Catholic Social Thought Edited by David O’Brien and Thomas Shannon, Orbis, £30
There are 687 pages in this collection of Church documents, roughly 635 of which are freely available on the Vatican website. So the consumer spends £30 for 50 or so pages of introductory material and indices. This is, it turns out, as bad a deal as it sounds.
The explicitly modernist thesis of the editors is that tradition and orthodoxy are barriers that must be overcome if the Church is to engage today’s society fruitfully. Throughout the text, concepts that evoke the tradition of the Church are kept at a careful distance as if they emit an embarrassing odour. We are told, for instance, that Pope John Paul II’s “commitment to doctrinal and moral orthodoxy … caused considerable disaffection”. Among whom (other than the editors), the reader is left to guess.
Natural law consistently has adjectives applied to it that signal whether the editors approve or disapprove of the way the popes marshal the concept, but we are never treated to substantive explanations of these judgments. For instance, the very first page of the book ascribes to Pope Leo XIII a “conservative, even negative understanding of natural law”. But, in the introduction to Mater et Magistra, we read that Pope John XXIII “brought a new openness and style to [natural law] that liberated it from static assumptions”. This is gobbledygook, meant to set the popes against one another, elevating John at Leo’s expense while shirking the burden of engaging substantively with their claims.
Meanwhile, concepts such as “the signs of the times” are warmly embraced but never fully explored – a vagueness that conveniently allows the phrase to mean anything at all. We are told about Gaudium et Spes that “the basic characteristic of the document is its feeling of openness to the contemporary situation”. What part of the “contemporary situation” is the Church open to? Whatever part you want it to be, dear reader.
But this is, after all, good marketing, allowing the consumer to identify his own hopes and dreams with the product, which in this case is the social doctrine of the Church. In this volume, like at so many universities in America and around the Western world, “Catholic” is a more a brand name than one of the four marks of the Bride of Christ. And like any product or brand, its success is judged by its appeal to prevailing attitudes rather than its truth value.
The editors are quite explicit that Catholic social teaching is valuable not inasmuch as it is Catholic, but primarily as it is useful and conforms itself to other, higher standards.
In only the third paragraph of the introduction we are informed that the pre-World War II, social encyclicals “were too rigid in their theology, too rooted in pre-industrial and to some degree anti-democratic ideologies to be directly useful to Americans”. This is meant to be an indictment of Leo XIII and Pius XII, not of Americans. If Catholic social teaching holds a dim view of economic and political liberalism, which it arguably does even after the Second Vatican Council, that is a problem with liberalism, not Catholicism.
In one of the most bizarre passages in the book, the editors assert that in the aftermath of Pacem et Terris, “the Church itself would now be judged by the standards of truth, justice, charity and freedom Pope John set forth”. If the souls in heaven can be mortified, then that is surely what humble St John XXIII must feel as he sees people down here carrying on about how the Church of Jesus Christ should submit Herself to his judgment – a judgment that conveniently seems to be co-extensive with conventional liberalism. The tragedy of this volume, however, is not in its price tag or even its annoying reliance on liberal tropes, but rather in the fact that its editors’ commitment to conventional liberalism undermines their own passion for social justice. O’Brien and Shannon dedicated this edition to “the women Religious of the United States, who … make social justice a living reality”. But the women Religious in America who have made the same bargain the editors propose – the modulating of orthodoxy in the service of social justice and “full engagement” with modernity – are, if I may be blunt, dying. Orthodoxy doesn’t just give justice its structure and meaning, orthodoxy vivifies justice.
This is why the “Catholic” in Catholic social teaching must be more than a brand name. We must instead reclaim the true meaning of catholicity: universality. This means not only that Catholic social teaching makes universal claims against which other ideologies and traditions must be judged, but also that orthodoxy and tradition and truth and justice and evangelisation and human development form a coherent whole in, and only in, the Catholic Church.
This universality is the beating heart of Catholic social teaching, but you will not find it in the glosses presented in this volume. Students of Catholic thought deserve better.
Brandon McGinley is a writer and editor based in Pittsburgh
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