Pacem in Terris, Fifty Years Later

Pacem in Terris can be considered as an epochal point of reference in the history of the social doctrine of the Church.¹ It entails the richness of the past and opens new horizons with all the risks linked to such an operation. We must not forget that the times were ripe to welcome such a change. Was it a change or a simple development, a breaking off or a continuity? This is a question of hermeneutics. As Pope Benedict XVI strongly insisted in regard to the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, the council can be interpreted and received only with a hermeneutic of continuity. The paradigm of Vatican II applies also to Pacem in Terris, and should be the rule for all magisterial documents.

Pacem in Terris comes to light in a changing world, one experiencing unprecedented economic and social development, and general optimism, at least in the West. The hard postwar years were over. Colonialism was ending in the South. The encyclical, too, is full of the yearning for more freedom, a better life, and the hope of peace. Yet peace was far from guaranteed in the early sixties. In addressing the world’s hopes, the movement that merged into Vatican II is already at work in Pacem in Terris. The Church would not miss its appointment with history.

The issue taken up by the encyclical was no less than the reconciliation between the teachings of the Church and the world, the latter understood as the liberal democratic society inaugurated by the European Enlightenment and the American experiment. The challenge was not small. Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors, written in 1864, had ruled out any possibility for the Church to compromise with the modern social philosophy of a now liberal and relativistic world.

One hundred years later, Pacem in Terris tried to reconcile the modern individual with the order created by God. In the social teaching of the Church the accent was on the objective reality in which all creatures move. This order, which is ultimately inscribed in the heart of human beings, is an object of knowledge through reason. It is not static or immutable. What is immutable is God’s design in creating an order that has to govern the relationship between human beings, human communities, and nations. What is submitted to change is our knowledge of that order.

At the core of the modern understanding of humanity in the universe, there is no notion of such an objective order. The entire accent is on the individual, his autorealization and, as a correlate, autoalienation in the hands of the state through a contract. There is no truth to be researched or achieved; there is only a consensus to be found among contractors to define what would be the norm to which all should conform in order to build an acceptable social framework.

I. In Search of Convergence with the Liberal Thought

Modern times began with the Pax Westphalica, and certainly earlier. However, 1648 is one of those milestones that indicate a new beginning. The old world based on the evidence of an inherent order created by God was over. As Grotius puts it, we can organize the world “etsi Deus non daretur” (as if God did not exist). God was still mentioned formally through mere lip service, but he was no longer the God of the Jewish-Christian revelation, acting in history and guiding its course to an end decided by him alone. Now the course of history was in the hands of the strongest. As Hobbes suggested, “Non veritas sed voluntas facit legem” (It is not truth but will that makes the law). The eighteenth-century Enlightenment mixed easily the claims of the absolute state with those of the absolute individual.

Thus the Westphalian peace treaties opened three centuries of unlimited state competence, including in ecclesiastical matters, although not without strong resistance from the Catholic Church. For each territory, the state authority became the rule in Europe. Relations among states were dictated by the law of the strongest.

The first attempt to overcome the Westphalia...