2004 December Archive at Joseph Scalice

Mary E. Hobgood, Catholic Social Teaching and Economic Theory: Paradigms in Conflict (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).

Paul Misner, Social Catholicism in Europe: From the Onset of Industrialization to the First World War (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1991).

Barbara E. Wall, “Rerum Novarum and its Critics on Social and Sexual Hierarchies,” in F. McHugh, ed., Things Old and New: Catholic Social Teaching Revisited (New York: University Press of America, 1993).

It was with the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891 that a longstanding convergence of theology and politics was given explicit dogmatic formulation. The fascinating and uneasy confluence of social and economic theory on the one hand, and religious and theological instruction on the other, was at last made explicit. This explicit confluence is problematic to its core; conflicting ideological bents and hierarchical goals led to a document with an interpretive malleability that left it largely useless.

Rerum Novarum represented a venture on the part of the papacy and, by tenuous extrapolation, of the Roman Catholic church writ large, to formulate a politically expedient stance vis-a-vis the shifting world of late nineteenth century capitalism. I argue that by dramatically adapting Thomistic thought on property while retaining Thomism’s Aristotelian notions of an organic society, the papacy attempted to shift its class alliances, aligning itself with its erstwhile opponent, the bourgeoisie, in the face of the perceived threat of socialism.

Rerum Novarum provides the historian with a fascinating, and frequently overlooked, window on late nineteenth century religion and politics. Resting as it does on the troublesome cusp of theology and history, it has either been conveniently ignored or myopically interpreted. In this article I will survey three studies of this encyclical, two published during Rerum Novarum’s centenary in 1991 and one in 1993. By examining these three recent accounts of the encyclical, and their at times widely divergent readings of this document and its historical significance, we can gain a sense of both the possibilities for historical investigation and the potential pitfalls of existing historiography.

Without drawing distinctions too sharply it can be said that these three accounts approach the subject from three different perspectives, the more strictly historical, the sociological and the theological.

Continue reading ‘Rerum Novarum and historiography:
Interpretations of 19th Century Catholic Social Teaching’

Creative practice is thus of many kinds. It is already, and actively, our practical consciousness. When it becomes struggle - the active struggle for new consciousness through new relationships that is the ineradicable emphasis of the Marxist sense of self-creation - it can take many forms. It can be the long and difficult remaking of an inherited (determined) practical consciousness: a process often described as development but in practice a struggle at the roots of the mind - not casting off an ideology, or learning phrases about it, but confronting a hegemony in the fibres of the self and in the hard practical substance of effective and continuing relationships. - Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature.[1 ]

In his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx wrote, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”[2]

Rizal For Filipinos striving to “make their own history,” no tradition weighs as heavily “on the brain of living” as the legacy of Jose Rizal. All of Philippine historiography has had to come to terms with him; some have written hagiographies, others denounced “veneration without understanding.”[3] Frequently Rizal, portrayed as the wealthy ilustrado author who opposed revolution, has been counterposed to Bonifacio, seen as the working class revolutionary leader; or again, Rizal is seen as the non-violent pre-Gandhian resister who opposed the violent tactics of the Katipunan.

No matter what stance is taken, one fact is inescapable: Rizal cannot be ignored. The tack taken in interpreting Rizal will unequivocally determine the understanding gained from Philippine history and literature.

The Filipino novelist, F. Sionil Jose, with his masterful fictional recreation of one hundred years of Philippine history in the five volume Rosales saga, allows us to make a radical reappropriation of Rizal and enables a fresh understanding of his significance in Philippine history. Sionil Jose does not approach Rizal on the established terms of Philippine historiography; he neither “casts off ideology” nor “learns phrases about it.” He confronts the Rizalian hegemony in the “fibres of the self” and, in Williams” phrase, “articulates a newly possible consciousness.” It is this confrontation and articulation that I intend to explore in this paper.

Continue reading ‘Articulating Revolution:
Rizal in F. Sionil Jose’s Rosales Saga’