The Popes (all Europeans) have written a number of Encyclicals on Social
Teaching.
They are bound to show a degree of Eurocentric bias and discerning Asian
theologians have not accepted them without reserve. In particular, a Sri
Lankan theologian, Aloysius Pieris, has presented a detailed critique.
He happens to be a founder member of the Ecumenical Association of Third
World Theologians (EATWOT) set up in 1976. He is a force to reckon with
in Asia and has lectured in the major institutions of the West.
Introduction
The critique has two aims:
1) to persuade the Vatican to listen and learn from concerned scholars
and groups so that the papal encyclicals are truly catholic;
2) to persuade Asian church leaders to evolve a Catholic Social Teaching
within Asia's own economic and cultural context.
Third world Perspective
Papal writings have failed to understand the authentic concept of a
Third world. Thus to Pope John II, the Third World is just a
geographical area where the poor are manufactured by a heartless
Christian First World. Unfortunately, the West's developmental ideology
in the 1960s neutralised the idea of a truly third way and reduced the
phrase to a mere economic category. Sadly, the Vatican also uncritically
accepted this ideology. Why didn't the Holy Ghost advise to Popes when
needed?
It was in the 1970s that the Third World came to be regarded as a
theological category and, EATWOT formed in this decade began to respond
to the West's model of development.
The Euro Popes continue to believe that their social teaching is
universally valid and needs merely adapting to local situations. Instead
of dialoguing with Bishops, theologians and the basic communities, the
Vatican has been issuing warnings and threats.
Asian Perspective
It is important to remember that Asia is almost totally (97%)
non-Christian. Asia is largely polytheistic or Marxist while only Islam
and Hinduism profess a theistic faith, together with a small minority of
Christians.
Three principles can be extracted from the western Christian formula and
re-formulated into an idiom acceptable to Asians:
(1) The theological basis of the papal social doctrine is the dignity of
the human person and this is nearly all Asian religions. The idea of
Image of God may be absent but the primacy of man and woman is affirmed
in other ways.
(2) There is a parallel between the principle of Natural Law in the CST
and the dharma/Tao or the principle of righteousness in some of Asia's
gnostic religions. But whereas in the CST, duties are derived from
rights rooted in the dignity of each person, Asian religions reverse the
process: it is dharma (duty) that justifies rights. So the dignity of
the human person is not the source of rights, rather one's
responsibilities to others.
(3)Finally there is convergence between the ancient Christian belief in
the Common Good over individual rights to private property, and Asia's
traditional sense of reverential obligation towards the common natural
resources.
The three aspects above (primacy of the human person, the human rights
language and primacy of the common good) are woven into a Christian
theory of commutative, distributive and social justice.
The papal doctrine seems tied to the West on whose colonial waves
Christianity was carried to the shores of Asia. Nowhere does the Pope
acknowledge the Christian sinfulness of colonialism so clearly stamped
in Asian history. It is difficult for non-Christian Asians to
disassociate the Pope's concern for Asia's social ills from the West's
blatant expansion of its technocratic power in Asia today. At stake is
the credibility of the CST, unlike Liberation theology, which draws from
a grassroots Third World experience.
It is time for Rome to acknowledge and correct its own failings in the
matter of social justice - silencing theologians it does to like,
overreacting to criticism levelled against its bureaucracy and most of
all its intransigent patriachalism.
Rome's unwillingness to confess its own sinfulness makes its version of
CST suspect from a biblical viewpoint. The Roman CST has been
preoccupied with general principles but is unable to respond critically
to the concrete situation.
The human rights theology of the West needs to be replaced by a
co-responsibility model. The obligations of the strong towards the weak
constitute the proper divine order priority of the needs of the poor
over the greed of the rich.
An authentic CST must promote participatory (rather than merely a
liberal) form of democracy.
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