The Church and Economic Development: The Legacy of Populorum progressio after Forty Years

Abstract

WE COMMONLY ASSOCIATE the idea of progress, and especially the ideology of progress, with the Enlightenment. This is understandable since Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment writers cherished the idea of and did their best to arrogate it to themselves as an idea that could only have become possible after Western thought had thrown off the fetters of Christian dogma and classical cosmology. (1) Yet in fact the idea of has a far more distinguished pedigree than its Enlightenment proponents were prepared to admit. (2) ancients, beginning with Hesiod, and proceeding through Xenophanes, Protagoras, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Thucydides and Plato, had traced an idea of humanity's from primitive origins to an ever more developed civilization. (3) It was a Christian, however, rather than a pagan philosopher, who formulated the most complete account of human St. Augustine's City of God has been rightly called the first comprehensive philosophy of world In it insists upon the unity of mankind and introduces the conception of human history that, although predetermined by God in the beginning, has unfolded through the activity of forces immanent in humanity itself and its striving for perfection. As Robert Nisbet has written, Augustine fused the Greek idea of growth or development with the Jewish idea of a sacred history. (4) As a result, Nisbet further notes, Augustine sets forth the history of mankind in terms of both the stages of growth understood by the Greeks and the historical epochs into which the Jews divided their own Old Testament history. (5) Thus, in a celebrated and influential passage, writes: The education of the human race, represented by the people of God, has advanced, like that of an individual, through certain epochs, or, as it were, ages, so that it might gradually rise from earthly to heavenly things, and from the visible to the invisible. (6) In much of the later history of the idea of the basic structure of Augustine's thought remains intact, with the noteworthy exception of the displacement of God. Enlightenment's specific contribution to earlier notions of human consisted in a removal of God as the grounding for human progress, followed by outright hostility to religion as the enemy of Whereas Augustine's idea of depended upon God's providential care for mankind, the French philosophes and later theorists, notably Auguste Comte, posited a that stamped out religion altogether. Comte's famous law of the three stages--the theological (or fictitious), the metaphysical (or abstract), and the scientific (or positive)--supplanted one another successively in an inexorable forward march. (7) nineteenth century was, by and large, a time of naive belief in the necessity of With the passing of time, it was supposed, things necessarily got better. This optimism burgeoned as the fruit of scientific advances, political stability, and the end of the wars of religion seemed to usher in an age of reason and human dominion over nature. Ambiguity of Progress I begin with these general reflections on progress, since much of twentieth-century magisterial social teaching regarding reflects a reaction to Enlightenment Progress as an ideology. This brief background allows us to better appreciate the legacy of Populorum progressio at a distance of forty years, especially as regards the importance of economic magisterium never speaks in a vacuum, and especially where ideologically charged concepts come into play, some familiarity with the cultural context is essential. This is decidedly the case with the Church's relationship to progress. Thus Pope Benedict XVI, in his encyclical letter Spe salvi evidences deep skepticism concerning He notes that in Francis Bacon progress not only proves incompatible with a vigorous Christianity; it threatens to assume the place of God. …