3. Minorities in the social Teachings of the Church
Our investigation of the Church’s position regarding minorities will have to be explored in three levels corresponding to the Church’s functioning within the context of premodernity, modernity and postmodernity. Joe Holland’s periodization of Modern Catholic Social Teaching will be useful for our own historical account.[10] He speaks of three stages based on the papal strategy vis-à-vis the development of modern industrial capitalism: (1) Pre-Leonine, (2) Leonine and (3) Johannine. The first will focus on how minorities were looked upon by the premodern or pre-Leonine Church that took on a universalist vision in the stabilization of society within a given framework of the Aristocratic Catholic social order. Secondly, we will locate the Leonine Church’s position vis-à-vis the question of the minority in between the two conflicting ideologies that characterized the modern landscape. Thirdly, we shall see how the post-Leonine or Johannine Church becomes sensitive to the minority discourses in a highly globalizing world within the postmodern context.
[10] Joe Holland, Modern Catholic Social Teaching: The Popes Confront the Industrial Age (New York: Paulist Press, 2003).
3.1. Minorities and the Catholic Social Order in Pre-Modern Times
The pre-modern world was governed by both the State and the Church within the framework of medieval syncretism with the former being in charge of the temporal order, while the latter had jurisdiction over the spiritual realm.[11] Both exercised power in accordance with the understanding of God’s will and design. Society was organized according to the Catholic social order, which was characteristically monarchial, pyramidal in structure, and highly stratified with a general acceptance of inequality as part of the natural constitution of reality. Behind this accepted social arrangement was the classic-metaphysical worldview of Aristocratic Christianity in the Christendom Church that was believed to be based on the natural and just ordering of society that ensured the stability of the status quo, understood to be at the service of the common good. Yet the overall claim to universality and the monolithic worldview must have silenced and rejected distinct perspectives, visions and voices of the minorities who were excluded from the established dominant system.
[11] Kenneth Himes, Christianity and the Political Order: Conflict, Cooptation, and Cooperation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013), 83.
This is especially true when the Church embarked upon its evangelizing mission during the period of colonization, an endeavor done for God, for glory and for gold. Narratives about the exploitations, injustices and genocides against the natives of the colonized territories abound. Except for some prophetic voices, like Bartolome de las Casas who denounced such oppressions, the Church’s main social documents during the period did not seem to offer a clear moral response to such systemic plunder of the victims. Joe Holland made this observation when he said: “Catholic social teaching largely ignored the great racist sins of the genocidal attack on the native peoples and lands of the Americas, the Atlantic slave system, and the Western colonialist plunder of Africa, Asia, and the Americas”.[12]
[12] Joe Holland, Modern Catholic Social Teaching, 19.
One can understand that the Church’s perspective somehow went along with the general colonial thinking of the supremacy of European culture and religion over other people’s forms of life. From such a Eurocentric perspective, it was asserted that “Europe had exceptional internal characteristics that allowed it to supersede, through its rationality, all other cultures.”[13] Yet from another perspective, it has been argued that European superiority was a product of the colonization process which boosted the self-esteem of European culture. Michael Barber writes, “the year 1492 constitutes the beginning of the experience of the European ego, expressed subsequently in the history of philosophy from the ego cogito (I think) to Nietzsche’s ‘will to-power’, by constituting other subjects and peoples as objects, instruments that it could utilize for its European, civilizing, modernizing purposes.”[14] Modern European expansion which strengthened the Cartesian modern (European) subject, ego cogito, is the actual fact of ego vinco (I conquer).[15] Economic development for the centre through the system of capitalism; political keenness through the management (with increasing bureaucratization) of the centrality of the world-system; and reflexive consciousness of world history through modern philosophy are just some of the fruits of totalization of the European ego.
[13] Enrique Dussel, “Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity,” The Cultures of Globalization, ed. M. Miyoshi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 3-31.
[14] Barber, Michael D. Ethical Hermeneutics: Rationalism in Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation ( New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), 89.
[15] Dussel, Enrique, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity, trans. Michael D. Barber (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1995).
3.2. Minorities and the Leonine Church in Between Modern Ideologies
The modernization of Europe eventually had its consequent impact on the Aristocratic Christian ethos and subsequent weakening and collapse of the Catholic Social Order. The long narrative of liberalism gradually displaced religion and its influence in the public sphere through the process of secularization. The meta-narrative of reason and freedom which found its beginnings during the Italian Renaissance, found expressions in the religious (Protestant reformation), political (revolutions), and economic (Liberal Capitalism) movements that brought about transformations of life in Western societies. The ideology of liberal capitalism which relies on selfish interest as the “invisible hand” that determines the economic activities of the market, as Adam Smith would argue, has actually given rise to social ills of great proportions. Especially in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, laborers, among them women and children, were exploited as they worked under inhumane conditions in factories and sweatshops. With the intent of defending the victims of the said oppressive economic system, an alternative modern ideology of socialism which developed from the philosophical writings of Karl Marx and his scientific critique of capitalism became attractive to the working classes in the struggle for their rights.
It was especially within such a complex context that the Church’s longstanding social tradition found refreshing expressions in defense of the workers. The Church’s pre-Leonine condemnatory posture against liberalism and modernism, especially during the time of Pius IX, and as expressed in his Quanta Cura and the Syllabus of Errors, eventually shifted to a relative openness in the pontificate that followed him. Influenced by people coming from both the movements of Liberal Catholicism and Social Catholicism, Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum of 1891 spelled out the Church’s distinct moral vision and principles for humanity and society. In defense of the transcendental dimension of humanity, the Leonine Church emphasized the centrality of human dignity and its corresponding human rights. Against the Socialist project, the rights to private property, participation and subsidiarity were affirmed and defended. Against the claim of unscrupulous capitalists, private property was relativized by the principle of common good and solidarity. The defense of dignity and rights means defense of the poor whose dignity gets trampled upon. “[W]hen there is question of protecting the rights of individuals, the poor and helpless have a claim to special consideration” (RN # 29). What was fundamentally argued, in contrast to the Pre-Leonine Church position, is equality of dignity and rights of peoples who share a common humanity.
3.3. Minorities and the Church’s Social Vision within the Postmodern Milieu
Referring to postmodernity as “the end of grand stories”, Jean-François Lyotard observes that there is a perceivable and widespread incredulity to all-encompassing projects and ideological systems.[16] Universal principles are put into serious question just as unitary and hegemonic discourses are held in deep suspicion. Monolithic centers are deconstructed and give way to a pluralistic landscape where multiple and even conflicting perspectives and discourses are generally accepted, if not celebrated. With much more open spaces for difference, assertion of diverse forms of life, culture and identities has characterized the postmodern milieu. Beyond the class discourse that mainly characterized modernity, minority discourses have come also from other marginalized voices based on religion, culture, gender, race, color, ethnicity and varied circumstances. Sensitive to the conditions especially of ethnic minorities, John XXIII’s social encyclical on peace, Pacem in Terris, asserts:
[16] Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans Geoff Bennington, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, [1974] 1984) 31-41.
It is especially in keeping with the principles of justice that effective measures be taken by the civil authorities to improve the lot of the citizens of an ethnic minority, particularly when that betterment concerns their language, the development of their natural gifts, their ancestral customs, and their accomplishments and endeavors in the economic order. (PT, 96)
The moral obligation to respond to the cry of the poor and those on the margins of society is clearly extended even to the environment, as articulated by the present pontiff, Pope Francis, in his Laudato Si. This moral imperative is especially true, when environmental exploitation has a corollary devastating effect on the survival in life and in culture of ethnic or indigenous minorities in those environs and habitats.
Many intensive forms of environmental exploitation and degradation not only exhaust the resources which provide local communities with their livelihood, but also undo the social structures which, for a long time, shaped cultural identity and their sense of meaning of life and community. The disappearance of a culture can be just as serious, or even more serious, than the disappearance of a species of plant or animal. The imposition of a dominant lifestyle linked to a single form of production can be just as harmful as the altering of ecosystems. (LS, 145)
With a greater awareness of the more complex social landscape with diverse forms of oppressions, we see in Catholic Social Teaching an emphasis given to a preferential option for the poor and to solidarity. This is more fully appreciated when, as described above in the first part of this paper, postmodern fragmentation has also found expression in the radical assertion of minorities for recognition, in militant fundamentalism, terroristic extremism, and national secessionism of minorities. John XXIII writes:
It should be noted that these minority groups, either because of their present situation which they are forced to endure, or because of past experiences, are often inclined to exalt beyond due measure anything proper to their own people, and to such a degree as to look down on things common to all mankind, as if the welfare of the human family. (PT 97)
Just as the Church’s Social Teaching recognizes the need to appreciate the unique reality, cultural identity and religious tradition of a particular group or people, it is also important to appreciate humanity’s commonly shared identity that becomes the basis for solidarity. It is in view of this assumption that the Church’s Social Teaching speaks of integral human development of every person and of the whole person. Development is not only for the majority, but for all, including minorities, who may have suffered exclusion or have been run over by development. It is in Pope Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio (1967) that we see this well articulated when he said “Development is the new name for peace” (PP 76, 87). Without this integral approach to people’s total well-being and development, what would result is division and conflict.