John Paul I and Populorum Progressio
Updated July 31, 2009 - I revised this recent post because due to my reading, it seems that this subject and John Paul I’s treatment of it is even more important than I first imagined.
One of the members of the heavenly choir who must be most happy at the appearance of Charity in Truth is John Paul I. Luciani was always very attentive to the Church’s social teachings. And especially to Populorum Progressio, the 1967 encyclical by Paul VI on which Benedict based his own just-published letter. Luciani based much of his own thought on Pope’s Paul’s encyclical. He commented on it at the time of its first appearance, and ten years later, in 1977, he recalled it as being like “one of the tongues of fire” that descended on the apostles at Pentecost, because like those tongues of fire, “it too put forth light, strength, and heat, it too was addressed to all peoples and treats the problems of all peoples.”(1)
Luciani’s own attention to the needs of the poor in the Third World was one of the hallmarks of his episcopate in Vittorio Veneto and in Venice. He also fortunately lived long enough to give a shout-out to Populorum Progressio as Pope. It was during his last public audience the day before he died.
I think there is something important about his few simple words that day that tie them to Benedict’s encyclical. He too spoke about Populorum Progressio in the context of love. That is, he saw the teaching of Paul VI revolving around the twin poles of justice and love. But his talk that day was about love, and that is the context in which he put the encyclical. John Paul I had set out to give talks on each of the three theological virtues (faith, hope and charity) and four moral or cardinal virtues (justice, prudence, temperance and fortitude). Perhaps it’s a good thing that it was during his talk on love, rather than the one on justice, that he spoke about the encyclical, for he didn’t live long enough to deliver the one on justice.
Why is this so important? Well, according to some (such as this article), in Populorum Progressio, Paul VI departed from the traditional balance of charity and justice in Catholic social teaching, to favor an outright emphasis on justice and even the taking of specific positions on government intervention in the economy, limitations on the private property of the wealthy, and the redistribution of wealth from poor nations to rich ones — all positions that some identified with leftist political positions and the solutions of technocrats. What about old-fashioned Christian charity? The same people see Benedict’s new encyclical as a return to sanity with its emphasis on charity.
I doubt that Paul VI himself saw his encyclical this way, and, from his words that day, it’s clear that his immediate successor didn’t either.
Here are John Paul I’s words:
And how [are we to love our neighbor]? Not only in our words, but in our actions. We will take an exam at the end of our lives, and Jesus has already said what the questions he will ask us will be. I was hungry in the persons of the least of my brothers: did you give me anything to eat? I was sick, I was a prisoner, did you come to visit me? These are the questions. Here we will have to give an answer (cf. Mt. 25:34).
Taking these words and some others from the Bible, the Church has made two lists, seven corporal works of mercy, and seven spiritual ones. They are not complete. We should update them. For example: hunger. Today it is no longer a question only of this or that individual. It is whole peoples who are hungry. We all remember the great words of the great Pope Paul VI. “The peoples who are hungry are making a dramatic appeal to the peoples who live in opulence. The Church shudders at this cry of anguish and calls on everyone to respond with love to his brother.” (Populorum Progressio, no. 3) And then, here justice is united to love. Because the Pope says, still in Populorum Progressio: “Private property is not a undeniable and absolute right for anyone. No one has the right to be able to make use of his goods exclusively for his own benefit, when others are dying because they have nothing.” (Ibid., no. 22). Hence “every debilitating arms race is an intolerable scandal” (Ibid., no. 53). . . In the light of these words, we must ask ourselves not only as nations, but as private individuals, especially we who are members of the Church: have we really carried out the plan of Jesus, who has said: “Love your neighbor as yourself”?(2)
By quoting those ringing words of Paul’s work, John Paul I made it clear that the principle it was based on was love: the cry from the heart of Christians responding to brothers and sisters in need. Also of note is his insistence that we must move from a purely individual concept of charity to one that equally embraced individuals and whole peoples, another thing he had in common with both Paul and Benedict.
The main part of his talk, which I’ve translated above, was in Italian. Here he is, saying it in English for the English-speaking pilgrims, from 2:18 to 3:18 (As far as I know, there isn’t any actual video of this part of the audience, so I put the audio together with images and other video):
A transcription, for those who might have trouble following his English (which he had only recently learned to speak)
There is also love of neighbor. These two loves are twins and they go together. Jesus spoke about the importance of loving our neighbors when he said: “I was hungry and you gave me food.” And Paul VI reminded us that there are whole peoples who are hungry and waiting for our fraternal love. Private property is not an absolute right, and the arms race is a scandal. From these things, we can see that as individuals and peoples we have still not fulfilled the command of Jesus: to love our neighbors as ourselves.
Many people may have wondered as I have what a social encyclical by Pope John Paul I might have been like. If we can believe the “person in Rome,” the anonymous source whose account was published in Camillo Bassotto’s book Il mio cuore è ancora a Venezia (My Heart is Still in Venice), he did indeed plan to write one, and from the description the Pope gave of it, it would have been very much along the lines of Populorum Progressio:
‘I will write and speak on “The poor and poverty in the world.” From the lands of famine and drought, of hunger and epidemics, voices are incessantly raised asking for help. The peoples of hunger, where the children die by thousands every day, are appealing to the peoples and the cities of opulence. There are peoples in the heart of Africa, in the countries of South America and in the communities of Vietnam and Cambodia that are struggling for survival, they are the poorest, the most wretched on earth. Those forms of poverty are the scandal of the western world, of the rich and of the Christians. The rich peoples must give life to a chain of solidarity and justice which will drastically reduce the debt of the peoples of the Third World: we must institute a vast worldwide network of exchanges and cooperation for the rebirth, development and independence and the religious, economic, cultural and racial freedom of those peoples who for centuries have been the prey and the servants of Europe and of the West. There will not be peace until justice is done to the underprivileged peoples.(3)
Much has happened in regard to poverty, the globalized consciousness of Christians, and especially the growing culture of death, that makes Charity in Truth a fitting update to Populorum Progressio. If Pope John Paul I had lived, his social encyclicals certainly would have done so too.
(1) “La Populorum Progressio dieci anni dopo,” Homily for the feast of Pentecost, June 6, 1977, in Albino Luciani /Pope John Paul I Opera Omnia 8:143.
(2) The text is from L’Osservatore Romano, September 28, 1978; but I have also followed the recording of the Pope’s words (which sometimes differs slightly from the official text because the Pope delivered it from memory); the video and audio are available here on YouTube, courtesty of Italian TV RAI; the translation from the Italian is mine
(3) Camillo Bassotto, Il mio cuore è ancora a Venezia (Venice, 1990).
