>This is a subset of the broader issue of left-religious links, but the
>Catholic Church is a particularly interesing institution for that analysis.
-Almost everything I know about Catholic social teaching I learned
-from a lecture I heard earlier this year by a Marxist Jesuit. He said
-that the Church philosophy was fundamentally corporatist - not
-socialist and not anticapitalist - and based on notions of fair
-shares (a fair wage, a fair profit, etc.).
Where corporatism leaves off and a lot of forms of socialism start is not always clear, especially when the form of corporatism spring from an institution like the Catholic Church which is not generally nationalist, as its pro-immigrant position in the US emphasizes. In the 20th century, it was the wedding of corporatism to nationalism that led to the most toxic results.
With parts of the Left in the US allying with the nationalist Right on issues like Kosovo and trade -- and folks like Cockburn arguing for exploring the ideological sympathies -- it seems quite as reasonable to argue for exploring how the ideological alliance between the secular Left and the Catholic social justice movement should be made.
I frankly think the Left has ultimately more in common in values with the internationalist third world orientation of the Catholic Church's social justice wing than with the nationalist and implicitly labor-aristocracy orientation of the Buchanite-militia Right.
>Anything involving the Church is going to be full of contradictions -
>there's liberation theology, but there's Opus Dei and the Knights of
>Malta too, not to mention a fundamentally patriarchal philosophy.
That goes without saying. But in real world organizing, it is negotiating those contradictions that are the toughest tasks and need the most thought. One reason theory often has a bad odor among activists is that theorists are often happy to criticize the hell out of all sorts of institutions, but then stop short of the practical thinking about what to do positively to negotiate the negative aspects brought to light by that criticism.
So for all those who see the Catholic Church as so fundamentally anti-socialist, does that mean that Leftists should not build coalitions with institutionally-based Catholic organizations? If coalitions are okay, what beliefs should be promoted by such coalitions that will be both acceptable on the Catholic social justice side yet not undermine a more radical socialist message down the line? What should the Labor Party do in the case of negotiating the abortion issue in regards to the strong Catholic labor wing?
These are the tough questions and I don't know the answers, but the reason I bring them up is that they are more immediately relevant to left activism than a lot of the issues that raise heated debate on these lists, but don't really show up in any practical way among day-to-day organizing.
--Nathan Newman