Word: niebuhrs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Roman Catholic Church, Niebuhr writes in the Christian Century, "is not entirely foolish" when it sees rebellion against the law of God in the disintegration of the medieval mixture of Scripture and philosophy, political power and spiritual prestige. "From the standpoint of the Mater et Magistra encyclical," he says, "what could be clearer than that the path from the Thomistic theory of a just price based upon labor value, to the theory of Adam Smith, guaranteeing social justice by the automatic balances of a free market, descends steeply from the heights of justice to the morass of private greed...
Justice & Love. Pope John's encyclical ignores its own indebtedness to some of the moral achievements of the welfare state and foreign aid, says Niebuhr. But, he writes, "before we ungenerously attribute to conscious and unconscious cribbing from a culture it ostensibly abhors the massive achievement of modern Catholicism in adjusting to the realities of modern industrialism," it is necessary to recognize that Catholicism has traditions that make this adjustment possible...
...Roman Church, writes Niebuhr, balances concern for the individual with concern for the health of the community, which is to be achieved by what the encyclical calls "objective justice and its driving force, love." Says he: "To assert that justice is the norm and 'love the driving force' is certainly a theory of the relation of...love to the social order preferable to some Protestant and secular theories...
...Impressive Survival." Niebuhr, who has long lashed out against the perfectionist strain in Protestantism, further admires the Roman Catholic Church for having relegated its perfectionists and ascetics to the monasteries, where they cannot mess up the proper processes of society, full of contingencies and compromises...
Pope John's encyclical displays "dated rather than eternal wisdom," Niebuhr believes, in opposing birth control and ignoring the fast pace of population increase. But he refrains from laboring the point, "lest the professional anti-Catholics take too much courage. They regard the Roman church as a monster. It is really a very impressive survival from medievalism, which has managed to apply its ancient wisdom to the comfort of a harassed generation in a nuclear and technical...