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On Reading Evangelium Vitae as a Social Encyclical

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Vivian Boland OP
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Extract

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John Paul II’s recent letter on faith and reason is the thirteenth encyclical of his twenty year papacy. Three of the thirteen are social encyclicals in the traditional sense. They explicitly place themselves within the line of social encyclicals which stretches from Rerum Novarum, published by Leo XIII in 1891, to Centesimus Annus, John Paul II’s encyclical to mark the centenary of Leo’s letter in 1991. This line of encyclicals has dealt with social, economic and political questions and reflects all the great events and changes of the 20th century. John Paul II marked the ninetieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum by publishing Laborem Exercens (1981) and the twentieth anniversary of Paul Vi’s great encyclical Populorum Progressio was honoured with the publication of Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987).

But John Paul’s encyclicals include also a number which might be termed ‘cultural encyclicals’ or ‘encyclicals of cultural critique’. Where the traditional social encyclicals, charting a middle road between the extremes of communism and capitalism, work within the general social and democratic drift of twentieth century development, these cultural encyclicals sound a more critical and, it may be, a more radical note. The letters I include under this rubric are Veritatis Splendor (1993), Evangelium Vitae (1995) and Fides et Ratio (1998). It is the middle one I want to consider here.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 80 , Issue 936 , February 1999 , pp. 73 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

Footnotes

1

I am grateful to those who took part in the 1998 autumn seminar at the Dominican House of Studies, Tallaght, and to the community of Saint Dominic's Priory, London, who listened to earlier versions of this paper and helped to improve it in the discussions that followed.

References

2 On this point see Leszek Kolakowski's reflections on ‘The Sacred and Death’ in Religion (Fontana Masterguides, 1982) pp. 152–160Google Scholar.

3 Maclntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory (London 1981), p.245Google Scholar.

4 Parsons, Susan, ‘Feminist ethics’, in Hoose, Bernard, ed., Christian Ethics. An Introduction (London 1998), pp.135–148Google Scholar.

5 Timothy J.Gorringe, ‘Property’, in Hoose, op.cit, pp.173–185.

6 Joseph Selling, “The human person”, in Hoose, op.cit., pp.95–109

7 Of the works of Stanley Hauerwas, for example, note especially Vision and Virtue (1974), A Community of Character (1981) and The Peaceable Kingdom (1983).

8 Taylor, Charles, The Ethics of Authenticity (Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1991), pp.9–10Google Scholar.

9 See for example J.Perry, Michael, ‘Religion, Politics and Human Rights’, in Treacy, Bernard OP and Whyte, Gerry, editors, Religion, Morality and Public Policy (Dominican Publications, Dublin, 1995), pp. 16–41Google Scholar.

10 The Ethics of Authenticity, p. 120.

11 See most recently Taylor, Charles, Multiculturalism. Examining the Politics of Recognition. Edited and introduced by Gutmann, Amy, with contributions by Appiah, K. Anthony, Habermas, Jü;rgen, Rockefeller, Steven C., Walzer, Michael and Wolf, Susan (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1994)Google Scholar.

12 Dodds, E.R., Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety. Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine (New York and London, 1965), p.138CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Dodds, op.cit., p. 138, n. 1.

14 One of these signs of hope is ‘growing public opposition to the death penalty’ (EV 27). Evangelium Vitae itself seems to mark an advance in Catholic thinking about capital punishment: EV 56.

15 Leszek Kolakowski, op.cit., p. 155.

16 Paul VI stressed that the modem world needs witnesses more than it needs preachers or teachers (Evangelii Nuntiandi, 1975). The credibility of the Church's social and political message is connected with the way the Church runs its own affairs: see now Vallely, Paul, The New Politics: Catholic Social Teaching for the Twenty‐First Century (SCM Press, London, 1998)Google Scholar.