Word: populorum
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Pope Paul has confounded critics by his basic dichotomy of views: conservative in doctrine and theology, progressive in matters of administration and social involvement. For example, soon after he excoriated laissez-faire capitalism in his encyclical Populorum Progressio, he left Roman Catholic liberals bitterly disappointed by his decision to uphold priestly celibacy. Many of the same liberals were delighted last week as Paul ordered one of the most sweeping changes in Roman Catholic church administration made by any Pope in the past four centuries...
...last week, declared Paul VI in Populorum Progressio (On the Development of Peoples), the fifth encyclical of his 45-month pontificate. The fourth major document of the Roman Catholic Church in the past six years to deal with socioeconomic problems,* the 12,000-word encyclical was in some ways the Pope's most striking pronouncement. In it, he gave unexpected support to government-sponsored birth control programs (see cover story). Absent from the encyclical was the usual stream of hedging qualifiers that in France have earned him the nickname "the Pope of Buts." Instead, the document had a ringing...
Natural Right. Populorum Progressio shifts considerably to the left of previous papal encyclicals in its criticism of private property. In his celebrated Rerum Novarum of 1891, Pope Leo XIII argued that economic reform must take into account "the inviolability of private property"; Pope John's Mater et Magistra likewise termed private ownership "a natural right" of man. Paul, on the other hand, declared that property ownership "does not constitute for anyone an absolute and unconditional right. No one is justified in keeping for his exclusive use what he does not need when others lack necessities. The right to property...
...capitalism were, understandably enough, endorsed with enthusiasm by Europe's Communist press. France's L'Humanité declared that "the evils that the encyclical calls attention to" are those that "Marxists have been calling attention to for more than a century." In fact, parts of Populorum Progressio had the strident tone of an early 20th century Marxist polemic-which, to some readers, was precisely its flaw...