The Two Churches: Catholicism and Capitalism in the World System
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The Two Churches: Catholicism and Capitalism in the World System
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Overview
Budde's argument here is twofold. He contends that world Catholicism, led by its Third World majority (most notably in Latin America), will continue to develop in an increasingly anticapitalist direction; and he suggests that once-dominant First World Catholic churches (exemplified by the U.S. Catholic church), are poorly placed to respond in solidarity with their coreligionists from the Third World.
Covering a wide range of theoretical and substantive matters, The Two Churches examines religion as a source of both social legitimation and social rebellion. It demonstrates the importance of ecclesiology, a branch of theology dealing with "theories of the church," and it highlights the effect of capitalism on world Catholicism, as well as the latter's influence on the development of the capitalist order.
In his original, far-reaching analysis of the Catholic church's role in world affairs, Budde revises current views of religious institutions as subordinate social phenomena. By relating developments in the world political economy to material conditions in the Third World and in turn to the practice of Catholicism, he reveals how the Catholic church functions as a worldwide institution. He also shows how core-periphery conflicts within the church affect transnational capitalism.
As the Third World becomes more and more volatile, and as its relations with the First World further complicate the politics of the Catholic church, the questions addressed in The Two Churches demand attention with increasing urgency. Timely, thoughtful, and lucid, this book will inform and enhance our understanding of this complex, pressing issue.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822398745 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 412 KB |
Read an Excerpt
The Two Churches
Catholicism & Capitalism in the World-System
By Michael L. Budde
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1992 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9874-5
CHAPTER 1
ROMAN CATHOLICISM IN THE WORLD-SYSTEM
When it finally fell, the Berlin Wall took more than state socialism with it. It also pulled down old certainties about the world, its resistance to change, and its unbridgeable divisions. No sooner had old verities crumbled, however, than new ones rushed to fill the gaps.
These new verities proclaim the final triumph of freedom, the victory of the West, the vindication of capitalism worldwide as the liberator of captives and uplift of the downtrodden. We may not have arrived at the "end of history" (Fukuyama, 1990), but the new wisdom suggests that serious conflicts over political-economic systems seem unlikely in the future. A Nobel laureate economist asserts that "it is now almost universally acknowledged that a private-ownership, free-enterprise economy 'works better' than ... [a] socialized economy, in which decisions are made by state or cooperative agencies" (Buchanan, 1990).
But even before the bubbles had left the victory champagne, signs of a more ominous reality began to return. Triumphant capitalism, a mighty world edifice, remains built on unstable foundations: on high infant mortality rates in Bolivia, on squatter settlements outside Mexico City, on worldwide debt levels unknown in prior history. Amid the huzzahs for capitalism victorious, there may yet be heard—in the hinterlands, away from the feast—both the rumblings of discontent and an odd silence, acclaim withheld by those to whom capitalism has provided not bread, but stones.
Among the institutions cheering the downfall of communism, surely few cheer more loudly than the Roman Catholic Church. The implacable foe of the Red menace since the latter's inception, the Church kept a steady drumbeat of opposition to communism—on behalf of Catholics in the "captive nations" of Eastern Europe (see Ramet, 1989), in support of the freedoms of liberal democracies, and to preserve its freedom of action worldwide.
But as the world has changed dramatically in recent decades, so has the Catholic Church as an actor within it. In ways unforeseeable a generation ago, developments in world capitalism have provided new challenges and controversies for world Catholicism. In turn, the future of the capitalist world economy may depend, at least in part, on developments within the Catholic Church.
Why should a political economist be concerned with developments within the Catholic Church? The ordinary stuff of political economy— land tenure and labor markets, international trade and tariffs, investment and public policy—seems remote from the world of incense and stained glass, saints and sacraments, popes and prayer. Such a distance, I contend, is more real at the level of academic disciplines—where moats of jargon, theory, and scholarly journals mark the divides—than at the level of lived experience. Real life, fortunately, proceeds in ignorance of scholarly turf and subdisciplines.
A variety of commentators have observed that capitalism, for its ongoing reproduction, requires a variety of cultural inputs that it cannot create (see Bell, 1976; Luke, 1989). Religion has long been one such cultural system, legitimating capitalist relations of production in diverse times and places. But if such legitimation is instrumental in stabilizing capitalism, the providing of such legitimation cannot be assumed. Those cultural systems built on non- or precapitalist foundations—as are all the major world religions, including Christianity—also have been tapped by groups seeking to delegitimize capitalism in different times and places. So long as religious phenomena retain at least some spark of independence from their surrounding milieus, their capitalist allegiance must be won anew rather than assumed as an eternal constant. What dynamic religious groups legitimize, they can also—under certain circumstances—delegitimize (e.g., Kowalewski and Greil, 1990; Billings, 1990; Gamoran, 1990).
However important in theory religious actors and phenomena are to capitalism (many contemporary scholars suggest, alas, that they are not very important), state actors in their practice attest to the significance of the relationship. Regardless of their legal/constitutional formulations, states in capitalist countries expend significant resources seeking to influence, direct, or inhibit religious activity in ways conducive to state objectives, among which the perpetuation of capitalism ranks at or near the top. While states prefer religious groups to bless and not damn capitalism, most will settle for indifference instead of a considered opinion either way. Tools that include persuasion, legal prosecution, infiltration, subversion, and even assassination have been employed by states in their quest to influence the orientations of religious communities in their midst.
After assessing the complex interactions of economics and religion with reference to the Catholic Church, my main conclusions are these:
(1) The workings of the capitalist world economy and changes within the Catholic Church make it plausible to argue that world Catholicism (led by the Latin American and other Third World churches) will continue to develop in anticapitalist directions.
(2) The churches in core countries (typified by the U.S. Catholic Church) are poorly placed to respond in ecclesial solidarity to the anti-capitalist critiques and challenges of their Third World coreligionists, who now compose the majority of members worldwide in the Catholic Church.
FRAMING THIS STUDY
In this book I attempt to apply the insights of world-systems theory (WST) to the study of the Catholic Church. While others have attempted to approach Catholicism within a systems-oriented perspective (notably Vallier, 1970), to my knowledge no one has situated the Catholic Church as an actor within theWST framework explicated by scholars such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Christopher Chase-Dunn, and Albert Bergeson.
The desirability of such an effort reflects two interrelated notions: (1) WST provides important theoretical resources helpful in understanding the changing social environments confronting the universal Church and local churches; and (2) a focus on Catholicism as a transnational cultural and social actor can point toward areas in WST that deserve further development.
Of necessity, an analysis that strives to integrate political economy with religious/theological studies must attempt to cover a broad expanse of literature and research. Fashioning a coherent, consistent, and reasonably compelling explanation of evolving and complex phenomena remains the goal of such transdisciplinary wanderings (Simon, 1982; Wilber and Jameson, 1983) rather than producing some positivistic core of falsifiable or quantifiable generalizations. I am presenting an attempt at explanatory and theoretical development, not original empirical research.
The literature on WST has grown rapidly since 1974. Some of the initial enthusiasm for the framework has faded, replaced by more tempered support (Denemark and Thomas, 1988). Critics have attacked WSTboth in its particulars and fundamentals (Brenner, 1977; Skocpol, 1977); while I find the fundamentals ofWST useful in understanding the world economy, my main disagreements will become apparent (particularly in WST'S treatment of cultural phenomena).
The central tenet of WST is the existence of a single world economy, capitalist in nature, originating in the sixteenth century and by the current age encompassing all areas of the world. To Wallerstein, the leader of the WST movement, an "economy" exists when (and only when) "there is an ongoing, extensive and relatively complete social division of labor with an integrated set of production processes which relate to each other through a 'market' which has been 'instituted' or 'created' in some complex way ..." (Wallerstein, 1984, p. 13).
The structural characteristics of this worldwide division of labor are a concentration of high-productivity, high-wage tasks in a few regions (the core), concentration of low-productivity, low-wage tasks in a majority of regions (the periphery), and a stratum of midrange regions with both core and periphery characteristics (the semiperiphery). This division of labor, significantly, ranges beyond the control of any single political authority. A fragmented system of states exists within the world economy, performing important functions for economic actors in that economy but unable to dominate or control its operations (Wallerstein, 1979, p. 2,0).
This by now familiar sketch of WST explains the prosperity of some regions (the core) and the immiserization of others (the periphery) as outcomes of the same processes; while purely domestic factors play a role in a region's economic fortunes, WST finds the primary explanatory variables at the level of the system itself, which shapes and situates domestic or national-level factors. WST sees itself as a framework superior in explanatory power to state-centered levels of analysis (and analyses between and among nations), which it regards as reductive (Wallerstein, 1979).
Studies of the Catholic Church up to 1992 have not reflected the WST paradigm. Most of the best recent studies of Catholicism, while attentive to international factors, have been nation-based works (e.g., Mainwaring, 1986; Bruneau, 1982). Most recent studies of the Vatican, the symbolic and administrative center of Catholicism, have been superficial (e.g., Packard, 1985; Wynn, 1988); Hebblethwaite's and Granfield's books and articles remain bright spots in an otherwise dim picture (Hebblethwaite, 1986a, 1986b, 1988a; Granfield, 1987, 1988). And while Hanson's 1987 book on world Catholicism remains the best contemporary work (one important to this study), it primarily concentrates on matters other than specifically political economy concerns.
A competent study of the Catholic Church is further complicated by the nature of religious organizations generally and the Church in particular. The Catholic Church is a large, bureaucratic, administratively complex institution—and much more. To understand it solely in terms that apply to other complex organizations—like states and corporations, for example—is to misperceive what makes religious groups so difficult to study, in particular their self-understanding, their points of ultimate reference, and their specific ideological developments (in the form of various theological traditions). Purely extrinsic studies of religious phenomena (Wiebe, 1985) fail to grasp the distinctively religious qualities they contain and invariably misunderstand the actors, motivations, and ideologies involved. Such failures, evident also in Wallerstein's limited treatment of religion in WST, are all too common.
A more detailed discussion of how WST has understood matters religious is offered in chapter 2. That chapter also reviews some theoretical literature relevant to issues considered here and more extensively considers previously unexplored relationships that hold promise in interrelating political economy and Catholicism more precisely. Before considering such matters, however, we should look at real-world changes in the world economy and in the Catholic Church.
TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHANGES IN THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD
RISE AND DECLINE OF U.S. HEGEMONY SINCE I945
The United States emerged from World War II with a world economic and political superiority that had few historical precedents. So dominant was this position from 1945 through 1967 that the United States enjoyed a hegemonic position in world affairs, understood in the sense offered by Wallerstein:
When providers located in a given state can undersell producers located in other core states in the latter's "home market," they can transform this productive advantage over time into one in the commercial arena and then into one in the financial arena. The combined advantages may be said to constitute hegemony and are reflected as well in a political-military advantage in the interstate system. (1984, p. 17)
Domestically, the United States enjoyed an era of unprecedented economic prosperity marked by increasing real wage levels and productivity, low unemployment and inflation, and comfortable levels of economic growth. This boom was fueled in no small part by the increasing involvement of U.S. multinational corporations (MNCS) in profitable overseas investment and production. While most of that investment went to Europe and other core areas, it also grew in the peripheral region of Latin America from $400 million in 1945 to $9 billion by 1976 (Evans, 1979, p. 25). Prosperity allowed for years of labor peace, with the 1947 GM-UAW pact inaugurating an era of business-labor cooperation focusing on expanding the pie enjoyed by both. The social strategy of the New Deal—a prosperous business climate with at least the rudiments of a welfare state—worked smoothly, greased as it was by comfortable levels of economic growth.
The U.S. boom lasted for more than two decades before it began to unravel. Wars of national liberation and civil wars throughout the Third World started to threaten U.S. political and military prerogatives. The economies of Western Europe and Japan, which provided profitable and secure havens for U.S. investments and exports after the war, began challenging the U.S. hegemonic position in trade and production. The Johnson administration's decision to finance the Vietnam War without tax increases (Wolfe, 1981, pp. 127-29) helped to inflate the U.S. economy with negative consequences.
By 1973, when the OPEC oil embargo signaled a long-term change in world economic and political relations, the United States had already backed down from its hegemonic perch. The U.S. abandoned the gold standard and important aspects of the Bretton Woods arrangements (in 1971) that had structured much of the postwar prosperity. With hegemony no longer a profitable position, the United States searched throughout the 1970s and 1980s for its place in a posthegemonic arrangement in which it would still enjoy considerable (if not determinative) influence.
Within the United States, life after hegemony has been traumatic for many. With lower levels of economic growth, business interests abandoned their cooperative arrangements with the labor movement, launching a multileveled assault on working-class wage and benefit levels. Unemployment, inflation, a severe recession, and a declining middle-class standard of living characterized these changed conditions. In many ways Americans seemed to "have spent the past thirty years getting used to the benefits of a hegemonic position, and will have to spend the next thirty years getting used to life without them" (Wallerstein, 1984, p. 68).
BOOM AND BUST IN THE PERIPHERY
If the United States enjoyed the benefits of hegemonic power through an important part of the twentieth century, the vagaries of the world economy treated most Third World regions less kindly. Many peripheral areas began the century developing or expanding export economies concentrated on one or two products, leaving the regions vulnerable to cyclical world-economic fluctuations over which they had no control. The Depression collapse of world commodity markets fell hardest on such primary product exporters, some of which responded by starting up import-substitution industrialization. In Brazil, for example, where the Depression killed the coffee-exporting part of the economy, the number of workers employed in industry nearly tripled between 1920 and 1940 (Adriance, 1986, pp. 9-10).
The regions in which some domestic industry had developed by 1945, or those regions that managed some political control over a strategic resource (for example, oil), were in a position to reap more benefits from the postwar economic expansion than were those more completely dependent on foreign centers for their economic dynamism. But in both peripheral and semiperipheral regions, broad similarities in patterns were evident: high levels of GNP growth, increasing levels of inequality, growing involvement with core-based MNCS, and chronic political instabilities and the threat of core political/military intervention. Certain sectors of the local elite in such regions prospered, along with a thinly based labor aristocracy; other beneficiaries included the military and state bureaucracy. According to Illich (1977, p. 69):
In most Third World countries ... income, consumption, and the well-being of the middle class are all growing, while the gap between this class and the mass of people widens. Even where per capita consumption is rising[,] the majority [of people] have less food now than in 1945, less actual care in sickness, less meaningful work, less protection. This is partly a consequence of polarized consumption and partly caused by the breakdown of the traditional family and consumption. More people suffer from hunger, pain and exposure in 1969 than did at the end of World War II, not only numerically, but as a percentage of the world population.
Third World regions incorporated into the world economy, designed to transfer surplus to core regions, increasingly came to be described as "dependent." Dependency theory, a still-evolving body of theoretical and empirical literature, began reshaping the picture of the world experienced by some scholars, activists, and politicians. As defined by Caporaso and Zare (1981, p. 46):
Dependency is a structural condition in which capitalist accumulation does not complete its cycle domestically but relies instead on external factors for its completion.... As the local economy opens itself up to the international system, these external factors operate in conjunction with internal (domestic) forces to produce distortions in the domestic system. These distortions (for example, internal inequality, either across economic sectors, between urban and rural areas, and across classes; authoritarian forms of government) are clearly not the product of either external or internal factors, but of both types of factors working together.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Two Churches by Michael L. Budde. Copyright © 1992 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,1 ROMAN CATHOLICISM IN THE WORLD-SYSTEM,
2 WALLERSTEIN, RELIGION, AND ECCLESIOLOGY,
3 ANTICAPITALISM AND THE LATIN AMERICAN CHURCH,
4 U.S. CATHOLIC NATIONALISM,
5 RESOURCES FOR CHANGE? U.S. CATHOLIC SOCIAL ETHICS,
6 CONCLUDING THOUGHTS,
COLLAPSING COMMUNISM AND THE FUTURE OF RELIGIOUS ANTICAPITALISM,
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
INDEX,