THE PONTIFICAL ACADEMY

Interview with Professor Margaret Archer, Department of Sociology

Pope Benedict XVI's state visit to Britain this month will be the first - and probably only - opportunity for many Catholics to see the Pope in person. However, for Professor Margaret Archer, Department of Sociology, meeting the Pope is nothing new. Since 1994, she has held a position at the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences, one of ten Pontifical academies, and one of the few to be situated within the Vatican Gardens. The role of the academy is to provide the Catholic Church with independent thinking and research on social issues.

Pope Benedict XVI’s state visit to Britain is the first of its kind since Pope John Paul II came for six days in 1982. For many Catholics this will be a once in a life time opportunity to see the Pope in person, albeit at a distance. For Prof Margaret Archer however, it does not share the same significance. In 1994 she received a letter in the post inviting her to join the new Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences (PASS). She accepted the position and has visited the Vatican every year since, to attend the Academy’s annual plenary conference, which includes an audience with the Pope.

The academy was set up to supplement the long established Pontifical Academy of (Natural) Sciences. It is one of the few Pontifical academies to have a dedicated space within the Vatican Gardens; the two science academies share the Casino Pio IV, a 16th century villa that was formerly used as a hunting lodge. “It is a beautiful building, encrusted in mosaics the size of my finger nail.” PASS is made up of thirty to forty academics. The members do not have to be Catholics - there are several Jewish members and one Hindu - but they do have to have ‘good moral character’: “No one knows what this means, to be honest. I am glad someone thinks that I have one because I certainly don’t!” It remains a mystery how the original thirty members were picked and now, when nominations are put forward for new members, potential names are scrutinised by the Secretariat of State to check that there is ‘no obstacle’ to their becoming, effectively, a representative of the Catholic Church. Other members of the group include the distinguished economists Joseph Stiglitz and Kenneth Arrow – both Nobel Prize winners for Economics.

The members do not have to be Catholics... but they do have to have ‘good moral character'...

Their meetings are focussed on broad themes that have included 'Work and Employment', and 'Democracy and Globalisation'. Margaret Archer, along with her collaborator Pierpaolo Donati, has recently organized a Plenary on the contributions of the third sector. For the first time, they invited practitioners to attend the plenary - “We are now more of a policy think tank than an academic talk-shop”. They included Giorgio Vittadini of the Italian Food Bank initiative; “Despite the political chaos in Italy, a very good piece of legislation was passed, called The Good Samaritan Law, that enabled supermarkets to donate food near the end of its sell-by date to homeless shelters. We are very interested in this kind of practical approach to solving social problems”.

The role of the academy is to provide the Catholic Church with independent thinking and research on social issues; the hope is that the recommendations are taken on board by the Pope himself. “We have to be realistic, he is a very busy man, but I think that our work contributed in part to Pope Benedict’s last encyclical. He spoke about the deficient society being one in which people are squeezed between the market and the state, or bureaucracy and capitalism. We see the third sector as a human place, not Giddens’ idea of the third way which is essentially New Labour. Sturdy independence is what we would like to see there. If you go online in this country there is a government run ministry for the third sector, at all times being squeezed in a vice to save on public spending whilst meeting public performance indicators.”

It is the focus on social justice that enables the group to be independent while at the same time avoiding pointless clashes with Catholic orthodoxy.

It is the focus on social justice that enables the group to be independent while at the same time avoiding pointless clashes with Catholic orthodoxy. “We do not talk about condoms - that would be banging our head against a brick wall. As a group we try to use the opportunity productively, not to provoke fruitless antagonism. Our conclusions are ones that can be advocated and defended on totally secular grounds.” Margaret highlights that the church’s teachings on work, for example, are fundamentally progressive. “The first social encyclical of 1891 (Rerum Novarum) defended the legitimacy of trade unions. Twenty years later, trade unions were still not fully legal in Britain - or France or most of Europe. The position on employment is basically in advance of Social Democrat parties in Europe”

Every year, as a member of the Academy she is given a few minutes to talk with the Pope. “I am not a fan of all the protocol. I go and shake his hand and try to highlight the latest work of PASS and to interest him in it.” During the state visit Margaret has been invited to a meeting at Westminster Hall where the Pope will address a select group of intellectuals and business leaders.

Margaret Archer completed her postgraduate research at the London School of Economics and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris. She produced four books on education and the social structure of Europe before moving to Warwick in 1973. There she completed her Social Origins of Educational Systems (1979) which opened up her main interest in social theory. This has been pursued in a quartet, beginning with Culture and Agency: the Place of Culture in Social Theory (1989 and 1996), and followed by Realist Social Theory: the Morphogenetic Approach (1996), and Being Human: The Problem of Agency (2000), which reconceptualizes agency, actors and persons, and The Internal Conversation: Mediating between Structure and Agency (2003). At the 12th World Congress of Sociology, she was elected as the first woman President of the International Sociological Association, and is a founder member of both the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and the Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences. She is a Trustee of the Centre for Critical Realism.