What Benedict XVI has not spelled out yet is another forgotten lesson from St. Augustine: the ever-corrupting role of sin in the City of Man. Augustine points out how difficult it is even for the wisest and most detached humans to discover the truth among lies--and how even husbands and wives in the closest of human bonds misunderstand each other so often. The Father of Lies seems to own so much of the real world.
What are the most practical ways of defeating him? The Catholic tradition--even the wise Pope Benedict--still seems to put too much stress upon caritas, virtue, justice, and good intentions, and not nearly enough on methods for defeating human sin in all its devious and persistent forms.
Even the Pope's understandable nostalgia for the European welfare-state too much scants the self-interests, self-deceptions, and false presuppositions that are bringing that system to a crisis of its own making. This was a crisis John Paul II saw rather more clearly in paragraph 48 of Centesimus Annus.
Oh, dear, poor naive papa for failing to convey the dark Augustinian understanding that human nature is too flawed to secure social justice by means of economic regulation and public support for the least among us!
What methods for defeating human sin does Novak have in mind? The tough love of the free market? And does he really imagine that what has brought about the current economic crisis are the presuppositions of the European welfare state, as opposed to the deregulatory ideology that was meant to bring it down?
I'm not Benedict XVI's biggest fan, but no one can deny that he's excessively qualified as a theologian, and as such is quite unlikely to overlook anything from - well, anyone at all, let alone St. Augustine.
I think you could argue that belief in the need for a strong regulatory regime to keep under control the excessive greed of human nature manifest in free market capitalism IS the Augustinian position. Who the hell stole those pears, after all?