Mirror of Justice

This is the seventh installment of our examination of John Allen’s book, The Future Church.This time, we consider with Allen the Church in relation to globalization.

Allen begins his discussion illustrating the Janus-faced leviathan of globalization with descriptions of two Indian teen-aged girls, one wealthy and the other poor. It is a fact that while the past few decades have brought wealth and prosperity to many formerly impoverished countries, there remains a global underclass that is poor, famine stricken, disease-ridden, and oppressed. Allen notes that “1.2 billion people still live on less that $1 a day. Half of the planet lives on less than $2 a day.” Allen suggests that it has become increasingly evident that the world trade regime cannot be relied upon to provide a solution to the problems of global poverty and social injustice.

(5) Migrants and Refugees. This topic was discussed in a previous chapter.

(6)   The Internet. Internet usage continues to grow, and wired connectivity is bringing telecommunication to remote regions for the first time. Yet experts also warn of a growing digital divide. Allen notes that “only 3.6 percent of Africans use the internet, a thin elite atop a vast ‘unplugged’ majority.” (279)

What it Means?

Allen offers some predictions with varying degrees of confidence.

3. Growing tensions with the American-style capitalism. Here, Allen quotes Pope Benedict XVI, “The conviction that the economy must be autonomous, that it must be shielded from ‘influences’ of a moral character, has led man to abuse the economic process in a thoroughly destructive way.”

4. “Horizontal Catholicism” is the term that Allen uses to describe the growing influence on the Church’s public role of non-hierarchical and decentralized organizations and affiliations. Although he does not specifically mention the importance of social networks and viral distributions, the connection seems clear.

2. Financial Accountability in the Church. More modern accounting and auditing of Church finances is badly needed, according to Allen.

3. Multi-National Corporation theology. Allen suggests the need for a theological understanding of the multi-national corporation that leaves behind the Marxist/capitalist dialectic polemics. The new MNCs are new to human experience. They are vastly powerful aggregations of wealth and influence, responsive to forces that are not well understood (as the global financial crisis indicates). And, they are growing in political influence, gaining power through political processes as well as markets. Traditional legal analysis of corporate speech may miss the subtly of the threats posed by MNCs (as Rick points out in his recent post). Allen suggests that a careful, theologically informed, consideration of the nature of the MNC is urgently needed.

Dynamic Diplomacy and Disinvestment. Catholicism is the majority or near majority religion in many nations, and notably in the African Great Lakes region. Catholics can exercise political and economic influence, either through formal structures or decentralized, informal associations and market behavior. This could lead to more dynamic interaction between the Church and governments in areas such as diplomacy, and in markets through selective investments.

Long-shot Consequences

Avignon in Africa. Might a pope someday relocate temporarily in Africa? It is possible, Allen says.

My Take:

1. Do we need to give greater attention to the destabilizing influences of globalization on families, both in developing and developed nations?

2. Is the "autonomy" that Selya Benhabib has described as the emerging "cosmopolitan norm" ultimately incompatible with a Catholic conception of the person? (This seems likely to me). Will that ultimately create conflicts in cooperating with the United Nations?

3. What sorts of structural changes are needed in the global trade and finance regimes to promote social justice? And, what resources do Catholics have to bring about these changes?

Mary, Table of Intellectual Faith

Happy New Year everyone! 

Fr. Araujo rightly observes the tension between the types of rationality that dominate contemporary legal reasoning and the types of reasoning that Catholics see as harmonious with faith.  His question for us points deeper into the nature and structure of legal reasoning and the values that it advances. 

John Paul II was particularly aware of the tensions between scientific rationality and the faithful Catholic life. In Fides et Ratio, he wrote that Mary, the Seat of Wisdom, is the “sure haven for all who devote their lives to the pursuit of wisdom.” (108) The encyclical interprets her “unqualified yes to Gabriel’s message as a leap of faith that made possible the salvation of all persons.”  It is this parable of Mary that illustrates the proper relation of faith and reason that Catholic philosophers should seek to emulate. Just as she put aside her worldly concerns so that “the Word might take on flesh and become one of us,” so too should the faithful Catholic philosopher offer natural reason in the service of the divine. The encyclical notes that the “ancients” saw Mary as the “table of intellectual faith. In her they saw a suitable image of true philosophy and realized that they must be philosophizing with Mary.” Taken in this light, Catholic thought is engaged in the pursuit of true wisdom when it thinks like Mary thought.

Imagine the full human range of reason and emotion that Mary would have experienced. The feelings of joy, fear, confidence, self-doubt, pride, humility, triumph, wonder, awe, and mystery. What were Mary’s self-understandings? Surely, her heart and mind were united in her affirmation of her role in God’s plan. Mary knew what the modern world has only recently begun to re-discover, that rationality and affectivity are inseparable (see for example, Antonio Damasio’s Descartes' Error).

The reduction of the fullness of human reason to the dispassionate discursive rationality of scientific inquiry is particularly troublesome for lawyers. In her interesting book, The Language of Law School, the linguistic anthropologist, Elizabeth Mertz, suggests that legal education, particularly in the first year, promotes objective, dispassionate modes of legal analyses, which denude the student of moral intuitions and empathetic emotion. What’s more, this sort of disengagement from moral feeling may be necessary for the professional formation of the contemporary America lawyer. Nonetheless, when legal education and legal reasoning obscure the fullness of human wisdom in favor of instrumentalism, consumerism, and fanciful conceptions of autonomy, we should rightly be aghast, because as St. Augustine taught, the emotional detachment of the Stoic is fundamentally incompatible with a faithful Christian life.