Four disclosures

Catholic Social Teaching: front fig leaf to bay leaf

There were a number of points in the work with CAFOD where it became clear that there was a real desire for CST to be a living tradition within the organisation. Officially, of course, the agency was thoroughly committed to CST as the root of its values and vision. In practice, however, there was a concern that documents of CST were simply mined as sources of quotes that could be used to legitimise actions already decided upon, appealing to the largely Catholic support base, as well as adhering to organisational identity. The tendency toward looking for ‘Pope quotes’ was recognised -not without humour! More seriously, this raised the issue of how a Catholic agency draws upon normative sources. This disclosure witnesses to the realisation that such an embodiment of a normative tradition need not be a simply passive process, but rather, CAFOD’s own theologising was an important source of commentary on CST. This engagement with the tradition through an authentic theologising of the agency’s own not only could lead to a greater appropriation of CST but also opened up the possibility that CAFOD had the potential to contribute to the tradition’s on-going development. A more dialogical approach to the tradition opened up the possibility of its both challenging and supporting the practices of CAFOD.

The struggle to appropriate the tradition effectively was well witnessed to, as was the experience of its effectiveness when speaking with partners in different parts of the world. One staff member highlighted how, as lay employees, they could struggle to find a common language with the Catholic hierarchies in the global south when they were discussing programmes, and explored the power of CST to bridge gaps between ‘development speak’ and ecclesial communities:

Quoting from different popes of course is hugely beneficial when talking to bishops and so, for me, just having a bit more awareness of what people have said and how I could use some of those comments or highlight some of those comments around what Pope Paul VI said about solidarity and working with those who are striving to escape hunger and misery and disease.... I’ve begun to understand a little bit more about what Catholic Social Teaching is saying, how I might be able to utilise some of those messages, picked out some messages that I think could apply to the situation in Burma and the situation of the church and its response to HIV and AIDS in Burma.... p 4: but I think CST can give the church a framework to enter into discussions with other agencies and articulate the church’s response and what is its vision and strategy, and CST runs through all of how the church is trying to articulate its response to HIV and AIDS, but they’re perhaps not utilising it as much as they could and not necessarily seeing it as a language that could be less threatening than other languages.

(Asia and Middle East Group Participant)

In another group, an Advocacy worker related how CST language and quotes were important in making communication effective in different contexts.

The way in which I use Catholic social teaching ... in terms of a bit of a justification: this is why we work on this; look this is what the Pope said ... therefore it is good to work on this. But obviously that comes after we call up “rent-a-quote”. There is a bit of “rent-a-quote”, but I guess there are two ways in which you use the “rent-a-quote” - and one is kind of reinforce for existing campaigners, oh yes there is a recognition here.... this puts into words something that I feel and links it to an authority I respect. And I guess the other one we use is to kind of help campaigners sell campaigning, I guess, to people who aren’t very interested in campaigning - but this will kind of give them a point of reference.

(Advocacy Group Participant)

These Advocacy workers were also prone to that reluctance with regard to explicit faith language that we had noticed in other projects (for example see C3 and El). This seemed to have led to a somewhat bifurcated use of the tradition, as described by this participant:

There is also I guess within the team a bit of a feeling of we don’t want to be preaching, so we don’t want to be coming over too strong, so there is all this talk around using social teaching implicitly using very values based language, picking up on ideas like compassion and hope and solidarity and so there is that element. But I think that just needs more thinking through, because I think at the moment we kind of say either it’s the “rent-a-quote” end or it’s something that is so implicit that it could be anybody, it’s a nice humanist agenda.

What seemed lacking here was a sense of CST as an appropriated language, which could be used fluently with a mature discretion of particular circumstances.

A common experience in doing theology through conversation is that at some point, someone will find a compelling metaphor that encapsulates the point. In this project, it was the participants themselves who generated the language which could give a currency to this idea of a fluent, mature use of CST. This took place in a third session with the Advocacy team, as a participant struggled to convey a hoped for way of working with CST:

I know they’re there [Catholic Social Teachings], that’s always the sort of interlocutor in terms of my conceptual ideas. And I think for me now, Catholicism is a.... because it’s a coherent and well developed set of ideas, it’s an interesting kind of discursive partner, it’s effectively a bay leaf in a big milky stock that sort of infuses the work even if it’s not always directly visible.

In later conversations, the bay leaf approach was contrasted with the idea that using ‘pope quotes’ was like using a fig leaf to cover the essential case being made. Thus, fig leaf versus bay leaf became a short-hand for the dilemmas in how to use the normative resource of CST.