B.A. Santamaria: The Power of One
by Veronica Brady
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 60
Autumn 1998

Whispering in the marketplace

CATHOLICISM REVEALS AT ONCE its greatest strength and its most terrible weakness in the face of modernity. On the one hand it has steadfastly refused to surrender to materialist and capitalist ideologies; on the other it has failed dismally to forge an effective alternative. Pope Leo XIII's great encyclical Rerum Novarum (perhaps the first modern encyclical) came close to pointing toward such an alternative. It sketched a view of the rights of workers to social justice in capitalist societies as a counter to Marxist claims about the evils of capitalism. John Paul II's Centesimus Annus echoed these themes, drawing on his major philosophical work, The Acting Person (Dordrecht, 1979). From this we see distant intimations of a possible Catholicism which could draw us out of modernity's ruthless iron cage of rationalism. It is a Catholicism which would give highest priority to the Christian ideal of personal integrity and authenticity as the primary source of the socially engaged self (see for example Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, Cambridge University Press, 1989, and Michael Ignatieff's The Needs of Strangers, Vintage, 1994). This ideal is far more than the liberal celebration of a positivist individualism. It is by acknowledging the pre-eminence of the spiritually unfathomable 'acting person' that social, political and economic structures may be enabled to operate. This sort of Catholicism would insist that it is the unique person, ultimately located in the very heart of God, who takes ethical precedence over all else. Christ's unwavering focus on loving the unique person, unconditionally, always being conscious of his or her sanctity-even at the expense of humanly contrived institutions and power structures-is central to this image of Meta-Catholicism.

Despite these movements within progressive Catholic thought, old Catholicism dug in its heels, often causing cruel suffering as a consequence. It has consistently and effectively resisted developing a moral and cultural opposition to modernity which would lead to a genuinely theological public policy. Thus many Catholics have been forced into a nostalgia for an imagined golden age.

This age is thought to have been disciplined and orderly, hierarchical and authoritative, blessed with a loyal laity which was willingly obedient to higher, non-secular things. It is a constructed order in which it is imaged everyone had a place and all knew their place. It contains none of the ambiguity and complexity that modernity thrusts upon us, where often we are obliged to choose between the lesser of evils rather than between good and evil. These nostalgic Catholics long for a return to the golden age to escape modernity's confusing and menacing realities.

To: Longing for the past

Allan Patience Allan Patience is Professor of Political Science at the Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne.