Pacem in Terris Lecture Series
Inaugural Lecture
October 10, 2003
The encyclical Pacem in Terris was most likely conceived during the late night hours of October 23-24, 1962. It was at the very still point, the eye of the hurricane, of the Cuban missile crisis. The world was on the brink of nuclear war, a war that Robert McNamara later said would have killed two-and-half million people in its opening salvo. It was during this night that Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, Pope John XXIII, whom Catholics now call Blessed, passed back and forth between his desk and his private chapel. He was composing a message, according to his secretary, that would help to bring Kennedy and Khrushchev into agreement and prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction far beyond any that we confront today.1
The encyclical actually saw the light of day five and half months later, in Holy Week, 1963, forty years ago last April. It was, in effect, the last will and testament of the Pope. He was already suffering from inoperable cancer. He died less than two months later, on June 3, just minutes after the crowd filling St. Peter’s Square had completed a Mass for the sick. The words of dismissal, sounding over the loudspeakers, could be clearly heard in the dying Pope’s bedroom: “Ite, missa est.”2
There are aspects of these events that are etched in my own memory. The bitter editorial I wrote for the Loyola University student newspaper, for instance, expressing the profound sense of helplessness that so many Americans felt during the Cuban missile crisis. I remember the issuing of the encylical and the death, so soon after, of the Pope, mourned as no other pope had been in modern times.
In many ways, these events seem so distant — “Ite, missa est,” for example, the Mass in Latin. Yet much of that time remains so very near: Nations remain subject to the law of fear that Pacem in Terris tried to overcome. People still seek the human rights that Pacem in Terris outlined so extensively. The question is still posed if the world can evolve a global public authority adequate to serve the “universal common good” that Pacem in Terris so emphatically urged.
Pacem in Terris was embraced by non-Catholic readers as no previous encyclical had been. One reason for this reception was the Pope himself. When Hannah Arendt later wrote about him, she titled her essay “A Christian on St. Peter’s Chair,” as though that were in itself an astounding miracle, if not a contradiction in terms.3
Another reason for the welcome was the desperate need for some resounding word that, to borrow an image from George Orwell, could break, like a pickax, the frozen ice of the Cold War.
A third reason was the surprise, sometimes mixed with a bit of condescension, that the Catholic church and especially the papacy, should be strongly affirming basic rights and freedoms that it had so often denounced or at best minimized. Remember, this was two-and-a-half years before the Second Vatican Council would promulgate, not without considerable delays and difficulty, Dignitatis Humanae, the Declaration on Religious Liberty.
Pacem in Terris may actually have benefited from what campaign strategists attempt to manipulate — low expectations. Of course it was preceded two years earlier by Pope John XXIII’s other major social encyclical, Mater et Magistra. But it is sometimes forgotten that the pope?s predecessor, Pius XII, despite the political controversy that still swirls about him, had issued various brief encyclicals appealing for peace or protesting Communist persecution and dictatorship; but the major extended encyclicals associated with his nearly two decades on the throne of Peter — such as Mystici Corporis Christi, Divino Afflante Spiritu, Mediator Dei, and Humani Generis — focused on matters of Catholic doctrine and discipline such as the Mystical Body, modern Scripture scholarship, the liturgy, and the church’s teaching authority. For encyclicals addressing social, political, and economic developments at length one had to reach back to the 1930s and Pius XI’s Quadregesimo Anno, on social reform, or Non Abbiamo Bisogno and Mit Brennender Sorge, on opposition to fascism and Nazism.
Finally there was the fact that Pope John had himself reached out. For the first time in history, a papal encyclical was addressed not only to the bishops, clergy, and faithful but “to all men of good will.”
So near — and yet so distant. I hesitate to think what might have transpired if I had begun by addressing you as “all men of good will.”
Yet it is worth noting that among what the encyclical called the “three distinctive characteristics” of the age, the second was that “women are now taking part in public life” and demanding “rights befitting a human person both in domestic and public life.”4
The encyclical also stressed the universality and equality of rights of all people and included, in its extensive list of rights, “the right to set up a family, with equal rights and duties for man and woman, and also the right to follow a vocation to the priesthood or the religious life.”5 I am sure that Pope John meant to break new ground for women. I doubt that he recognized just how combustible those various notions, when placed in proximity, could be.
The other distinctive characteristics of the age. according to the encyclical, were first the arrival of working people into the political, social, and cultural mainstream, something that had undoubtedly occurred in post-Depression, post-World War II Europe and North America far more than the rest of the world, and finally the end of colonial rule, the recognition of newly independent nations, the rejection of ancient assumptions about human superiority or inferiority on grounds of social status, political privilege, wealth, sex, or race.
“Racial discrimination,” the encyclical declared, “can in no way be accepted.” Not exactly an earthshaking statement today. But, again, remember that this was five months before the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s March on Washington and much longer before the United States Congress passed major civil rights legislation that overthrew the legal apartheid existing in the American South.
Likewise much of Part II of Pacem in Terris, on the nature of political authority, its relationship to the common good, the rights and duties of individuals, the need for constitutions and public participation, and so on, may seem like an obvious civics lesson today. It was written, however, in the context of claims by many in states newly emerged from colonial rule that the principles of constitutional liberalism and democracy were irrelevant to their cultures or circumstances, or were outdated Western imports. Today, those claims have lost their luster, although they have not disappeared.
A contemporary reader may very well find the argument of Pacem in Terris about authority, common good, and even human rights at one and the same time persuasive and yet arid and abstract, at least until it touches earth with concrete examples. In addressing the wider world and its frank embrace of human rights, this was a new kind of papal document. Yet in its style and methodology, it was the last of an old kind. It made its case in largely deductive, natural-law terms. As Charles Curran has pointed out, “in the discussions of peace in this document no appeal is made to Christian warrants such as grace, Christian reconciliation, or the gift of Jesus and the Spirit to the disciples.”6 There is an irony here. In principle, this methodology is meant to be accessible to all reasoning people; in practice it often sounds more enclosed within a distinctly Catholic world of discourse than do more explicit appeals to the heritage of Scripture and faith.
Having lightly sketched, I hope in very positive terms, these aspects of Pope John and Pacem in Terris, I have to make a confession. I don’t like encyclicals. No, that is not quite right. I merely do not seem to like encyclicals as much as many fellow Catholics do.
Catholics are expected to give encyclicals serious attention and to disagree with their major pronouncements only for serious, well-considered, conscientiously held reasons. But the degree of authority with which a particular matter is taught in an encyclical is not indicated by the encyclical form itself but by the subject matter and how it is set forth. So encyclicals can contain statements of the weightiest authority side by side with expositions to which Catholics owe primarily a respectful hearing but not necessarily much more.
That hardly describes what has frequently been the practice. Marx called religion the opiate of the people. Perhaps encyclicals are the opiate of the faithful. So often they operate to stifle thought, not stimulate it. Few religious documents are so little read but so regularly quoted. We mine them for proof texts, to back up our own political or religious opinions with papal authority. We celebrate what we like. We minimize what we don’t. They either make us lazy, or they turn us into lawyers.
Not surprisingly, Pacem in Terris, like other encyclicals, is selectively read to illustrate the progress of papal social teaching as some Catholic thinkers conceive it. Michael Novak reads that movement as a progress toward the entrepreneurial, self-reliant virtues and the liberal, free-market institutions of democratic capitalism. The encyclical’s extensive list of rights, including many economic and social rights still quite controversial in the United States, is nonetheless assimilated by him to the American Bill of Rights.7 For many Catholic pacifists, Pacem in Terris’s narrowing of the grounds for just war and its condemnation of the arms race constituted one more step toward the ultimate goal of out-and-out rejection of all resort to military force.
Earlier this year, as the fortieth anniversary of Pacem in Terris approached, I was twice asked to speak about it. It was clear that the interest in the anniversary was linked to the intense moral debate, in the case of the first invitation, about going to war in Iraq, and in the case of the second invitation, about whether we should have done so.
This linkage, I felt, was perfectly natural. We are all obliged, as citizens, as Christians, or simply as people of conscience, to reach some moral judgment on the foreign policy of the United States and in particular on any decision to employ armed force. As a Catholic, in this case as in others, I welcomed whatever help my religious tradition and my religious leaders could provide me in approaching this kind of decision. But in stating my moral objections to the policy that Washington was embarked upon, I could not pass responsibility off onto religious leaders or onto a Pope, living or dead, or onto an encyclical.
The aura of a papal pronouncement does not absolve me from the hard work of seeking facts and weighing opinions, especially perhaps the opinions of those who are of a contrary view. I certainly could not lean on a title alone, even one like Peace on Earth, to give me leverage over those who disagree or to pretend that they, too, might not be able to find some support in the text.
As you well know, papal encyclicals quite frequently have organizational consequences as well as theological and spiritual messages. That means they are drafted and revised by several hands, who can round off the sharp corners and introduce qualifications and loopholes so that important perspectives and constituencies in the church are not peremptorily excluded.
Encyclicals are less like marching orders and more like traffic signals or railroad switches. They give green, red, or yellow lights to this or that current within the church. They put some groups or outlooks full speed on the main track while shuffling others off onto sidings.
Take Pacem in Terris. It was written as Pope John struggled to overcome the opposition entrenched within the Vatican, indeed within the whole church, to contacts with Moscow, an opposition that suspected détente as a dangerous compromise of principle and relaxation of vigilance.8 The pope was successfully arranging the release of Ukrainian Metropolitan Josef Slipyi from a Soviet forced labor camp. Eventually, in March 1963, the pope held a well-publicized audience with Khrushchev’s daughter and son-in-law, the editor of Izvestia.
It is in this international context as well as in its local, Italian counterpart, that one should read paragraphs 157-60 of Pacem in Terris. They contain the important warning against confusing error with the person who errs. The latter, the pope says, “is always and above all a human being and . . . retains his dignity as a human person.” These passages about cooperation with other Christians, with non-believers, and even with movements arising from false tenets would have significant implications for religious freedom and ecumenism and, immediately, for international détente, but on the narrower stage of politics in Italy and other nations, they also gave the green light to the apertura a sinistra, working alliances between Catholic politicians and parties and certain socialists.
I mentioned the warm reception Pacem in Terris received outside the church. Two years after the encyclical appeared, the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions made it the centerpiece of an imposing conference. It is not easy to define the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions for the many who are too young to have ever heard of it. Funded generously and headed by Robert Hutchins, once the enfant terrible president of the University of Chicago, the Center may have been the original think tank. Unlike today’s think tanks, however, no one in its southern California setting seemed to have to do anything but think –not lobby, not research and design policy proposals, not produce press releases, not offer sinecures to out-of-office politicians, but just think. I should add that almost all of the thinkers thought politically liberal thoughts.
In February 1965, twenty two hundred scholars, clergy, statesmen, and peace activists descended on the United Nations to open the Pacem in Terris conference. There were hundreds of reporters. Speakers and panelists included U Thant, the secretary general of the UN, which had just gone into extended recess, unable to resolve a dispute about payment of dues, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, Adlai Stevenson, George Kennan, Abba Eban, Eugene McCarthy, the editor of Pravda, and a host of European, Asian, and African leaders whose names were as well known then as Jacques Chirac’s and Nelson Mandela’s are today.9
Hutchins began the conference by warning that “this is no time for pious platitudes” and wondering whether “the reason Pacem in Terris was applauded throughout the world was that it was so general as to be meaningless, or so vague that any partisan could put his own meaning into it.” Hutchins himself did not believe so. The Center, he said, considered the encyclical “one of the most profound and significant documents of our age.”
“The Pope,” Hutchins said, “consigns nuclear arms, nationalism, colonialism, racism, and non-constitutional regimes to the wastebasket of history. He rejects the devil theory of politics. He asserts the unfashionable doctrine that ‘the same moral law which governs relations between individual human beings serves also to regulate the relations of political communities with each other.'”10
The first speaker the next morning was one of the major theologians of the twentieth century, Paul Tillich. Tillich was respectful. He called the encyclical “an important event in the history of religious and political thought.” But he questioned some of its basic premises. The pope had addressed men of good will, but Tillich stressed the ambiguity of human nature and of all human will, good or bad. The encyclical had called for resistance against violations of human dignity. But all such resistance, Tillich argued, even without arms, risks escalation and destructive consequences, and ultimately, he added, there are also “situations in which nothing short of war can defend or establish the dignity of the person.” Tillich was speaking as the refugee from Nazism that he was.
Tillich also questioned one of the premises Hutchins had hailed. The encyclical, he suggested, proposed too easy an equation of the moral law and judgments appropriate to individuals with those appropriate to political groups.11
In this and in other ways he was posing a tragic view against Pope John’s optimistic one. He was not alone. Reinhold Niebuhr was the most influential American theologian of the era. His theology of “Christian realism” had begun in the 1920s and ’30s as a Marxist-influenced reaction against the naivete of Protestant Social Gospel advocates who thought that major social change could be brought about by simply altruism and good will. With the rise of fascist and Nazi power, Niebuhr had articulated a critique of the pacifism that dominated liberal Protestantism, often hand in hand with a form of isolationism. Now, Niebuhr welcomed Pacem in Terris for its treatment of rights. but he found that it breathed “a Pelagian, rather than an Augustinian, spirit” and would serve better, he wrote, “as a prod rather than as a guide” to statesmen.12
John Courtney Murray, the great Jesuit theologian whose work provided a foundation for the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on Religious Liberty, also found the encyclical overly optimistic.13 So did radical theologians, the forerunners of liberation theology, who felt that John XXIII had altogether too much confidence in liberal welfare-state capitalism.14
As a 23-year-old graduate student of history at Columbia and a newly minted editorial assistant at Commonweal magazine, I attended the Pacem in Terris conference. Listening to Tillich, I felt that he had injected some sobering realism into the high-minded Pacem in Terris discussion. The encyclical had outlined a whole array of goals to go into the making of peace: human rights, equal respect for nations, economic development, disarmament, an evolving world authority, the replacement of fear with trust. The problem, of course, is that such goals may not coincide, not at least in the kind of time spans that frame human decision making. Justice and rights have often been gained and defended only through arms. One human right may pull against another. The drive for equal respect for nations may conflict with the establishment of a world authority. Economic development of one region may retard that of another or inspire fear rather than trust. The making of peace demands choices, often hard choices.15
Tillich’s speech, I recall, was received perfunctorily. Many were confused by his introduction of ironies, complications, and doubts. I recently went to the library, dug out his speech, reread it, and it holds up well.
But so does Pacem in Terris, better than perhaps I could have anticipated at 23. Forty years later, the world is of course very different. The emergence of independent nations from European empires, even from the Soviet empire, is virtually complete. The bipolar world of the Cold War and nuclear stalemate is gone, although a continental-size version still exists between India and Pakistan in South Asia. There is one super power, torn between super responsibility and super arrogance, perhaps super vulnerability as well. Instead of the nuclear balance of terror, there is a new asymmetrical terrorism, what Joseph Nye has called the “privatization of war,” where proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and new, non-state actors can combine in a way that even the old law of fear may not be capable of deterring.
What Pope John said forty years ago about human rights and liberal constitutional regimes has not lost its relevance, and what he said about ethnic assertion and conflict has become only more relevant. Much of what is currently described under the category of globalization, Pope John described under the term “interdependence”.16
It may be a weakness in Pacem in Terris that the Pope did not order the multiple aspects of peace making or address the problem of resolving conflicts between them. But in insisting that peace does require this multi-dimensional effort, that disarmament and human rights and economic development and sensitivity to the dignity of weaker nations all go together, and today, I am sure he would add, the campaigns against terrorism and proliferating weapons of mass destruction as well, in all this he was surely right.
Today, Pope John would also surely add, as John Paul II has done, warnings about religious fervors and convictions and their enlistment and manipulation for political purposes. Today, in developing the concept of a “universal common good” posing problems of world-wide dimensions and underlying the security and peace of the entire planet, he would surely emphasize environmental issues.
But the dramas and debates played out over the last two years unavoidably draw our attention to the pope’s plea in Pacem in Terris for the development of a universal public authority commensurate to the problems of economic globalization or interdependence and the promotion of that “universal common good,” including security from terror. The Pope’s analysis is brief, deductive, and simply poses the imperative for such an authority over against the problems it presents without offering any resolution. It comes down to earth in his suggestion that the United Nations and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights are the first steps in the development of such an authority.
Some commentators have found in the papal notion of a world-wide public authority an outdated hierarchical image, one that comes all too naturally, perhaps, to a world-wide hierarchical church, except that in Pacem in Terris far more than in the church the local public authorities of nation-states or other jurisdictions are to be protected by the principle of subsidiarity. These critics argue that globalization, particularly through its new technologies of information and communication, is displacing hierarchical models of authority exercised “from above” with all sorts of cross-cutting organizational networks exercising authority “from below”or “from alongside.” These networks include multinational corporations and transnational financial organizations. They include non-governmental organizations (NGOs) of all sorts, like Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, Caritas, or the many churches themselves. They include international organizations with specific public tasks, like the World Health Organization, the World Bank, or the World Trade Organization. They include all the linked Web sites and international participants in global cyberspace. Taking all this into account, what is often referred to as a global civil society, the new world-wide public authority must be understood not as a hierarchy but as a web.
I detect a certain anarchist romanticism in this image but also a practical bias toward institutions that develop piecemeal and organically rather than planned and designed. I will return to this question. Meanwhile, the war in Iraq has refocused attention on the United Nations — capacity, present and potential, to serve as the world-wide public authority that Pacem in Terris envisioned. That authority, however, in the pope’s view, stood on two legs. One was legitimacy arising from a virtually unanimous consensus of national authorities to respect its powers. The other was efficacity. Today, when one reads Pope John’s description of that “public authority, having world-wide power and endowed with the proper means for the efficacious pursuit of its objective,”17 one recognizes that today there is, besides the United Nations, another claimant to the role — the United States, which now claims to act not just as Cold War leader of the free world confronting and limited by another superpower-led bloc but on behalf of the safety of the whole world, as President Bush and his Administration repeatedly say, even as they always add a reference to America’s own security.
Of course, this outright rivalry — between the United States and the United Nations — for the role of world-wide public authority goes officially unacknowledged. It emerges less from words than from the logic of the war on terror and the promulgation of an American national security doctrine amounting to global police powers. But this rivalry has repeatedly emerged at the center of the recent drama. In Pope John’s terms, the United Nations possesses the legitimacy. The United States possesses the efficacious power. Indeed, U.S. power, or its specter, has probably strengthened UN legitimacy. As many people have pointed out, what has galvanized opinion in other parts of the world. like it or not, is not just the potential threat of Iraq but the potential threat of the United States. Pope John saw this problem forty years ago when he warned that the world authority he envisaged “must be set up by common accord, and not imposed by force.” Effective power had to be combined with “sincere and real impartiality.”
“There would be reason to fear,” he wrote, “that a supra-national or world-wide public authority, imposed by force by the more powerful nations might be an instrument of one-side interest; and even should this not happen, it would be difficult for it to avoid all suspicion of partiality in actions.”18 Again and again, he reminds readers of the explosive sensitivities of nations, however weak or small, to the impositions of others, and today he would certainly specify the sensitivities of cultures and religious faiths as well.
Like all rivalries this one is complicated. Those of us who consider fulfillment of United Nations agreements vital to the future of that public authority and who advocated earlier this year the prolongation of the UN inspection process over any American-initiated invasion had to admit that without the world-wide power of the United States and the Bush administration’s threat to use it, the United Nations would have almost certainly shirked its obligations and Iraq would have almost certainly obstructed any trustworthy inspections. The promise of the UN as Pacem in Terris’s meaningful though embryonic world authority was advanced in some ways by American policy, and both simultaneously and subsequently impeded by that policy.
This need not have been the case. Since the collapse of Communism and the Soviet empire, both Democratic and Republican Administrations have squandered a dozen years during which a new framework of international institutions could have been nurtured, as was done in the years following World War II. To do so, we would have had to make that a priority rather than an afterthought. We would have had to show the “decent respect to the Opinions of mankind” our Declaration of Independence invoked. We would have had to moderate our reluctance to submit any aspect of our unprecedented power and national sovereignty to international limitation. We would have had to take the lead in devoting that power to an array of works like the still incompletely funded AIDS relief effort that the President announced in his State of the Union address.
And we would have had to heed Pope John’s repeated admonitions that superiority, in nations no less than individuals, creates an obligation to assist and share, not a license to rule.19 Nations’ sense of their dignity, equality, and cultural excellence, does not rest on their economic and military weight. They will rightfully resist, he points out, “an authority imposed by force” or “in whose creation they had no part.20
The British empire was not created, as it was once claimed, in a fit of absent-mindedness. Likewise, it is not true that the United States is being propelled into the role of world-wide public authority without forethought by our leaders and being forewarned, not only by contemporary analysts but by John XXIII speaking across four decades. But if the United States turns away from that fateful course, the pope’s question will remain very much on our agenda. What public authority can effectively address and assure the universal common good, whether by organic evolution or by careful design, whether through a limited but overarching organization like the UN or through a messy web of intergovernmental and non-governmental bodies?
In an article in the Winter 2003 issue of Daedalus, Stanley Hoffman noted the complex relationship of state power “from above” and civil society networks “from below”:
“We live in a world where one crucial sector, involving security and survival, remains a zone of fragmentation,” he wrote, “while another sector, involving prosperity and growth, is a zone of growing integration. At the same time, the globalization of civil society is gradually depriving some nation-states of many of the instruments that were once at their disposal?especially monetary and industrial policies.”
Hoffman outline a “non-utopian”approach to world governance. He proposed a world commission and world court of human rights, modeled on the European Court, to which individuals could directly appeal. He proposed new powers for the Secretary General of the UN to bring cases of human-rights violations on his own before the Security Council and General Assembly. Along with much greater legal precision in defining humanitarian intervention, he proposed a standing UN force with a UN military command and a civilian board of UN officials to monitor and oversee its actions, including the right of inspection for weapons of mass destruction and enforcement of sanctions.
He proposed an embryonic economic governing body — again, on the model of the European Union — that would harmonize the policies of the WTO, ILO, World Bank, and IMF. He proposed a world environmental agency and suggested that UNESCO shift its focus from preserving elite or local cultures to opposing fanaticism and intolerance. He proposed an elected UN Assembly of People’s Representatives, if only to serve as a forum and exemplify democratic processes and the potential of representation for individuals as well as for nations.
Hoffman seemed to recognize that these “non-utopian” proposals faced so many obstacles, in particular the chasm between liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes, that it was unclear what distinguished them from “utopian” ones. But writing well before the Iraq war, he concluded on what he termed “the final obstacle . . . . the very superpower that sees itself as the upholder of world order and the champion of liberal democracy. . . . In recent years, unfortunately, a sizable section of the American establishment has expressed skepticism about the value of U.S. support for existing global institutions — never mind creating new ones. . . . The underlying message of this boastful unilateralism is clear; the United States is a self-sufficient guarantor of ssglobal order and the interpreter of last resort of what global order requires. . . . Without a thorough rejection of this new doctrine, and a return to a policy of American leadership without dictation, the prospects for creating a new and more democratic form of world governance are very dim indeed.”21
There are four words that mark off different section of Pacem in Terris and run like a mantra through the whole document: truth, justice, love, and freedom. The Pope defined “an order that is genuinely human” as “an order whose foundation is truth, whose measure and objective is justice, whose driving force is love, and whose method of attainment is freedom.22 Peace, he warned, would be “an empty-sounding word” unless it rested on “an order founded on truth, built according to justice, vivified and integrated by love, and put into practice in freedom.”23 He hailed those magnanimous individuals who strove to establish new relationships in human society “with truth, justice, love, and freedom.”24
I think that we all should repeat these words “truth, justice, love, and freedom” as a kind of prayer and a touchstone of our moral-political thinking in these days. Is this true? Does this serve justice? Is this consistent with love? Will this promote freedom? These should be our watchwords for further deliberations on the great issues addressed a great pope’s last great encyclical.
Thank you very much.
© Peter Steinfels, 2003
1. Peter Hebblethwaite, Pope John XXIII (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image Books), 1987, pp. 446, 447. Hebblethwaite actually writes that “Capovilla [Archbishop Loris F. Capovilla, Pope John’s secretary] dates the origin of Pacem in Terris to October 25, 1962, when Pope John was working on his message”; but previous page reports, as do many public documents, that the message was issued on October 24 and composed during the preceding night.
2. Hebblethwaite, p. 504.
3. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World Harvest Book), 1968, pp. 57-89, originally published in The New York Review of Books in 1965.
4. Paragraphs 40-44.
5. Paragraph 15.
6. Charles E. Curran, “Catholic Social Teaching and Human Morality,” in John A. Coleman, S.J., editor, One Hundred Years of Catholic Social Thought (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1991), p. 73.
7. See Michael Novak, Freedom with Justice: Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Institutions (Harper & Row, 1984), pp. 132-33.
8. See Hebblethwaite, Chapter 23, pp. 467-88.
9. Edward Reed, ed., Peace on Earth: Pacem in Terris: The Proceedings of an International Convocation on the Requirements of Peace, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (Pocket Books, 1965).
10. Ibid., pp 1.
11. Ibid., pp. 13-23.
12. Quoted in Charles C. Brown, Niebuhr and His Age (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002), p. 226. His reference is to “Pacem in Terris: Two Views,” Christianity & Crisis (May 13, 1963), pp. 81, 83.
13. That is the view of David J. O-Brien and Thomas A. Shannon in their introduction to the text of Pacem in Terris in their anthology, Renewing the Earth (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image Books, 1977), p. 123. They write that Murray, like Niebuhr, found the encylical “too idealistic and impractical” but give no reference. The Murray bibliography in the collection of his articles, Religious Liberty (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993) edited by J. Leon Hooper, S.J., lists the article by Murray, “Things Old and New in ‘Pacem in Terris,'” America (April 27, 1963), pp 612-14.
14. It is easy to find this view, sometimes stated explicitly, sometimes between the lines, in Donald Dorr, Option for the Poor (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983), Chapter 5, “Pope John XXIII — A New Direction?” pp. 116, especially pp. 100-02.
15. I offered this analysis and these impressions in “Peace and Reality,” Commonweal (March 19, 1965), pp. 785-86.
16. “The recent progress of science and technology . . . is rousing people everywhere to more and more cooperation and association with one another. Today the exchange of goods and ideas, travel from one country to another have greatly increased. Consequently, the close relations of individuals, families, intermediate associations belonging to different countries have become vastly more frequent. . . . At the same time, the interdependence of national economies has grown deeper . . . so that they become, as it were, integral parts of one world economy. Finally, the social progress, order, security and peace of each country are necessarily connected with the social progress, order, security and peace of all other countries.” Paragraph 130.
17. Paragraph 138.
18. Ibid.
19. Paragraphs 87-88.
20. Paragraph 138.
21. Stanley Hoffman, “World Governance: Beyond Utopia,” Daedalus (Winter 2003), pp. 27-35.
22. Paragraph 149.
23. Paragraph 167.
24. Paragraph 163.