Hakluyt
01-16-2006, 01:02 AM
http://www.thetablet.co.uk/cgi-bin/register.cgi/tablet-01129
14/01/2006
John Paul’s debt to Marxism
Jonathan Luxmoore and Jolanta Babiuch
The late Pope is often portrayed as an enemy of the extreme Left, but an unpublished early work, Catholic Social Ethics, reveals that he was much less dismissive of the ideology prevalent in his native Poland than has recently been suggested
When a Polish supplementary tribunal for John Paul II’s beatification began work in Krakow this November, a key task was to examine the late Pope’s pre-papal writings, for the light they threw on his firmness of faith and loyalty to Catholic doctrine.
But there is uncertainty as to how objective the tribunal will be. Evidence exists that the young Karol Wojtyla nursed radical sympathies, and a passionate critique of capitalist injustices, that made him interested in Marxist ideals. Poland’s Catholic Church has discouraged interest in his unpublished texts, insisting they were not fully developed or intended for public consumption. Far from steeping himself in Marxist classics, church leaders insist, Wojtyla took his material from Catholic sources. Those who maintain this might consider a seemingly forgotten collection of Wojtyla’s lectures, bound in a limited typescript edition in the early 1950s. The two-volume Catholic Social Ethics has never been published and is not available at libraries in Poland. But it throws important light on the Pope’s background, and calls into question his image as a cradle anti-Communist.
In his monumental biography, Witness to Hope (1999), the American George Weigel dismisses the 511-page work in a mere footnote, claiming Wojtyla had used course outlines from an older colleague, Professor Jan Piwowarczyk (1889-1959), whose own work was published with a similar title in London in 1958-60, and that Wojtyla could not therefore be regarded as the author.
This contention is rejected by Polish experts on John Paul II. They insist that Catholic Social Ethics, although drawing on Piwowarczyk, is indeed Wojtyla’s work, and could significantly affect assessments of the future pontiff’s philosophical development. Cesary Ritter, deputy director of the John Paul II Institute at Poland’s Catholic University of Lublin, sees the work as an “academic sequel” to Wojtyla’s enthusiastic early writings on “worker priests” in France and Belgium, as well as to his 1949 play, Brother of our God, with its agonised musings over the rights and wrongs of revolutionary violence.
“There’s no question that Karol Wojtyla is the author – these lectures are distinctive and belong to the body of his work,” Mr Ritter said in a statement on behalf of the institute’s governing body. “They’re written in the ideological language of the 1950s, so they would need some explaining if published. But there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be, as a means of understanding the Pope’s intellectual path.”
Catholic Social Ethics is densely typed on cheap paper, and contains sections on Personalism, Liberalism and Individualism, as well as “Totalism” and “Solidarism”. Yet the bulk is written as a conscious response to Marxism. The detailed contents table includes subtitles such as “Communism in its Historical Dimension”, “The Issue of Revolution” and “Marxism’s Ethic of Class Struggle”.
The text confirms that the future Pope was an expert on Marxism by his early 30s. It strongly suggests he had also already thought out the strategy for winning a “moral victory” over Communist power, which he would put to use many years later. “In the contemporary Communist movement, the Church sees and acknowledges an expression of largely ethical goals,” Wojtyla concedes. “Pius XI has written that criticism of capitalism, and protest against the system of human exploitation of human work, is undoubtedly ‘the part of the truth’ which Marxism contains.”
When these words were written, Stalinist rule was at its height and dozens of Polish priests were in jail. A 1949 Vatican decree had barred church members from any dealings with Communists – “who show themselves, in teaching and actions, to be enemies of God, true religion and the Church of Christ”. But Karol Wojtyla was noted among students as an unusual lecturer. Ordained in 1946, he had studied in Rome, gaining an insight into Pius XII’s dilemmas as he confronted Eastern Europe’s newly installed communist regimes.
Wojtyla read Marxism through the prism of his philosophical training. The phenomenology he had encountered at the Jagiellonian in Krakow offered a kind of antidote. Whereas Marxism stressed the duty to change the world through revolutionary destruction, phenomenology taught the need to understand it first. While Marxism emphasised violent discontinuity – a new beginning after wasted centuries – phenomenology referred to traditions of thought back to antiquity.
Thanks to his work on Krakow’s Tygodnik Powszechny Catholic weekly, Wojtyla had also come into contact with personalism, which had made waves in 1950s Poland as a counter-proposition to Marxism. Personalism advocated engagement with the world to achieve social justice and human emancipation, but it gave these principles a Christian meaning, and offered answers to troubling questions about the Church’s place in society.
The influence of both schools is evident in Catholic Social Ethics. Instead of rejecting Marxist concepts, Wojtyla identifies their historical origins in Christian tradition, and shows the different meaning given to them by figures stretching back as far as St Thomas Aquinas. His aim, he states clearly, is not a “total criticism” of Marxist philosophy, but an analysis of how it has used or misused “ethical categories”.
Class struggle is the starting point. Catholicism cannot “agree with materialism” or the “primacy of economics”, Wojtyla says: the ability to “choose spiritual goodness” testifies to the “spiritual nature of the human will”. Yet Catholicism recognises that “various facts and historical processes” are economically determined. Achieving social justice is an element of “building God’s kingdom”. So a struggle that aims to achieve this “certainly does not contradict the love proclaimed by the Gospel”. Even the “evil that is class struggle” is justifiable to ensure a “just distribution of goods”.
“Every person has an undeniable right to struggle to defend what rightly belongs to him,” Wojtyla writes. “So does a social class. In a well-organised society, orientated to the common good, class conflicts are solved peacefully through reforms. But states that base their order on individualistic liberalism are not such societies. So when an exploited class fails to receive in a peaceful way the share of the common good to which it has a right, it has to follow a different path”.
Wojtyla departs from Marxism in the meaning he attaches to “class”. Whereas Marx defined classes economically, and the German sociologist Max Weber defined them as cultural phenomena, the future Pope sees them as a compound of both. A class is, according to Wojtyla, “a community of people linked by a similar attitude to the means of production and a similar form of cultural life”.
Wojtyla’s notion of struggle is different too. In Marxism, class struggle is a means of liberation – the “sacred duty of the proletariat”. But if Catholicism accepts the need for it, it does not see it as a “supreme ethical imperative”. Class struggle can help achieve the common good “only indirectly and marginally”. “Although Catholicism is aware of the importance of material and economic factors in the life of individual and society, it also postulates freedom of the human will,” Wojtyla continues. “This is why it sees the possibility of an evolutionary solution to inflamed social and economic issues. The struggle of oppressed classes against exploiting classes should be a stimulus ensuring this evolution occurs more quickly … But despite all the factors which divide people in society (such as cultural levels), or set them against each other (such as attitudes to the means of production), Catholic Social Ethics assumes there are other deeper, more fundamental factors which unite them and build solidarity.”
When it comes to demanding justice, however, Wojtyla is unequivocal. Society has “a strict right, even a duty” to ensure just governance, by controlling the exercise of power and criticising its mistakes. When this fails, society has a right to passive resistance. And when this fails, it has a final option: “active resistance against a legal but unjust power”.
As the authoritative text, Wojtyla cites Pius XI’s 1927 encyclical Nos es Muy Conocida, which had defended armed resistance against anti-Church atrocities committed by Mexico’s socialist regime a quarter-century before. As with a defensive war, active resistance can be justified as a malum necessarum, a “necessary evil”. Even then, Wojtyla draws a careful distinction between “active resistance” and revolution. Catholic moral theologians denied that “political revolution” – the kind envisaged by Marx – could be ethically justified. And they did so not because they were “conservative or opportunist”, but out of a “sense of responsibility”. They knew that “the revolutionary step carries grave consequences for the common good”.
The ability to dissect Marxism and reassemble it in a Christian form made Karol Wojtyla a potentially significant Catholic thinker. It would take him another two decades to perfect this approach in The Acting Person (1969) – a book that was studied, much to Wojtyla’s satisfaction, not only by Catholics but also by Communists, and is still widely seen as his most distinctive pre-papal philosophical work.
But Catholic Social Ethics served as a prototype for Wojtyla’s later efforts. When it was bound in Lublin in just a few copies, he had not yet found a coherent philosophy of his own. But he had thought out ways of reapplying Marxist concepts of alienation and parti-cipation in a Christian context.
Wojtyla had also set down the master concepts that would recur in his sermons in the Eighties. One was the need for “solidarity”, which became the name of the Polish movement that helped to bring Communism to a peaceful end in the 1980s.
Catholic Social Ethics confirms that the Church’s latter-day struggle with Communism was largely the Pope’s personal achievement, since it drew on insights and intuitions born in his own head. Previous popes had feared the potential of spontaneous social movements. By contrast, Wojtyla saw them as important forces whose creative energy could be directed for godly purposes. He saw Communism less as an enemy than as a misunderstanding – a misdirected turn towards a false conception of the world and humanity. To correct any mistake, one had first to understand it, to turn its illusory values into real ones. Despite his Christian interpretation, though, Wojtyla clearly empathised with Marxism’s analysis of capitalism, as can also be seen from the margin notes of his personal books in the Krakow curia.
Perhaps this explains why the Polish Church has been so reluctant to acknowledge the existence of Catholic Social Ethics, fearing it could be “misunderstood”. The few surviving copies are jealously guarded. Although the Lublin Institute has published several volumes of Wojtyla’s work, his 1950s lectures have not been included.
This could soon change. In the early 1990s, a three-man committee charged with custody of the Pope’s writings, headed by Cardinal Marian Jaworski of Lviv, commissioned another Lublin professor, Jerzy Galkowski, to prepare Catholic Social Ethics for publication. Cesary Ritter, the Institute director, says the project was put back in favour of the “more mature” writings Wojtyla had prepared for publication. But he agrees the work provides a key to understanding how the Pope developed a Christian answer to Marxism and should be published as part of a new edition of Wojtyla’s works.
It remains to be seen whether the Krakow Tribunal will include Catholic Social Ethics in its beatification proceedings. Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek, the Tribunal chairman, claims to know nothing about it, while Professor Andrzej Szostek, the Catholic University’s former rector, who is charged with collecting Wojtyla’s Polish writings, says the Tribunal will only consider texts which were published officially. If it does, it could end up selecting convenient data for a hagiography, where it could have revealed the full human passions of this most complex of personalities.
Jonathan Luxmoore and Jolanta Babiuch write for The Tablet from Warsaw. Their new book, Rethinking Christendom: Europe’s struggle for Christianity, is published by Gracewing.
14/01/2006
John Paul’s debt to Marxism
Jonathan Luxmoore and Jolanta Babiuch
The late Pope is often portrayed as an enemy of the extreme Left, but an unpublished early work, Catholic Social Ethics, reveals that he was much less dismissive of the ideology prevalent in his native Poland than has recently been suggested
When a Polish supplementary tribunal for John Paul II’s beatification began work in Krakow this November, a key task was to examine the late Pope’s pre-papal writings, for the light they threw on his firmness of faith and loyalty to Catholic doctrine.
But there is uncertainty as to how objective the tribunal will be. Evidence exists that the young Karol Wojtyla nursed radical sympathies, and a passionate critique of capitalist injustices, that made him interested in Marxist ideals. Poland’s Catholic Church has discouraged interest in his unpublished texts, insisting they were not fully developed or intended for public consumption. Far from steeping himself in Marxist classics, church leaders insist, Wojtyla took his material from Catholic sources. Those who maintain this might consider a seemingly forgotten collection of Wojtyla’s lectures, bound in a limited typescript edition in the early 1950s. The two-volume Catholic Social Ethics has never been published and is not available at libraries in Poland. But it throws important light on the Pope’s background, and calls into question his image as a cradle anti-Communist.
In his monumental biography, Witness to Hope (1999), the American George Weigel dismisses the 511-page work in a mere footnote, claiming Wojtyla had used course outlines from an older colleague, Professor Jan Piwowarczyk (1889-1959), whose own work was published with a similar title in London in 1958-60, and that Wojtyla could not therefore be regarded as the author.
This contention is rejected by Polish experts on John Paul II. They insist that Catholic Social Ethics, although drawing on Piwowarczyk, is indeed Wojtyla’s work, and could significantly affect assessments of the future pontiff’s philosophical development. Cesary Ritter, deputy director of the John Paul II Institute at Poland’s Catholic University of Lublin, sees the work as an “academic sequel” to Wojtyla’s enthusiastic early writings on “worker priests” in France and Belgium, as well as to his 1949 play, Brother of our God, with its agonised musings over the rights and wrongs of revolutionary violence.
“There’s no question that Karol Wojtyla is the author – these lectures are distinctive and belong to the body of his work,” Mr Ritter said in a statement on behalf of the institute’s governing body. “They’re written in the ideological language of the 1950s, so they would need some explaining if published. But there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be, as a means of understanding the Pope’s intellectual path.”
Catholic Social Ethics is densely typed on cheap paper, and contains sections on Personalism, Liberalism and Individualism, as well as “Totalism” and “Solidarism”. Yet the bulk is written as a conscious response to Marxism. The detailed contents table includes subtitles such as “Communism in its Historical Dimension”, “The Issue of Revolution” and “Marxism’s Ethic of Class Struggle”.
The text confirms that the future Pope was an expert on Marxism by his early 30s. It strongly suggests he had also already thought out the strategy for winning a “moral victory” over Communist power, which he would put to use many years later. “In the contemporary Communist movement, the Church sees and acknowledges an expression of largely ethical goals,” Wojtyla concedes. “Pius XI has written that criticism of capitalism, and protest against the system of human exploitation of human work, is undoubtedly ‘the part of the truth’ which Marxism contains.”
When these words were written, Stalinist rule was at its height and dozens of Polish priests were in jail. A 1949 Vatican decree had barred church members from any dealings with Communists – “who show themselves, in teaching and actions, to be enemies of God, true religion and the Church of Christ”. But Karol Wojtyla was noted among students as an unusual lecturer. Ordained in 1946, he had studied in Rome, gaining an insight into Pius XII’s dilemmas as he confronted Eastern Europe’s newly installed communist regimes.
Wojtyla read Marxism through the prism of his philosophical training. The phenomenology he had encountered at the Jagiellonian in Krakow offered a kind of antidote. Whereas Marxism stressed the duty to change the world through revolutionary destruction, phenomenology taught the need to understand it first. While Marxism emphasised violent discontinuity – a new beginning after wasted centuries – phenomenology referred to traditions of thought back to antiquity.
Thanks to his work on Krakow’s Tygodnik Powszechny Catholic weekly, Wojtyla had also come into contact with personalism, which had made waves in 1950s Poland as a counter-proposition to Marxism. Personalism advocated engagement with the world to achieve social justice and human emancipation, but it gave these principles a Christian meaning, and offered answers to troubling questions about the Church’s place in society.
The influence of both schools is evident in Catholic Social Ethics. Instead of rejecting Marxist concepts, Wojtyla identifies their historical origins in Christian tradition, and shows the different meaning given to them by figures stretching back as far as St Thomas Aquinas. His aim, he states clearly, is not a “total criticism” of Marxist philosophy, but an analysis of how it has used or misused “ethical categories”.
Class struggle is the starting point. Catholicism cannot “agree with materialism” or the “primacy of economics”, Wojtyla says: the ability to “choose spiritual goodness” testifies to the “spiritual nature of the human will”. Yet Catholicism recognises that “various facts and historical processes” are economically determined. Achieving social justice is an element of “building God’s kingdom”. So a struggle that aims to achieve this “certainly does not contradict the love proclaimed by the Gospel”. Even the “evil that is class struggle” is justifiable to ensure a “just distribution of goods”.
“Every person has an undeniable right to struggle to defend what rightly belongs to him,” Wojtyla writes. “So does a social class. In a well-organised society, orientated to the common good, class conflicts are solved peacefully through reforms. But states that base their order on individualistic liberalism are not such societies. So when an exploited class fails to receive in a peaceful way the share of the common good to which it has a right, it has to follow a different path”.
Wojtyla departs from Marxism in the meaning he attaches to “class”. Whereas Marx defined classes economically, and the German sociologist Max Weber defined them as cultural phenomena, the future Pope sees them as a compound of both. A class is, according to Wojtyla, “a community of people linked by a similar attitude to the means of production and a similar form of cultural life”.
Wojtyla’s notion of struggle is different too. In Marxism, class struggle is a means of liberation – the “sacred duty of the proletariat”. But if Catholicism accepts the need for it, it does not see it as a “supreme ethical imperative”. Class struggle can help achieve the common good “only indirectly and marginally”. “Although Catholicism is aware of the importance of material and economic factors in the life of individual and society, it also postulates freedom of the human will,” Wojtyla continues. “This is why it sees the possibility of an evolutionary solution to inflamed social and economic issues. The struggle of oppressed classes against exploiting classes should be a stimulus ensuring this evolution occurs more quickly … But despite all the factors which divide people in society (such as cultural levels), or set them against each other (such as attitudes to the means of production), Catholic Social Ethics assumes there are other deeper, more fundamental factors which unite them and build solidarity.”
When it comes to demanding justice, however, Wojtyla is unequivocal. Society has “a strict right, even a duty” to ensure just governance, by controlling the exercise of power and criticising its mistakes. When this fails, society has a right to passive resistance. And when this fails, it has a final option: “active resistance against a legal but unjust power”.
As the authoritative text, Wojtyla cites Pius XI’s 1927 encyclical Nos es Muy Conocida, which had defended armed resistance against anti-Church atrocities committed by Mexico’s socialist regime a quarter-century before. As with a defensive war, active resistance can be justified as a malum necessarum, a “necessary evil”. Even then, Wojtyla draws a careful distinction between “active resistance” and revolution. Catholic moral theologians denied that “political revolution” – the kind envisaged by Marx – could be ethically justified. And they did so not because they were “conservative or opportunist”, but out of a “sense of responsibility”. They knew that “the revolutionary step carries grave consequences for the common good”.
The ability to dissect Marxism and reassemble it in a Christian form made Karol Wojtyla a potentially significant Catholic thinker. It would take him another two decades to perfect this approach in The Acting Person (1969) – a book that was studied, much to Wojtyla’s satisfaction, not only by Catholics but also by Communists, and is still widely seen as his most distinctive pre-papal philosophical work.
But Catholic Social Ethics served as a prototype for Wojtyla’s later efforts. When it was bound in Lublin in just a few copies, he had not yet found a coherent philosophy of his own. But he had thought out ways of reapplying Marxist concepts of alienation and parti-cipation in a Christian context.
Wojtyla had also set down the master concepts that would recur in his sermons in the Eighties. One was the need for “solidarity”, which became the name of the Polish movement that helped to bring Communism to a peaceful end in the 1980s.
Catholic Social Ethics confirms that the Church’s latter-day struggle with Communism was largely the Pope’s personal achievement, since it drew on insights and intuitions born in his own head. Previous popes had feared the potential of spontaneous social movements. By contrast, Wojtyla saw them as important forces whose creative energy could be directed for godly purposes. He saw Communism less as an enemy than as a misunderstanding – a misdirected turn towards a false conception of the world and humanity. To correct any mistake, one had first to understand it, to turn its illusory values into real ones. Despite his Christian interpretation, though, Wojtyla clearly empathised with Marxism’s analysis of capitalism, as can also be seen from the margin notes of his personal books in the Krakow curia.
Perhaps this explains why the Polish Church has been so reluctant to acknowledge the existence of Catholic Social Ethics, fearing it could be “misunderstood”. The few surviving copies are jealously guarded. Although the Lublin Institute has published several volumes of Wojtyla’s work, his 1950s lectures have not been included.
This could soon change. In the early 1990s, a three-man committee charged with custody of the Pope’s writings, headed by Cardinal Marian Jaworski of Lviv, commissioned another Lublin professor, Jerzy Galkowski, to prepare Catholic Social Ethics for publication. Cesary Ritter, the Institute director, says the project was put back in favour of the “more mature” writings Wojtyla had prepared for publication. But he agrees the work provides a key to understanding how the Pope developed a Christian answer to Marxism and should be published as part of a new edition of Wojtyla’s works.
It remains to be seen whether the Krakow Tribunal will include Catholic Social Ethics in its beatification proceedings. Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek, the Tribunal chairman, claims to know nothing about it, while Professor Andrzej Szostek, the Catholic University’s former rector, who is charged with collecting Wojtyla’s Polish writings, says the Tribunal will only consider texts which were published officially. If it does, it could end up selecting convenient data for a hagiography, where it could have revealed the full human passions of this most complex of personalities.
Jonathan Luxmoore and Jolanta Babiuch write for The Tablet from Warsaw. Their new book, Rethinking Christendom: Europe’s struggle for Christianity, is published by Gracewing.