Catholic Social Teaching: A communitarian democratic capitalism for the new world order

Still studying the Catholic contributions to communitarian thinking. Martin opened my eyes to the importance of understanding Pope John Paul II and Vatican II. These other writers assure me this is a fairly open and well hashed out topic within the modern Catholic community. Will that make it more difficult for me to discuss political communitarianism with someone who has tied the political to the religious already; will it mean I am challenging their religion if I oppose it?

Catholic Social Teaching: A communitarian democratic capitalism for the new world order, by Oliver F. Williams1

(1) University of Notre Dame, 46556 Notre Dame, Indiana, USA

Abstract Catholic Social Teaching has taken a remarkable turn with the May 1991 document on economic ethics, Centesimus Annus. During their one hundred year history, church documents were notable for their courageous championing of the rights of the least advantaged; they were much less distinguished for their understanding of how markets and incentives function in capitalism. Most business leaders admired church teaching for its compassion but had little respect for its competence. With this most recent document, however, there is a growing conviction that the church may have come of age in economic ethics. Even the Wall Street Journal has celebrated Centesimus Annus. The article outlines the highlights of the document and its points of continuity with the tradition. Responses from business and the academy are also briefly considered.

Oliver F. Williams is a member of the faculty and serves as Associate Provost of the University of Notre Dame. A Catholic priest, Father Williams has a doctorate and other degrees in theology and chemical engineering. He has published and lectured extensively in the field of business ethics.
This article includes an updated version of some material previously published. For more elaboration on the history of Catholic social teaching, see articles by Williams, O. F. in Houck, J. W. and Williams, O. F. (eds.): 1984,Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy: Working Papers for a Bishops'' Pastoral (University Press of America, Washington, DC) and in Williams, O. F. and Houck, J. (eds.): 1982,The Judeo-Christian Vision and the Modern Corporation (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN).
http://www.springerlink.com/content/n89m583132416421/

Other sources that tie the economy to religious communitarianism:

Communitarian Liberalism in Support of an Equitable Global Economy, by John E. Kelly, Ph.D., Philosophy, Canisius College, 2001 Main Street, Buffalo, NY 14208, Sources include "Relevant modern papal social encyclicals beginning with Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum up to Pope John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus (100^thRerum Novarum)." http://iaes.confex.com/iaes/Rome_67/techprogram/P2804.HTM

A Communitarian Model of Business: A Natural-Law Perspective

by Surendra Arjoon

This article compares and contrasts a communitarian view of business with business models under the liberalist and socialist doctrines. Specifically, it attempts to define a communitarian view that is based on natural-law principles. The communitarian view represents the proper balance and order between the claims of liberal and socialist views, and provides assistance to private initiative, while at the same time correcting its abuses and respecting its rights. The theoretical framework developed in this article utilizes a metaethical approach in specifying the underlying philosophical assumptions about rationality, primary purpose, basic unit, supreme value, market characteristics, dynamics of market regulatory mechanism, and juridical order. Today, there is need for a new humanism based on an integral view of the human person. Natural-law communitarianism recaptures the metaphysical certitude of the human person and thereby provides a philosophy of authentic human development. By its very nature, it defines the business organization that incorporates its social purposes.
http://www.acton.org/publications/mandm/mandm_article_24.php

The communitarian third way: Alexandre Marc's ordre nouveau, 1930-2000
By John Hellman

Ordre Nouveau's "neither right nor left" movement, based on personalism and revolutionary federalism, helped shape modern Catholic political culture in France, the National Revolution instituted by the Vichy regime, the post-war European movement, and the contemporary European New Right. It influenced European youth exchanges, veterans' organizations, trade unions, religious groups, artists, and architects, even the executive of the French national railway system. In The Communitarian Third Way John Hellman introduces us to the non-conformist Alexandre Marc, a Russian Jew who became a Christian convert and full-time professional revolutionary.Marc helped Le Corbusier launch Plans, imported the existential philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger to France, helped Mounier start Esprit, and was an important force in revitalizing traditional French Catholic political culture. Hellman uses interviews, unpublished correspondence, and diaries to situate Marc and the Ordre Nouveau group in the context of the French, German, and Belgian political culture of that time and explains the degree to which the ON group succeeded in institutionalizing their new order under Pétain. Hellman also examines their post-war legacy, represented by Alain de Benoist and the contemporary European New Right, shedding new light on the linkages between early national socialism and the political culture of Charles de Gaulle, François Mitterrand, and pioneers of the post World War II European movement.
http://books.google.com/books?id=FktLgT8B2yQC&dq=pope+john+paul+communitarian&source=gbs_navlinks_s

On Catholic Communitarianism
by Dominic A. Aquila

Although communitarianism commends itself as a third way between the free market and the welfare state, its relentless attack on the former makes it difficult to dissociate it from welfare state socialism. The Catholic version of it is hardly any different. Father Hollenbach proposes “a communitarian reconstruction” of “the classical liberal understanding of human rights” by refounding it on “the traditional natural-law conviction that the human person is an essentially social being.” His great hope is to transform the prevailing liberal understanding of rights as “fenceposts” that protect one’s “turf” from intruders, into “claims” that “specify the minimum standards for what it means to treat people as members of the community.” Father Hollenbach points to the United States Bishops’ Pastoral Letter on the American economy, Economic Justice for All (1986), as an example of the communitarianism he has in mind.
http://www.acton.org/publications/randl/rl_review_154.php

The rest of these citations are not Catholic

On Confucian communitarianism

Hu Weixi 1 Contact Information
(1) Department of Philosophy, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

Abstract As a social and political thought, communitarian ideas appeared in the Pre-Qin Confucianism. By the Song Dynasty, it had become a systematic theory, namely, the learning of the “four books.” As a social and political theory, not only can Confucian communitarianism contribute to Western liberalism, but it can also be an intellectual resource for the development of democracy in East Asian countries and regions. The future of the Confucian communitarianism lies in its critique of itself and its discourse with Western liberalism, by which Confucianism evolves from communitarianism into liberalism.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/lw383565t412m738/

Shaming punishments and communitarianism, the kamakazi model

Orin Kerr has here effectively jumped into today's debate over shaming punishments (basics here). Orin terrifically explains my communitarian-based grounds for suggesting that shaming punishments may actually honor and strengthen human dignity:

Don't [shaming punishments] rely on, and ultimately reinforce, the notion that the offender is a valued member of the community? It seems to me that the offender feels shame precisely because he values his position in the community. Thus judges hand down such punishments only when they think the offender values his position and will want to restore it to its earlier status. In that sense, then, shaming punishments are not about dehumanization, but about hope and community: the punishment is based on and recognizes the hope that the offender will feel a strong enough connection to the community that he will feel shamed, and that the community will value that person's connection to the community enough to react to the offender.

Along these lines, consider this Wikipedia entry on Crime in Japan which notes here the theory that "an important factor keeping crime low [in Japan] is the traditional emphasis on the individual as a member of groups to which he or she must not bring shame."
http://sentencing.typepad.com/sentencing_law_and_policy/2006/10/shaming_punishm.html

From Liberalism to Communitarianism: The Erosion of Individual Rights in the Irish Criminal Process? by Liz Campbell, University of Aberdeen - Law School,July 25, 2007
Law and Society in the 21st Century, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany

Abstract:
Traditionally, the central concern in the Irish criminal process was the accused person, as is evidenced in the matrix of due process rights which developed to protect him against the might of the State and to safeguard him from unfair conviction. However, in recent years it seems that there has been a shift in discourse and policy away from liberal concerns about the primacy of the individual towards an approach in which the interests and demands of the community and the wider public are prioritised. Contemporary political rhetoric in Ireland often presents the community as an entity with an entitlement to protection from harm, and developments in the criminal process are increasingly justified by invoking the rights of the community, to the detriment of individual liberties.

This paper explores a number of measures which encapsulate this trend. Firstly, the right to bail was restricted in 1996, so as to prevent further offending, and this was based on the perceived need for public protection, notwithstanding the effects on individual liberties. Also, the introduction of behaviour orders under the Criminal Justice Act 2006 was legitimated by the need to protect the public from anti-social behaviour. When exploring such legislative developments which indicate the growing import accorded to the community in the criminal process, this paper will examine the threat that the adoption of elements of communitarianism poses to individual rights. Furthermore, the perception that the interests of the community and those of the suspect are fundamentally at odds will be challenged, and the importance of the limitation on State powers will be emphasised.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1162134

Rastafari: Roots and Ideology (Utopianism and Communitarianism)
http://www.wikio.com/books/rastafari-roots-and-ideology-utopianism-and-communitarianism-0815602960-1544893,b.html

Ubuntu and communitarianism in media ethics
Clifford G. Christians

A robust and visionary media ethics depends on the normative theory in which it is rooted. Two such paradigms have grown up independently—ubuntu in Africa and communitarianism in Europe and North America. For both, the community is ontologically prior to persons. They serve as an antidote to mainstream libertarianism. Ubuntu as a universal idea solidifies dialogic communitarianism and keeps it oriented intellectually. Ubuntu’s total focus on humans and its insistence on the moral dimension of society produce an ubuntu communitarianism that is the most mature version of any to date. As a normative paradigm for media ethics, ubuntu communitarianism emphasises authentic disclosure for news and moral literacy as the media’s mission. Its liberatory journalism empowers citizens to come to agreement about social problems and solutions among themselves rather than depending on the political elite or professional experts.
http://ajs.uwpress.org/cgi/content/short/25/2/235

Communitarianism vs. Individual Rights In the West and the Islamic World
David Lea, Dr. Lea is an associate professor of philosophy at the American University of Sharjah, the United Arab Emirates.

In the 1980s, however, these arguments came into question. A powerful "communitarian" or "culturist" movement began to gain force and stress the value of the community.3 These academics questioned the liberal tendency to articulate principles of justice based on the "bi-polarity" of the individual, on the one hand, and the state, on the other. They argued that justice must go beyond the idea of equal rights for all citizens and provide special rights for communities and cultural groupings so that these cultural groups could survive and endure the overwhelming threats to their traditions.
http://www.mepc.org/journal_vol12/0506_lea.asp

Utopian and Communitarian Movements
The Oxford Companion to United States History | 2001 | Paul S. Boyer |

Traditional cloistered Roman Catholic orders, introduced to America by Augustinian monks who reached Philadelphia in the 1790s, and perpetuated in the twentieth century by Trappists, Benedictines, and other orders, represented a different form of the communitarian vision. So, too, did colonies embracing Spiritualism or Theosophy; gender‐based settlements such as the Women's Commonwealth in Texas and Washington, D.C. (1874–1906), and ashrams established by Asian‐influenced mystics in Massachusetts and California in the 1920s. In the Depression‐wracked 1930s, Catholic renewalists started a communitarian religious retreat, “The Grail,” in Ohio; conservative Protestants founded communities in Texas and Arkansas to promote fundamentalist religious beliefs; and radical Jews formed socialist colonies in Michigan.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O119-UtopianandCommuntrnMvmnts.html

Monday, 8:30 am add on -
If the American founders were really freemasons as many Lodges claim to be true, then is it just as possible they were also secretly communitarians, as Bill Clinton and Amitai Etzioni insist? Was Thomas Jefferson aware of the dialectical divide between materialism and spiritualism? Did he understand the synthesis and the conflicts necessary to move it to final conclusion? What does it mean to take the side of materialism when following in the steps of Jesus Christ? How perfectly Jefferson's Bible plays into Pope John Paul's assessment of the Soviet and American systems.

In The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus, Jefferson describes his views of Jesus Christ, the Christian religion, and his own religious beliefs. In a Syllabus which he appended to his Bible, he compared the teachings of Jesus to those of the earlier Greek and Roman philosophers, and to the religion of the Jews of Jesus' time. The following excerpt is from a letter discussing the Syllabus. Of significance is his statement, "...(Jesus) preaches the efficacy of repentance towards forgiveness of sin; I require counterpoise of good works to redeem it..."

"But while this syllabus is meant to place the character of Jesus in its true and high light, as no impostor Himself, but a great Reformer of the Hebrew code of religion, it is not to be understood that I am with Him in all His doctrines. I am a Materialist; he takes the side of Spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of repentance towards forgiveness of sin; I require counterpoise of good works to redeem it, etc., etc. It is the innocence of His character, the purity and sublimity of His moral precepts, the eloquence of His inculcations, the beauty of the apologues in which He conveys them, that I so much admire; sometimes, indeed, needing indulgence to eastern hyperbolism. My eulogies, too, may be founded on a postulate which all may not be ready to grant. Among the sayings and discourses imputed to Him by His biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others, again, of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same Being. I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross; restore to Him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of His disciples. Of this band of dupes and impostors, Paul was the great Coryphaeus, and first corruptor of the doctrines of Jesus. These palpable interpolations and falsifications of His doctrines, led me to try to sift them apart. I found the work obvious and easy, and that His past composed the most beautiful morsel of morality which has been given to us by man. The syllabus is therefore of His doctrines, not all of mine. I read them as I do those of other ancient and modern moralists, with a mixture of approbation and dissent..." (6) {emphasis added by me}
http://watch.pair.com/mason.html

What actual role, if any, did Freemasonry play in setting up the political-religious divide between Republicans and Democrats? How far back does the penetration by the Masons-Luciferians-Marxists of the Vatican go? Were there open Iluminists in the American constitutional groups prior to 1775? Did the enlightenment serve only to further the divide? What role did the Protestant churches really play in the global divisions? Is there an authentic divide between the material and the transcendent sides of human existence? What if this is but a piece of an elaborate plot to transform the entire world into a global empire in the 21st century?

One thing's for sure, there is nothing normal about the progress of the divide between Christians and Christians, Christians and Muslims, and Catholics and Catholics; it did not evolve naturally.