Fratelli tutti and the Debate around Fratelli tutti

Pope Francis released a new encyclical. Despite coming in at 43,000 words and only being available to the public for 24 hours, various commentators of varying stripes have assured me that this document is either the greatest challenge to modern society, or proof the Pope is some now not-so-secret Marxist.

Cards on the table, I have not yet read Fratelli tutti, not even a sentence.  Further cards on the table:  I have no plans on reading Fratelli tutti in the short or medium term future.  Yet that is also why you will hear me say little on this topic.  This is not out of some disdain for the Pope's take on Catholic Social teaching, a take that I actually find mostly orthodox, albeit filled with platitudes to the institutions/mechanisms of modern liberalism because the Church of today has more or less made peace with classical liberalism.  Make of that what you will.  One can see in the archives here and elsewhere I've written where I've defended not only Francis' particular right to speak on these issues, but viewed them as valuable.

So why am I not planning on reading it?  Because for crying out loud, its 43,000 words.  There's no way even 90% of the encyclical is that insightful at 43,000 words.  I have not done the math, but I'm willing to bet that the 3 encyclicals plus Evangelii Gaudium probably have as much if not more of a wordcount than the entire corpus of Leo XIII's social magisterium.  (And even if it turns out to be an exaggeration, its probably not that big of one.)  Leo XIII was wordy for his age.  Yet if one reads his encyclicals now, compared to modern ones, its amazing how succinct his writing is.

Yet if I do not plan on reading it, I do think there is something everyone should keep in mind.  The first point is that almost no Catholic reads an encyclical, and few Catholics have ever read encyclicals.  When asked to write an encyclical on the dogmatic principles of Christ's Kingship, Pius XI was openly contemptuous of the idea, writing:

For people are instructed in the truths of faith, and brought to appreciate the inner joys of religion far more effectually by the annual celebration of our sacred mysteries than by any official pronouncement of the teaching of the Church. Such pronouncements usually reach only a few and the more learned among the faithful; feasts reach them all; the former speak but once, the latter speak every year — in fact, forever. The church’s teaching affects the mind primarily; her feasts affect both mind and heart, and have a salutary effect upon the whole of man’s nature. Man is composed of body and soul, and he needs these external festivities so that the sacred rites, in all their beauty and variety, may stimulate him to drink more deeply of the fountain of God’s teaching, that he may make it a part of himself, and use it with profit for his spiritual life.

One can see this even from Francis' own pontificate.  Calling for days of worldwide fasting and reparation as calls mounted for the West to become involved in the Syrian Civil War probably achieved far more than writing a papal encyclical about the benefits of not escalating war.  While some take this attitude to be dismissive of the idea of an educated laity, its not that at all.  In my secular job, I've written training documents on technical matters for new employees.  One of the things I've learned to do is include a "presuppositions" section before the document starts, in which certain access and principles are assumed to be true before beginning.

Encyclicals are technical documents that have varying levels of norms and authorities, as well as requiring certain presuppositions before reading them.  Even assuming they speak clearly (which has always been a dubious proposition), their applicability to most things in life just isn't terribly relevant.  It isn't a surprise that most people look at these documents and shrug, even if they find nothing wrong with them.  As the Pope has morphed into "Catechist in Chief" (a trend that began with the brilliant Leo XIII), a higher value has been placed on encyclicals as a way for the pope to leave his stamp on the world, a value that has not been matched by the returns in any conceivable fashion.  If everyone internalized that paragraph from Pius, it wouldn't be hard to see why.

I think that is a better criticism of the encyclicals than LOLFRANCISISAMARXIST.  As someone who has been around traditionalism for two decades now, there has been an undeniable shift, at least in the circles of its opinion writers.  Back during the pontificate of JPII and even Benedict, traditionalists were far more worried about the dangers of Americanism and skeptical of classical liberalism and capitalism.  The SSPX silenced a priest who spoke a bit too glowingly of the founding of the American government. Sometimes this skepticism they veered into a hostility towards the very idea of a market and their political philosophy was that of the cosplaying absolutist.  Yet as traditionalism has gained greater acceptance, its made a certain accommodation with various political strains.  For decades, Thomas Woods was an outlier in traditionalism, a bit of a unique fellow in that he was a lover of the Latin Mass, yet also a hardcore libertarian who wrote for Lew Rockwell's website.  (Indeed, it was this libertarianism that led to a fallout with a lot of the traditionalist commentariat in general.)  If he wrote a lot of that stuff today, he'd probably find a far larger audience.  (Tim Gordon and Taylor Marshall are a very poor poor man's Thomas Woods.)

Whatever one thinks of this shift, its undoubtedly true that before Francis, a pope who spoke skeptically of classical liberalism and of the way the global economy is structured would find a lot of nodding from traditionalists.  Indeed, on the few instances when John Paul II did this (especially in the non-english warnings to European nations not to trade the slavery of communism for consumerism), trads nodded their head, while his conservative stenographers went to considerable lengths to act like the Pope didn't say what he just said.  I think there's a lot of wisdom in that skepticism, even if at times it went overboard.  I think we trads should appreciate that skepticism anew, even if it comes from a plainly flawed messenger as Francis.

By all means, don't read this encyclical.  Yet also don't comment on it if you haven't read it.  If you do read it, don't read it through the prism of a creeping libertarianism that is the pet hobby of a (I would wager) quite small subset of commentators.