Abstract
This excellent edited volume explores Paul VI’s watershed social encyclical, Populorum Progressio (PP), in light of its origins, key driving themes, and subsequent ecclesiastical, economic, and political developments. The basic tone of the text is one of deep, but not uncritical, appreciation for the gains represented by PP. The opening chapter from Alfred Verdoy, SJ insightfully demonstrates how the key themes of PP (integral development, peace, and solidarity, among others) slowly developed in Cardinal Montini’s writings and pastoral practice in the decades before the encyclical. The next two chapters offer remarkably clear and engaging accounts of the deepest concerns of the encyclical, both in terms of the text itself and in light of subsequent social encyclicals. The remaining essays take a more interdisciplinary and dialogical approach, bringing Pope Paul’s vision into conversation with recent thinkers, theories, and economic developments. These conversations are wide-ranging, including a number of points which anticipate Pope Francis’s Fratelli Tutti, published a year after this book (see, for example, the important discussions of fraternidad on pp. 36 and 243). I would note, however, that the intra-ecclesiastical discussions, though excellent, generally focus on later papal texts and social encyclicals, with surprisingly little mention of, for example, the relationship between PP and the Latin American bishops’ conferences at Medellín and Puebla (see p. 227 for one minor exception).
Overall, La humanidad en camino is an excellent collection of individual essays as well as a cohesive engagement with the delicate balance Paul VI sought to maintain in his groundbreaking account of integral human development—“the development of each person and of the whole person” (PP, 14—a line quoted in nearly every essay). In short, the text offers a rich account of “development” as a genuinely theological concept open to interdisciplinary enrichment.