Globalism in Natural Law Theory:Pope Benedict XVI and Paul Francis Kōtarō Tanaka Kevin M. Doak Does Benedict's 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate mark a shift away from an earlier interest in the natural law? Vincent Strand thinks so. In a 2017 article in the English edition of Nova et Vetera, he concludes that "because the practical conclusions reached by Benedict in Caritas in Veritate rest on an explicitly theological foundation rather than a philosophical foundation of the natural law," Caritas in Veritate marks "a new turn in Catholic social thought" away from Benedict's earlier interest in Thomism.1 Strand contrasts the Benedict in Caritas in Veritate who is all about "the gift" (grace) with what he calls "the neoconservative position" that draws on "a type of Thomism that separates the natural and supernatural spheres" and he concludes that Benedict's rejection of this separation of nature and grace in favor of everything as gift explains why he prescinds from the natural law in Caritas in Veritate. I find several problems with Strand's argument. In the first place, his characterization of a Thomism that draws a sharp line between nature and grace sounds to me like little more than a familiar stereotype in these kinds of theological debates. I think my colleague Stephen Fields has the better theological argument in the same issue of Nova et Vetera when he notes that Benedict "understands nature and grace as dialectically analogous" [End Page 653] in his 2005 encyclical Deus Caritas Est.2 Did Benedict drop his analogic understanding of the relationship of nature and grace in the four years between Deus Caritas Est and Caritas in Veritate and thus prescind from an earlier commitment to the natural law? One problem with that assumption is that even Strand recognizes (albeit in a footnote) that Benedict explicitly refers to the natural law in several places in Caritas in Veritate, although Strand points out that these references to the natural law "are not significantly developed."3 That is a fair point. In fact, Benedict never fully develops a theory of the natural law. That is not surprising, since he is a theologian, not a jurist. But that does not mean he does not rely on certain assumptions about what the natural law is when he brings up the natural law in his writings. I hope to clarify what those guiding assumptions about the natural law are. First, let us start with recognizing another problem with Strand's argument: that European scholars, Germans in particular, who have looked carefully at Benedict's legal philosophy have come to precisely the opposite conclusion from Strand about Benedict's interest in the natural law. Martin Rhonheimer argues that Benedict offers a fulsome defense of the natural law in his 2011 address to the German Bundestag—two years after his supposed rejection of the natural law in Caritas in Veritate. And Manfred Spieker argues that Benedict moves away from an earlier rejection of the natural law in a 1964 article—the only one of Benedict's publications that has the natural law in its title—to an embrace of the natural law, a move that he traced to sometime around the year 2000 in the context of the "certificate controversy" that arose over the liberalization of abortion in Germany. He reads the same encyclical as Strand, Caritas in Veritate, as part of a whole with Deus Caritas Est, the Regensburg address of 2006, and the Bundestag address. And this whole is a robust defense of basic human rights on the basis of the natural law. How shall we account for such divergent interpretations of Benedict's texts and his view of the natural law? To be fair to Strand, the English translation of Spieker's article did not come out until 2018, a year after Strand's argument appeared in Nova et Vetera. And while Rhonheimer's English article appeared in 2015, it was included in an anthology of legal scholars, making it easy for a theologian like Strand to miss. First of all, then, we must recognize a difference in the field of Benedict studies between Anglophone scholarship and Germanic scholarship. In the...
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Dec 15, 2023
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