Mea Maxima Culpa?

In his recent encyclical, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, Pope John Paul II several times asserts that the great “hopes for development” in the Third World expressed by his predecessor Pope Paul VI in Populorum Progressio have not been realized in the two decades since that earlier encyclical was published. In fact, says John Paul, those hopes “today appear very far from being realized.”

He is right about that, and a glance back at the recommendations of Paul’s encyclical may help explain why things didn’t work out as hoped. As John Paul notes, the “novel character” of Populorum Progressio helped win it great acclaim in 1967—notably from left-wing development economists such as Barbara Ward. Not all later critics have been as kind. The encyclical was denounced by P. T. Bauer, the well-known critic of mainstream development economics, as “immoral.” Lord Bauer (as he now is) considered the encyclical to be “incompetent” because it gave rise to policies “directly at variance with the declared sentiments and objectives” of the document. Furthermore, it encouraged the notion “that envy can be legitimate.” Its main theme, said Bauer, was that economic differences, “consistently termed inequalities, reflect injustice.”

TB

About the Author

Tom Bethell

Featured Tags

In his recent encyclical, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, Pope John Paul II several times asserts that the great “hopes for development” in the Third World expressed by his predecessor Pope Paul VI in Populorum Progressio have not been realized in the two decades since that earlier encyclical was published. In fact, says John Paul, those hopes “today appear very far from being realized.”

He is right about that, and a glance back at the recommendations of Paul’s encyclical may help explain why things didn’t work out as hoped. As John Paul notes, the “novel character” of Populorum Progressio helped win it great acclaim in 1967—notably from left-wing development economists such as Barbara Ward. Not all later critics have been as kind. The encyclical was denounced by P. T. Bauer, the well-known critic of mainstream development economics, as “immoral.” Lord Bauer (as he now is) considered the encyclical to be “incompetent” because it gave rise to policies “directly at variance with the declared sentiments and objectives” of the document. Furthermore, it encouraged the notion “that envy can be legitimate.” Its main theme, said Bauer, was that economic differences, “consistently termed inequalities, reflect injustice.”