As mentioned yesterday, Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute has produced a short discourse on the Pope’s not-yet released encyclical on social justice over at First Things. Novak’s article is to the encyclical what condoms are to intercourse: Novak is trying, and trying desperately, to frustrate Pope Benedict’s intention in issuing an encyclical on social justice.

Pope Benedict is, of course, a pastor. By training he is also a theologian. An encyclical is a means by which the Pope teaches Catholic truth, which truth is intimately and intrinsically tied to the revelation of Jesus Christ. In other words, the truth Pope Benedict will proclaim is a theological truth. Yet, not once does Novak mention theology and the only reference he makes to a theologian is to a statement of Pope John Paul II’s that has no particular theological content. Novak, for example, writes, "Will all those good Catholic leftists who announce their own enthusiastic preference for the poor actually help to liberate the poor, even by a little? Will their anticapitalist policies help alleviate poverty? The historical record offers very little evidence for that contention." The verb "liberate" is the key to that quote and Novak means something different from liberation from what St. Paul meant. Freedom from government regulation is not the same thing as the freedom of the children of God. The question, the theological question, about capitalism is not whether it alleviates material poverty. We can stipulate that fact, although many in Latin America are right to wonder what happened to the promises of prosperity from the NAFTA crowd. But, the theological question is this. Do not the very means by which capitalism increases material wealth entail an impoverishment of the spiritual wealth of the people who engage in it?

 Novak assures us that this is not the case, that capitalism is not all about greed but is romantic, it involves noble sentiments of the human heart like the yearning for innovation and human creativity. "In actual capitalist practice, the love of creativity, invention, and groundbreaking enterprise are far more powerful than motives of greed," he writes.