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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
IN POLITICS the church is only a theoretician. The religious communities as such should be concerned with political doctrine, and with clarifying and keeping wide open the legitimate options for choice. Their task is not the determination of policy. Their special orientation upon politics is, in a sense, an exceedingly limited one. They need to stand in awe before people nowadays called political “decision-makers,” or rather before the majesty of topmost political agency. Political decision and action is an image of the majesty of God, who also rules by particular decrees. God says, “Let there be … ”; and His word becomes deed and actuality. So also earthly magistrates have the high and lonely responsibility of declaring what shall actually be done. Allowing for the limitations that surround even the highest magistrate of a great nation, it is still the case that he creatively shapes events by decisions that must be particular decisions going beyond doctrine. He must actualize what is to be from among a number of legitimate choices. The majesty of political rulership is that it is always a triumph over doctrine through right doctrine, a victory over generalities through the proper generalities. It injects life-giving, or at least actuality-giving, deeds into words over words and beyond words.
* An address before the Religious Leaders' Conference on Peace, held at the Church Center for the United Nations in New York, January 12–14, 1965.
1 The New York Times, Sept. 18, 1964.
2 “Ethics and International Relations Today,” an address delivered at Amherst College, Dec. 8, 1964, and reported in The New York Times, Dec. 10, 1964.
3 For an examination of this political doctrine, see my article, “The Uses of Power,” Perkins School of Theology Journal, XVIII, No. 1 (Fall, 1964), 13–24Google Scholar.
4 Pope John XXIII's encyclical Pacem in Terris seems on first reading to teach that the national and the international common good are always coincident, or that these can be made to be coincident in any moment of governmental decision. At least, this is the interpretation of some enthusiastic commentators, who seem to believe there is never any reason for negotiation to fail. To the contrary, the Pontiff rightly emphasizes that “it can at times happen” that “meetings” are actually useful. This implies that it can at times happen that they are not, and that issues fail to be resolved. “… To decide whether this moment has arrived … these are the problems which can only be solved with the virtue of prudence.” Whether the moment for fruitful negotiation (which should always be held open as a possible occurrence) has actually happened is a decision which “rests primarily with those who live and work in the specific sectors of human society in which these problems arise.” (¶ 160)
5 The New York Times, May 3, 1965.
6 Cogley, John, “The Encyclical as a Guide to World Order,” one of the papers prepared for the planning session of the Pacem in Terris Conference which was held in New York City, Feb. 18–20, 1965Google Scholar. The paper was inserted by the Hon. Claiborne Pell in the Congressional Record, Thursday, May 21, 1964.