"Let us say what we are for rather than what we are against," said Pope John XXIII last January, while proposing a new encyclical on world peace to a group of Vatican aides.* It was a point well taken: too many papal pronouncements in the past have displayed a finger-wagging, negative tone. Perhaps because of John's injunction to think positive, work on the new encyclical, the eighth of his pontificate, went rapidly; the Pope was pleased with the first draft, had only to pencil in a few flourishes of his own. Last week
John XXIII signed and issued the 15,000-word document called, after its opening words in Latin, Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth). It is the first encyclical addressed not only to the bishops and faithful of the Roman Catholic Church but also to "all men of good will."
With Right Reason. Order is the theme of Pacem in Terris, and the encyclical itself is appropriately a document both lucid and logical. In outlining his plan for world peace. Pope John relies heavily on two concepts dear to Catholic theology: natural law—man's God-given, innate knowledge of what is right and wrong—and right reason, by which man applies this knowledge to concrete situations. With these instruments, the Pope argues, man can see how order may be realized in human relationships.
∙ BETWEEN MAN AND MAN. The search for world order must begin with the fact that "every human being is a person endowed with intelligence and free will." As such, he is endowed with certain inalienable rights: life, liberty, assembly and association, "free initiative in the economic field," a just wage and decent living standards. He even has a right to unmanaged news—"to be informed truthfully about public events." In one of the strongest papal statements in history on religious freedom, Pacem in Terris says also that "every human being has the right to honor God according to the dictates of an upright conscience, and therefore the right to worship God privately and publicly."
These rights also carry with them proportionate duties. "The right of every man to life is correlative with the duty to preserve it; his right to a decent standard of living with the duty of living it becomingly; and his right to investigate the truth freely with the duty of seeking it and possessing it profoundly." Therefore man must respect the rights of his peers and cooperate with them in creating "a well-ordered, beneficial" political society.
∙ BETWEEN MAN AND THE STATE. Rights and duties can only be exercised properly in a free society, under government by and for the people. Where the civil authority uses "threats and fear of punishment or promises of rewards, it cannot move men to promote the common good of all." Nor can an oppressive government claim the allegiance of its subjects, for "it follows that if civil authorities legislate for or allow anything that is contrary to that order and therefore contrary to the law of God, neither the laws made nor the authorizations granted can be binding on the conscience of the citizens."