Nature, Sin, and Society - Is Human Nature Obsolete? - page 351

social relationships; that cooperative social relations work to the benefit
of all; and that societies and governments have the duty to ensure for all
the basic social and material necessities of life.
The fundamental premises and standards that Rerum Novarum lays
down have been reappropriated and restated in response to different
social situations and with different nuances, agendas, and tones at inter-
vals of about four decades for over one hundred years. 16 After the Second
Vatican Council, in the 1960s, two important qualifications introduced
were a vision of all nations cooperating in a global society or a “uni-
versal common good,” and a growing realization that the common good
requires full social participation by all members, not just the leadership
of the upper classes, government officials, or property owners. The pope
of the Council, John XXIII, opened his 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris
( Peace on Earth ) with a hopeful appeal to “all men of good will.” He
reads in “the signs of the times” that “there is reason to hope . . . [that]
men may come to discover better the bonds that unite them together,
deriving from the human nature they have in common,” and that they
may give up the arms race and all threat of war, in order to collaborate
in an atmosphere of love. 17
Beginning in the 1960s, with the encyclicals of Paul VI, and increas-
ing in the 1980s and 1990s, with the pontificate of John Paul II, more
and more attention has been devoted to the impact on the universal
common good of inadequately regulated capitalism, often couched in
or advanced by the cultural values of individualism, materialism, con-
sumerism, and imperialism. Papal social teaching has striven to maintain
a balance between the independence and free initiative of social groups
and organizations and the government regulation that is sometimes
needed to ensure the fair participation of all in the common good. The
axis of balance is the “principle of subsidiarity,” originally used to
protect subordinate bodies from state interference. 18 Later, it was wielded
to call on governments (including international organizations) to correct
imbalances in the social order. 19 John Paul has certainly never condemned
capitalist economic behavior outright or in toto. 20 Yet he has often
expressed acute awareness of some of the excesses to which it is liable.
In Sollicitudo Rei Socialis , John Paul warns that world development is
not merely a matter of economics, notwithstanding “the many real
benefits provided in recent times by science and technology.” Unless