Because all human beings share an intrinsic dignity we ‘love our neighbors as we love ourselves’. Capitalism, which is only the economic extension of this anthropological truth, can be lived out from this perspective, but in order to be secure, just, and enduring, it needs to rooted in the historical development of such an anthropology.

FMM: In July of last year, the Guardian reported on Pope Benedict XVI’s third encyclical, entitled Charity in Truth. For me, the following is a particularly disturbing paragraph from the article:

The pope today called for a “profoundly new way” of organising global finance and business, calling for a new social and ethical dimension to capitalism and arguing the case for a new world political authority to help champion “the common good”.

The idea of the “common good” goes against the spirit of individualism that is an essential part of capitalism and any proper government. Can you discuss Charity in Truth, particularly, its ramifications for those who consider themselves both Christians and capitalists?

Father Sirico: If one is going to really understand papal encyclicals one must understand the tradition and theological milieu from which they emerge and attend to the precise definitions that are given to various specific phrases or concepts. In the case of the latest encyclical Caritas in Veritate many have asked questions about what the pope was addressing when he called for a “New World political authority”. I very much doubt your readers want from me a full exegesis of this section of the encyclical, but let me summarize by saying that this phrase is used in context with the references to subsidiarity elsewhere in the encyclical (e.g., no. 57) which is therein described as “the most effective antidote to any form of all-encompassing welfare state.”

Thus it is explicitly NOT the pope’s intention to be calling for some kind if ‘super state’, but rather for a global solidarity and authority “which cannot be imposed by force” (cf., Mater et Magistra, no. 130). The encyclical also cites a number of other references it is drawing upon, all of which are noted in the critical apparatus of the encyclical itself and all of which repudiate any kind of ‘super global state’. Read more on Interview: Economics and the Reality of Things…

In another Acton Commentary this week, Research Director Samuel Gregg looked at Catholic dissenter Fr. Hans Küng, who recently published an “open letter” broadside directed at the Vatican. Küng’s letter includes the now discredited Malthusian warning about global overpopulation (see video above). The letter, writes Samuel Gregg, “shows just how much he remains an unreconstructed creature of the 1960s.”

Hans Küng’s Malthusian Moment

By Samuel Gregg

In April, the world received yet another global missive from the 82-year-old Swiss theologian, Fr. Hans Küng. Perhaps the world’s most famous Catholic dissenter from Catholic teaching, Fr. Küng’s “open letter” to the world’s Catholic bishops contained his usual critique of the papacy and his now-tediously familiar prescriptions for changing the Catholic Church.

Almost 31 years ago, Rome and Germany’s Catholic bishops stripped Küng of his license to teach as a Catholic theologian because, by Küng’s own admission, he does not believe in some central tenets of the Catholic faith. Some would say Rome’s action was merely an exercise in ensuring truth in advertizing. This has not stopped Küng, however, from continuing to exhort Catholicism to adopt the path followed by many mainline Protestant confessions in the West since the 1960s.

Read more on Hans Küng’s Malthusian Moment…