As the current Pope expresses many opinions about politics and economics, those who agree with him will attempt to portray his current interpretations and opinions as inerrant truth. And the Francis partisans are certainly not the first to do so. Right wing Catholics of the traditionalist variety still embarrass themselves to this day, droning on incessantly about Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors from 1864, how religious freedom is bad, and how the rack-and-thumbscrew authoritarians of monarchical Europe were the bee’s knees.

As with many ideologies and religions, political ideologues of every age attempt to take something that’s much bigger than their issue-of-the-day and force it into a mold that supports their current likes and desires for public policy X.

But that’s not how Catholic doctrine works, and we can see this in how papal statements on politics and economics — unlike similar statements on core moral issues — are all over the map and contradict themselves. There are not contradictions on contraception, marriage, and abortion, for example. There are contradictions all over the place on things like slavery, money lending, and similar issues. Those familiar with how Catholic teachings work will recognize the importance of this distinction.

And for a great, short summary of these contradictions, see John Zmirak’s 2014 article on this phenomena, in which he writes:

Here is a short (and non-exhaustive) list of issues on which, over the course of time, papal positions have made what can only be honestly called a 180-degree reversal. Entire scholarly books have been written to explain how and why – and sometimes to suggest that “development of doctrine” can be stretched to accommodate such reversals.

I do not have space here to argue why such rationalizations are unconvincing. Suffice it to say that the plain meaning of “development” suggests something organic, not a Hegelian dialectical leap from “A” to “the opposite of A,” not even one that happens gradually over centuries.  When a tadpole turns into a Steinway grand piano, that’s not an organic development.

• Lending at interest. Condemned for centuries by popes and councils (Clement V; Lateran II, III, IV & V) as a sin against nature akin to sodomy (Dante, following Aquinas, put bankers alongside pederasts in Hell), usury was later redefined from “any interest” to “excessive interest.” That is not a minor tweak, but a fundamental change. To appreciate its significance, imagine a future pope redefining “contraception” to make room for its general use, withholding permission only when it was employed “abusively.” Pius VIII and Pius XII each allowed for lending at interest, and the Vatican runs its own bank, which charges interest.

• Slavery. Several popes (Gregory I, Urban II, Nicholas V, Paul III) explicitly allowed for the owning of slaves by Christians and Pope Pius IX’s Holy Office was still defending the moral licitness of slave-owning as late as 1866, three years after the Emancipation Proclamation. It took until Leo XIII – after slavery had ended in most major Catholic countries – for a pope to condemn this practice outright. The Catechism of the Catholic Church now calls the practice “intrinsically evil.”
• Religious liberty. A long list of papal statements in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, echoing previous papal bulls and centuries of Church practice, denounced the notion that “error has rights,” and reaffirmed the positive duty of Catholic rulers, whenever prudent, to repress and punish heretics. This is completely contradicted by the Second Vatican Council, which teaches that state coercion in matters of conscience violates both revealed and natural law – which means that it is intrinsically evil. When the Council reaffirms the part of the old teaching that insists on the rights of Christ the King, it explicitly speaks not of “states” but of “societies” as having the duty to recognize and advocate religious truth. To equate “society” with the state is to slide right into totalitarianism – one of the evils that the Council was called to address.
• Torture. In service of the repression of heresy, countless popes were knowingly complicit in the use of torture to extract confessions, and a means of execution (burning at the stake). Pope Innocent IV explicitly called for such use of torture. The Catechism of the Catholic Church now teaches that torture is intrinsically evil (2297).

Were those Catholic bankers who charged non-excessive rates of interest before the popes reexamined the question really committing sins against nature? Were Catholics who joined the abolitionist movement also sinning, by claiming that the institution was evil prematurely, before the popes got around to it? Were advocates of religious liberty before Vatican II material heretics, until that day in 1963 when the Council came round to agreeing with them? Were opponents of torture culpable for teaching a position before the Church approved it?

Or could it be that the notion of a “social Magisterium” is simply false, that Christ never intended the papacy to serve an oracular function on politics and economics? Instead, the popes try to act as shepherds, and consult their knowledge of Church tradition and natural law, to come up with the wisest, most prudent ways to apply the timeless principles drawn from both at a given moment in time. . .and sometimes they make mistakes.

The Best of Ryan McMaken