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230 兩 L O YA L D I S S E N T Puritan founders, has seen the United States as God’s chosen people and as having a God-given leadership role in the world. We see this tendency today as strongly as ever before. But American Catholics have often made the same mistake. We can never identify our own finite perspective totally with God’s omnipotence. The gospel perspective always stands in judgment over every finite human perspective. On the other hand, Catholicism has learned and can learn from American culture. Catholicism traditionally has failed to give enough importance to human freedom and the active participation of the citizen in government. Without glossing over the very real dangers inherent in the American notion of freedom, which stresses freedom from rather than freedom for, all can agree that the Catholic Church has come to appreciate the importance of individual freedoms, and that the United States has been one of its teachers in this respect. The Catholic Church was slow to embrace human rights and democracy because of its fear of rampant individualism and the sins that it breeds. The procedures of canon law still fail to protect adequately the rights of the accused, and this stands in stark contrast to the procedures of American law. The church universal should learn from the more open style of writing church documents that the U.S. bishops used in their pastoral letters on peace and the economy, a style in keeping with the larger American ideal of open processes. This is not to say that the church has been in the wrong to mistrust unbridled individualism—far from it. Catholicism, based on its biblical foundation and also borrowing from Aristotle, has traditionally insisted on the solidarity of all human beings; indeed, the church is in its very essence a corporate body. And the church is right to criticize the abuses that flow from privileging individual rights and liberties at the expense of the common good. In political matters, Catholic social teaching steers a middle course between the two extremes of minimal government intrusion into people’s lives (the individualist ideal) and maximum government control over people ’s lives (collectivism). The church recognizes the need for intermediate institutions between the individual and government. In the economic arena, Catholic teaching calls for significant limits on the capitalist system to ensure that all human beings are guaranteed a minimally decent The Development of Theology in the Past Fifty Years 兩 231 human existence. The church must teach and live the preferential option for the poor. One reason why I moved away from sexual and medical ethics into the study of social ethics in the 1970s was that I had realized that sexual ethics was often a middle-class agenda. Social ethics addresses issues that have a broader impact and that concern not only or primarily the middle class but also the working class and the poor. Other Social Issues While, as I have said, I regret that I never directly addressed the issue of racism or white privilege in this country, I am quite proud of my essay on the community organizing approach of Saul Alinsky, which had been adopted by many Catholic social activists.23 Saul Alinksy, an agnostic Jew, had been organizing poor people in Chicago in the 1950s with strong support from the Catholic community and Father Jack Egan. In 1970 the U.S. bishops, following Alinsky’s model, established the Campaign for Human Development in response to the urban riots of the 1960s. This project funded a good number of community organizations that helped poor people work for their own betterment. Until this time, Catholic theology had ignored what was the most signi ficant development in Catholic social practice in the United States. I was very impressed by the Alinsky approach and how it fit in with the Catholic theological tradition, but I also argued that we need to deal with substantive issues and institutional structures, not just with tactics and strategies, including the conflictual ones that Alinsky emphasized. Alinsky’s approach to community organizing impressed upon me the important role that solidarity and its challenge to entrenched power must play in bringing about social change, even though these things can never be absolutized . Official Catholic social teaching has not adequately recognized the importance of power and conflict to social reform. In 1979 I argued that the Catholic understanding of distributive justice calls for the right of all citizens...

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