There are libraries full of narrative guides based on practical experience and tips for good leadership. The mere recognition of man as the center of personnel management is insufficient to arrange and evaluate a theory’s ethical content. The first concern of this article will be the disclosure of the fundamental values currently underlying contemporary management models and the assessment of their ethical quality. The second concern of the article will be to show a coherent deductive approach from a Catholic point of view. A Christian theory of leadership ethics is developed starting from its source of values up to strategic entrepreneur decisions. Its merit is to suggest a conclusive Christian orientation for the assessment of codes of ethics and leadership cultures in enterprises, that, as an end in itself, clearly and plausibly places man at its center.

It is uncommon, especially in the United States of America (the vanguard of our democratic age), for people to oppose the supposed sanctity of democratic government--American Catholics included. They have tended toward, especially during the Cold War, the long-held evangelical Protestant view that democracy was God’s system (or at least was compatible with Catholicism). The Roman Catholic philosopher and public intellectual Frederick D. Wilhelmsen (1923-1996) lamented this liberal-democratic consensus; for him, American democracy was potentially anti-Christian, incompatible with the Kingship of Christ, in that ultimate authority in the social order tended to reside in the people, not Christ.

By applying Alasdair MacIntyre’s framework of rival traditions of rationality analogically to Catholic theologians and economists, this paper argues that these two groups can greatly benefit from a reexamination and appropriation of John A. Ryan’s insights when engaging debate on wage justice today, first by understanding the tradition out of which the Catholic Church established its rationale for justice regarding wages, and second by applying Ryan’s innovation of six “canons of distributive justice” for establishing commensurability of concepts in discourse between the traditions of moral theology and economic science. This paper argues that Ryan’s distinctive experience and character allowed him to enter into conversation with a non-native tradition of enquiry to draw forth commensurate concepts that improved the coherence of his native Catholic theological understanding and afforded greater opportunities to discourse with social scientists in meaningful argument for the sake of human welfare.

Since the 1970s, issues in the political realm of the United States have increasingly created tension within religious communities including the Roman Catholic (RC) community. The divisions in the RC community are areas of difference which can lead to discrimination. While such divisions may always exist, the way in which these areas of difference within the RC community are recognized will play a factor in determining the level of discrimination experienced by RC individuals in different environments. This article will review how the term Catholic has been described in social work and related literature, which will enable a discussion of the future for social work in relating to differences within the RC community. The hope is for the social work profession to acknowledge areas of difference within the RC community and the potential for discrimination which occurs based on differing perspectives. By promoting a less political lexicon for tense topics and identifying areas of difference, the hope is to foster a respect for RCs of all opinions within the social work profession.

This three-part article will discuss: (1) The approach of the U.S. bishops in order to thank them and praise their efforts against the HHS Mandate, while at the same time respectfully pointing out a certain oversight in their approach; (2) some reasons not often mentioned for which the Obama Administration is enacting the HHS mandate; and (3) some ideas on how most wisely to approach the question of contraception in the midst of the fight for religious freedom. The article, written in 2012, is preceded by a preface outlining key developments in the intervening years between 2012 and 2015 and explaining the importance of looking now at a clear snapshot of where we were three years ago.

Friedrich Hayek is one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. A 1974 Nobel Prize winner for Economics, Hayek argues for the superiority of the free society over totalitarian, planned societies. Although Hayek arguably hit his target, he missed the bull’s-eye, because he failed to explain government and its prudential limits with reference to a complete view of human nature. This is partly because he failed to recognize that Christianity is the essence of Western civilization.

This article argues that Karl Jaspers’s account of the rise of the Axial Age phenomenon is deficient owing to his failure to consider the natural law as a plausible cause for its development. The Axial Age concept—which precedes Jaspers, who nevertheless popularized it—claims that widely separated civilizations from the Ancient Greeks and Hebrews to the Persian, Hindu, Buddhist, and Confucian cultures all began to display sophisticated political and moral development from 800–200 BC, without any known contact. Jaspers regarded its rise as a mystery. However, given ancient legal codes containing moral precepts long predating this period, the natural law hypothesis serves as the most plausible explanation of this ‘mystery’ of mankind’s dawning moral awareness.