Religion: Silence Treatment

In his encyclical Mater et Magistra (TIME, July 21), Pope John XXIII came out for the kind of “socialization” that includes economic planning and state-run welfare programs. He expressed an “earnest wish” that Roman Catholic bishops give “more and more attention” to spreading this social doctrine. A new survey, published by the national Catholic weekly magazine Ave Maria suggests that some of the U.S. Catholic clergy were not listening very hard.

Ave Maria, which is edited by Notre Dame’s Holy Cross Fathers, found that most diocesan newspapers carried either the full text of the encyclical or substantial excerpts from it. But of the 53 dioceses responding to the survey, more than 70% left unanswered a question on what they were doing to place Mater et Magistra in their parochial-school curricula, and in 85% of the dioceses there were apparently no plans by bishops, priests or diocesan groups for promotion of the encyclical.

The Pope, Ave Maria noted, has already given his own best answer to ecclesiastical indifference. “Should these teachings remain only a pronouncement without effect,” he warned recently, “strength would be given to the arguments of those who hold that the church is incapable of facilitating the solution of the most difficult problems of temporal life.”