"Fratelli Tutti" and the Good Samaritan Society

First Things, 23 October 2020

Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis’s recent encyclical on “fraternity and social friendship,” will generate work for theologians for some time. The Holy Father employs formulations that will require study in order to be harmonized with previous teaching. It is important to note those formulations, but also to grasp the larger social vision that the pope proposes.

There is, for example, the consideration of life imprisonment as a “secret death penalty” (268), ratcheting up the “firm rejection of the death penalty” (269) itself. And there is the statement, in a brief footnote that garnered much attention, that “we no longer uphold” Augustine’s teaching on just war (note #242). Fratelli Tutti suggests that it might be time to set aside “the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war’,” given that “its risks will probably always be greater than its supposed benefits” (258).  

Leo XIII taught in Rerum Novarum that “as a principle private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable.” The Catholic tradition since has defended private property subject to the “universal destination” of all goods; indeed private property is the instrument by which the universal destination of all goods is best, but not always, realized. Fratelli Tutti states “the Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable” (120), which may be saying the same thing with different emphasis, or something novel. Pope Francis does describe private property as “a secondary natural right” and states that “each country belongs to the foreigner” (124). 

In Deus Caritas Est, Benedict XVI insisted that diakonia (the works of service commanded by charity) is as much a part of the Church’s identity as the kerygma and the liturgy. Making careful distinctions, he clarified that the task of politics is justice, while the mission of the Church is love. Fratelli Tutti conflates the two, proposing “political love”: “If someone helps an elderly person cross a river, that is a fine act of charity. The politician, on the other hand, builds a bridge, and that too is an act of charity” (186). But if infrastructure projects are charity, what is left, say, for distributive justice? Pope Francis also quotes St. John Chrysostom, who treats care for the poor as justice, not charity (119), leading to some confusion about whether the state promotes justice or charity.

Finally, taking in the fraternal humanism of the encyclical as a whole, it is possible to ask whether the Church does not risk losing her identity to become “a charitable NGO” as Pope Francis vividly warned against in his very first homily as pope. A Church-cum-NGO has given into a “demonic worldliness,” according to the Holy Father. 

So there is much sorting out to be done in what Austen Ivereigh, author of two fine biographies of Pope Francis, calls a “potpourri.” Ivereigh considers this encyclical a “valedictory” which “closes out the teaching of this pontificate.”

With such a range of topics, it might be better to consider instead the social vision of Pope Francis as a whole.

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