For many months, Pope Benedict XVI’s social encyclical has been hotly anticipated in certain sections of the Catholic press and blogosphere. Many Catholics, fed up of the perceived neoconservative stranglehold on Church teaching, were excited about a possible rebuke of the free-market fundamentalism that is prevalent among some of the faithful in the west.

Well, now Caritas in Veritate is here. From one quick reading, it seems to me that this is not the anti-capitalist tract that some Catholics were hoping for. At the same time, the encyclical gives Christian free-market enthusiasts plenty to worry about.

In fact, Benedict adopts a determinedly balanced, humanitarian assessment of globalism and mankind’s current economic predicament. He does not fail to observe the benefits of the spread free-market capitalism, but he invariably stresses the importance of humanity in economic matters and the risk posed to human dignity by the delusional embrace of technologically enhanced market systems. The Pontiff draws from several other socially conscious papal encyclicals that most neocons would rather forget, such as Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio and and John Paul II’s Sollicitudo Rei Socialis.

It’s hard to do justice to the depth and breadth of the Pope’s work here. But here’s just one part that struck me as interesting:

Economic activity cannot solve all social problems through the simple application of commercial logic. This needs to be directed towards the pursuit of the common good, for which the political community in particular must also take responsibility. Therefore, it must be borne in mind that grave imbalances are produced when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution.

That might ring alarm bells among some conservatives. But they would be missing the point, I think. The Pope’s argument here is not to say that private and public spheres must be harmonized into some sort of corporatist Christian ideal; but that the current, simplistic debate of wealth creation vs redistributive government is false and harmful, because it unfairly empowers both the state (as the sole source of human justice) and the market (as the sole source of human prosperity and happiness.)

Time and again, Benedict strikes a moral balance between politicized positions. Take international aid, for example. Contra Dambisa Moyo and the emerging anti-aid orthodoxy, the Pontiff insists that overseas aid is an essential tool to human betterment and global solidarity. Yet, rather than simply boosting overseas government-led programs, he suggests “fiscal subsidiarity, allowing citizens to decide how to allocate a portion of the taxes they pay to the State. Provided it does not degenerate into the promotion of special interests, this can help to stimulate forms of welfare solidarity from below, with obvious benefits in the area of solidarity for development as well.”

Cynics might say that the Pope is indulging in a sort of moral triangulation: giving his conservative admirers truths to cling on to — subsidiarity, family, the beneficent power of trade — while balancing it out with progressive giblets — social justice, government aid to the poor, protect the environment — for the Left to chew on. Rightists and Leftists can pick and choose whatever they want to stress from the Pope’s message, and consider themselves Catholics in good standing.

No doubt the pundits of Left and Right — the ones who can be bothered to read this long document, and even some of the ones who can’t — will do exactly that. But that cynicism misses the point, not to mention the theological depth of Benedict’s thought. Caritas in Veritate is an dazzling work of Christian humanism, a convincing appeal for moral sense and decency in a discombobulated and lonely — albeit more than ever inter-connected — world.

PS. The more earthy cons among TAC’s readership will delight in the Pope’s ruminations on the environment, particularly in this passage:

In order to protect nature, it is not enough to intervene with economic incentives or deterrents; not even an apposite education is sufficient. These are important steps, but the decisive issue is the overall moral tenor of society. If there is a lack of respect for the right to life and to a natural death, if human conception, gestation and birth are made artificial, if human embryos are sacrificed to research, the conscience of society ends up losing the concept of human ecology and, along with it, that of environmental ecology. It is contradictory to insist that future generations respect the natural environment when our educational systems and laws do not help them to respect themselves. The book of nature is one and indivisible: it takes in not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations: in a word, integral human development. Our duties towards the environment are linked to our duties towards the human person, considered in himself and in relation to others. It would be wrong to uphold one set of duties while trampling on the other. Herein lies a grave contradiction in our mentality and practice today: one which demeans the person, disrupts the environment and damages society.

Eat your crunchy hearts out.

UPDATE: I’d missed George Weigel’s predictable harsh-yet-polite verdict on the encyclical — thank you John for linking to it. Weigel, it seems, is becoming the go-to theologian for right-wingers who want to damn Pope Benedict in faint praise. The Pope, he writes, “is a truly gentle soul”, who included several woolly-headed Lefty arguments, “in order to maintain the peace within his curial household.” How’s that for false charity? In this, Weigel reminds one of those catty Catholic progressives who would say that Pope John Paul II is really “one of us”, but that, because of his goodly nature, he has allowed himself to be corrupted by “conservative factions” within the Vatican.