Will Benedict XVI's New Encyclical Matter?

In the days leading up to this week's scheduled release of Pope Benedict XVI's latest encyclical, there's been a quickening of speculation about what it will say. We know the name: Caritas in Veritate ("Charity in Truth"). And we know generally that it will be about social topics, including the effect of the global economy, environmental issues and business ethics.

From the left comes predictions that steadfast capitalists will not be happy. From the right comes scoffing that liberals don't understand this pope.

But I have a different question: How much does it matter what the encyclical says? Who will pay attention? Is there any evidence that a papal pronouncement in 2009 has the power to change minds or even behaviors? Because if not, this will ultimately be of interest only to future religious historians.

Catholics themselves are raising the issue. As the Catholic News Service reported last week:

When Pope Benedict XVI's social encyclical is released, Catholics shouldn't just ask, "What does the pope say I'm doing right?" but "What should I do to act more morally?" said the Carl A. Anderson, head of the Knights of Columbus.

Will that happen?

Benedict clearly hopes his words will have an impact. The release of the encyclical -- delayed since last year – arrives days before the scheduled opening of the G8 summit in Italy, not to mention President Obama's scheduled meeting with the pope at the Vatican .

But does anybody really expect the world's leaders to spend the night before the summit combing through the papal recommendations? (Of course, that's probably too short a time horizon to evaluate a statement from an institution that understands itself as operating through millennia. )

Assessing the potential impact of the encyclical is a question of politics and even sociology. So I sought out some folks savvy in those areas.

The Rev. Thomas Reese, former editor of America magazine, is a senior fellow at the Woodstock Institute at Georgetown University. He's one of the experts who has speculated about the content of the encyclical. So how about the impact?

In the short run, the timing has run smack dab into current events, he said.

"Bad luck means that the encyclical is coming out on the day of Michael Jackson's
funeral. No one will be paying attention," he said.

And in the long run? Even if the encyclical itself changes no minds, he said, it could open up the substantial administrative power of the Catholic Church to working harder for the causes Benedict mentions. Priests and nuns working as organizers, parish halls for meetings, topics for homilies – these could make a difference in the long run.

"You might call this the 'trickle down theory of papal encyclicals,'" he said.

Nancy Ammerman, sociology professor at Boston University, points to recent American history for an example of how official religious pronouncements reorganized a denomination's work and, to some extent, the beliefs of the people in the pews.

"Think about what has happened to the SBC in the last 20 years. When sermons and Sunday School lessons every January always turn to the "sanctity of life" (and dozens of other similar emphases are present throughout the denomination), the culture and constituency of the denomination slowly comes to reflect those resolutions that weren't supposed to have any official 'clout.'"

(On the other hand, some sociologists think the Southern Baptist Convention's aggressive push to the right helps explain the rise in the "None of the Aboves," as people on the relative fringes of faith who disagreed with the SBC voted with their feet and left organized religion behind altogether.)

Is there any data showing whether papal pronouncements jiggle the needle of public opinion or behavior? John Green is a senior fellow in religion and American politics at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and has done as much slicing and dicing of survey data about politics and faith as anybody alive. His answer?

"I am not sure there is systematic survey data on these issues."

Hm. Then let's look at the recent historical record to see whether we can find indications of where a pope's statements have mattered.

Start by reaching back a ways, to 1891 and Pope Leo XII's Rerum Novarum (literally "Of New Things"). What new things? The subtitle tells it all : "On capital and labor."

This is considered the grand-daddy of papal social encyclicals. On the one hand, Leo was confronting the effects of the Industrial Revolution and the brutal working conditions for many workers. On the other hand was Karl Marx and his proposed secular solution to that problem.

Leo tried for a middle path. God's will, he suggested, is on the side of private property. But employers had a moral obligation to provide a living wage and humane work environment. And workers had the right to organize if those minimum standards were not met.

(You can read it yourself here. But be warned, heavy lifting ahead: The text doesn't exactly jump from the page.)

How big a deal was this at the time? The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1917 (not exactly an impartial observer, I realize), gave it a standing O:

"Probably no other pronouncement on the social question has had so many readers or exercised such a wide influence. It has inspired a vast Catholic social literature, while many non-Catholics have acclaimed it as one of the most definite and reasonable productions ever written on the subject."

Home team enthusiasm aside, there's no question that it got widely talked about. Or that Catholic organizations used it to bolster actions. In Germany, it was cited by the creators of the Catholic Workers'Associations (katholische Arbeitervereine). It was quoted by priests involved in organizing during the Progressive Era battles in San Francisco.

It even made it into fiction. In George Bernanos' 1937 novel "Diary of a Country Priest," an older priest tells a younger one:

"For instance, that famous encyclical of Leo XIII, 'Rerum Novarum,' YOU can read that without turning a hair, like any instruction for keeping Lent. But when it was published, sonny, it was like an earthquake. The enthusiasm!"

So let's grant that a pope's words could have impact in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Jump forward some decades. I'll not take on the most obvious example: Pope John Paul II and his effect on Poland. That was such a special case that it's impossible to generalize. But I will stick with JPII.

Among his many encyclicals was Evangelium vitae, issued in 1995. Among the topics he addressed with considerable eloquence in that encyclical was the death penalty. Here's a key passage:

"It is clear that, for these purposes to be achieved, the nature and extent of the punishment must be carefully evaluated and decided upon, and ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent."

Pretty unambiguous, yes? Did it have an impact?

By 2005, it had led to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops creating the Catholic Campaign to End the Use of the Death Penalty. At the news conference announcing the campaign, the bishops trotted out a Zogby poll that said Catholic support for the death penalty had declined to only 48 percent from a high of 68 percent some years earlier.

But not so fast. Gallup polls a year or two later showed that 61 percent of Catholics thought the death penalty was morally acceptable. And Pew surveys from about that same time found 62 percent support among Catholics.

So a majority of American Catholics do not accept papal instruction on this issue. (Even as they also reject instruction on, say birth control and abortion, topics much more likely to affect their everyday lives.)

Here's an "on the other hand": Catholic support for the death penalty was a bit less than the general population. And among people who said they attend mass at least once a week – who presumably would be more inclined to pay attention to the Pope and other official Catholic sources -- support for the death penalty was significantly less than among those who said they did not attend as often.

So maybe the encyclical has made a difference there?

But here is another other hand: Support among Hispanic Catholics (44 percent) was much less than among non-Hispanics. So maybe the downshift in support for capital punishment among Catholics is more linked to ethnicity – the increase in the American Hispanic population -- than religious observance ? Is it even possible to tweeze the two apart?

Plus, in the years since Evangelium vitae, forensic science has made enormous strides, and more than a dozen people who had been sentenced to death are now free due to examination of DNA evidence. Maybe that has tipped some public and Catholic public opinion?

So how much difference did Evangelium vitae make? Who can say?

Which leads us back to my original question: How much will this new encyclical matter to anyone who is not a religious scholar?