Rerum Novarum All Over Again

The Holy Father is to answer Bernard Jenkin and so many others on Monday, when he will powerfully restate the Church's Social Teaching.

Those who present themselves as Catholics while dissenting from the Church's Teaching on social justice and on peace are no less pernicious than those who present themselves as Catholics while dissenting from the Church's Teaching on bioethical and sexual matters. The present Pope and his immediate predecessor are peerless, except in relation to each other, when it comes to expounding and explaining the catholicity of these considerations; in layman's terms, how they are all connected.

Most of the Italian Left has been subsumed into the Democratic Party, which has elected as its President Rosy Bindi, late of Azione Cattolica and Democrazia Cristiana. Her election, together with that of her preferred candidate for Leader, is an immensely positive sign, and she herself deserves much credit for having reached out in this way, when we consider that she lost at least one close friend to the Red Brigades. Their erstwhile supporters exist on the fringes of her major new party. But its internal electoral results leave no doubt as to where its centre of gravity lies, as to what is its mainstream.

The Italian Democrats sit with the British Labour Party in the European Parliament, in a Group which has changed its name in order to accommodate, especially, those Democrats with Christian Democratic backgrounds. Let us hope that this fraternity will have a significant impact on the party famously "owing more to Methodism than to Marx", the historic British vehicle of Social Catholicism, and still the preferred electoral choice of the clear majority of British Catholics.

Many post-War Italian Christian Democrats identified strongly with the Attlee Government's domestic programme, although they also wished to see an Italy outside both NATO and the Soviet Bloc, a bridge between East and West. Domestically and internationally, and complete with the strong admiration for British Labour at home, such was also Jacob Kaiser's post-War vision for a reunited Germany. A vision, sadly, never realised. Not yet, anyway.

It was not by chance that the New Deal was so strongly supported by very devoutly Catholic Americans of German, Irish, Italian, Polish and other extraction. The witness of Bob Santamaria in Australia is also of the utmost importance, even if, sometimes, as a warning. His Wikipedia entry is surprisingly good. Do take a look at it.

Who, within the Church or the ecclesial communities as well as without, wants to keep Christianity "out of politics"? Those who are horrified at such concepts as compassion for the poor, disgust at wars of aggression, revulsion at the lying of countries into such wars and at gargantuan personal profiteering from them, hostility to drugs and to sexual promiscuity, and so on.

Those are unable to forgive the ultimately successful critiques, lived out as anything properly theological is by definition, both of apartheid South Africa and various Nazi-harbouring monetarist regimes in Latin America, and of Marxism in general and the Soviet Union in particular. Leaving aside fringe aberrations, it was the churches, in specifically theological terms, that opposed Botha and Pinochet without siding with Brezhnev, and which opposed Brezhnev without siding with Botha and Pinochet.

No one else managed that, because no one else had the necessary resources, which were and are theological. Those resources alone are able to critique the whole of the indivisible campaign of vandalism that has been waged socially since the 1960s, socially and economically since the 1980s, and socially, economically and constitutionally since 1997.