PREFERENTIAL OPTION FOR THE POOR

Since her earliest days, the Church has exercised a ministry to the poor and oppressed. These activities derive directly from the many biblical indications of our responsibilities toward those suffering from any cause, but especially those who, because of their own misfortune or their social context, cannot care for themselves. Catholic missionary work has accordingly been accompanied by the building and operation of hospitals, schools, and economic enterprises meant to enable people to live better and to participate more fully in social and economic life.

As it grew from being an oppressed minority itself to a full-scale church, Catholicism encouraged governments and other public agents to include the most vulnerable in making public decisions. In Catholic thought, charity – in the sense of love for God and others – should give birth to justice, and the works of mercy specify the contents of that justice.
Pope Leo XIII, who inaugurated modern Catholic social doctrine with his 1891 encyclical On the Social Question, Rerum Novarum, warned against the growing movement toward socialism and asserted the importance of private property to individual liberty and family welfare. In the process, however, he also repeated and summed up the earlier teaching: “In protecting the rights of private individuals, special consideration must be given to the weak and the poor.”

Origin of the Term • In 1968, meeting at Medellín, Colombia, the Latin American Bishops’ Conference (CELAM) introduced a new formulation of the Church’s commitment to the poor into modern Catholic social teaching: the preferential option for the poor. Vatican Council II had encouraged the local churches to apply universal Catholic principles to their concrete circumstances. For the Latin American bishops, facing severe underdevelopment and rapidly growing populations in the 1960s, the preferential option seemed an urgent necessity. The term spread quickly to other parts of the world.

In 1971, Pope Paul VI spoke of a “preferential respect for the poor” in Octogesima Adveniens, 3, without implying any specific political direction that flowed from such respect. But in Latin America the preferential option soon became associated with movements of a Marxist social bent such as liberation theology, Christian “base communities,” and the iglesia popular (popular church). Though each of these movements was composed of various complex currents, for the most part they tended to adopt Marxist analysis and to blame Western capitalism for poverty in Latin America and elsewhere among underdeveloped countries, and the traditional Church for alleged complicity in what was regarded as exploitation.

Even among Latin American bishops, this was never the majority view of what the preferential option meant. At their 1979 meeting in Puebla, Mexico, they reaffirmed the preferential option. But under the leadership of John Paul II, the notions of preferential option and liberation developed in some different directions. The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued two instructions in the mid-1980s that sorted out the true from the false in these ideas.
To avoid the political associations of the word “option,” the Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation, Libertatis Conscientia, recast the principle as “a love of preference for the poor” (68). With the collapse of Marxism and changes in attitudes about what produces wealth and liberty in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the preferential option became a less narrowly ideological and more broadly religious concept. The Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes (2448) the second Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith instruction about the need for a preferential love toward the poor, but places it in a very different understanding of Christian society and economics. Rather than tie the desire to lift up the poor through recourse to partisan positions or one form of social analysis, the instruction returns the discussion to broad Catholic principles of society.

Recent Developments • Both the original notion and the one later promoted by the Vatican seek to transform the condition of the poor rather than merely provide them with relief. Many advocates of the early preferential option saw transformation coming from Marxist social revolution. The later form saw the dignity of the poor as bound up with their own possibilities for free initiative and self-support.
In his encyclical The Hundredth Year, Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul II developed this further with a call for a cultural revolution: “one which fosters trust in the human potential of the poor and consequently in their ability to improve their condition through work or to make a positive contribution to economic prosperity. But to accomplish this, the poor – be they individuals or nations – need to be provided with realistic opportunities” (52).

As this passage shows, in addition to its relevance for each country the preferential option also had an international dimension. During much of the 1970s, underdevelopment was explained by exploitation and “dependency” of Third World nations on First World businesses and banks. Pope John Paul did not deny that developed and undeveloped nations were related to one another; in fact, even after the dependency theory was discredited among social scientists, the Pope continued to remind the First World of its human responsibilities to the poor. But he changed the social vision from the Marxist view of exploiters and exploited to a Christian notion of social interdependence.

The most recent Catholic social teaching recognizes that economic liberty is a good and even a right. But like all human freedoms and rights, it must be exercised within the proper moral framework, particularly, in this case, within a properly constituted political system and under the rule of law. The problem in Latin America and elsewhere in the world had not so much been capitalist exploitation as monopolistic manipulation of the political and legal system for personal advantage.

Furthermore, as we now know, societies are more complex than originally envisioned by most modern social theorists. All Marx’s predictions failed to materialize. Workers in industrial societies became wealthier rather than proletarianized. Similarly, on an international scale, the rich nations are not rich because the poor nations are poor, but because they have developed faster. A development process must now occur within underdeveloped nations that will bring them to the educational and technical levels necessary to produce abundance.

As even the developed nations have learned, solidarity with the poor means more than merely providing them with welfare-style assistance. In fact, John Paul warns in Centesimus Annus that the “social assistance state” may actually sap personal initiative and create disincentives among the very people it intends to help. Part of the preferential option means helping the poor to become part of the society through education and training. It also means crafting economic policies that provide sufficient job opportunities and easy legal means to starting new businesses so that more people have access to economic action. The preferential option today means pursuing both traditional measures of relief where warranted and a dynamic and prosperous society that provides opportunities for all members, but especially for its weakest.

See: Interdependence; Liberation Theology; Missionary Activity; Population; Property; Social Doctrine; Social Justice; Works of Mercy.
Suggested Readings: CCC 2448. John Paul II, The Hundredth Year, Centesimus Annus.

Robert Royal




Russell Shaw. Our Sunday Visitor's Encyclopedia of Catholic Doctrine. Copyright © 1997, Our Sunday Visitor.

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Last Updated: Sunday, April 01, 2001 01:25:11 PM