The non-governmental organization (NGO) is perceived not only as a disseminator of information, monitor of human rights or provider of services but also as a shaper of national, regional, and international policy. Many members of the lay faithful, working with others from various Christian denominations, have established NGOs to monitor and to promote the rights of the unborn, the natural family, and many other topics of common interest. These NGOs lobby at the national, regional, and international levels. This paper discusses the role of the Catholic-inspired NGO on the international level with reference to the thought of Pope Benedict XVI in his encyclical, Caritas in veritate.

This article was prepared as a presentation for the Long Island Coalition for Life, Joseph Barry Chapter of the Knights of Columbus, Hicksville, New York, Monday, April 27, 2009.

This article, which inaugurated SCSS president Stephen M. Krason’s monthly (sometimes bi-monthly) online column, “Neither Left Nor Right but Catholic” (in September 2010), takes note of an important address given by Archbishop Charles Chaput in Europe in which he foresees increasing repression by an arch-secularist political and cultural elite against Catholics and the Church when they try to bring the Church’s message to society. This represents a deeply disturbing narrowing of the meaning of religious liberty to mere freedom of worship.

Caritas in Veritate emphasizes authentic development as growth in virtue and love for each other and for God. Civil society, especially religion and the family, set upon a foundation of truth about man and what is good for him, is critical. In the last century, debates about the economic and political mix were driven by theories which, because they overemphasized the impact of economic factors (especially capitalism) on individuals and society, often saw religion and civil society asirrelevant. The failure of the alternative economic arrangements demonstrates the error of those theories and testifies to the importance of truth, religion, and civil society to authentic human flourishing. Excessive criticism of capitalism hinders learning this lesson by keeping the focus on economic factors rather than moving to the more central issues of truth and civil society.

The most remarkable characteristic of Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate is its theologically robust mode of discourse: a pervasive and unapologetically Trinitarian and Christological, substantive argument, based in a robust theological anthropology of person and society as gift, and a peculiarly Platonic and Augustinian rhetorical mode of discourse. Caritas reveals the implicit, hidden, and faulty theological and philosophical commitments of secular reason—which, when used as a medium for the Gospel, can too easily taint the true doctrine the Church attempts to convey with it—proclaiming instead a radically orthodox diagnosis of and prescription for a disenchanted, love-and-truth starved—yet Enlightenment-weary—postmodern world.

The following is a transcript of a lecture by Dominican Father Romanus Cessario, delivered May 25, 2010, at the commencement exercises of the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, held at the Crypt Chapel in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Father Cessario highlights the work of the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, on whose faculty serve several SCSS members, including its president, Gladys Sweeney. It was originally published by ZENIT, July 12, 2010 (zenit.org), and the CSSR gratefully acknowledges ZENIT’s permission to reprint (edited and formatted for the CSSR).

This article provides a summary of the thought of the major economic thinkers of the past two centuries, especially tracing the development of economic liberalism. It notes the resurgence of that perspective in the current era (what is called “neoliberalism”). It points to the flaws in economic liberalism and contrasts the modern social teaching of the Church in the encyclicals to it and to its purported nemesis, Marxism. It notes Pope Benedict XVI’s acknowledgment of the influence of the early German Catholic social thinkers, such as Bishop Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, on that teaching.

The nineteenth century brought challenges that undermined the unity of French Reformed Protestantism. Evangelicals held to the great doctrines of Luther and Calvin, while liberals preferred a looser connection with the past and emphasized the libertarian character of the Reformation rather than its formal doctrinal content. Protestantism was deeply rooted in dialectical forms of thinking and expression, most obviously between assumptions of biblical truth and Roman Catholic idolatry and superstition. That same dialectic, supported by contemporary philosophies, would be turned inward as liberals sought to claim theReformation as grounds for their freedom from traditional theological constraints while accusing evangelicals of a Catholic-like dogmatism.

This essay explicates five themes from We Hold These Truths. Specifically, it seeks to: (1) compare Murray’s treatment of contemporary America’s loss of a public philosophy to similar arguments made by important non-Catholic journalists and political theorists in his day; (2) bring Murray’s account of the Christian roots of the liberal tradition into conversation with the view that the liberal tradition is specifically modern; (3) explore the significance of Murray’s famous interpretation of the religion clauses of the First Amendment as entirely practical “articles of peace”; (4) critically engage Murray’s account of the thought of the founders and explore the motivations underlying this account; and (5) relate Murray’s account of the natural law theory undergirding the American democratic experiment to the political theory informing the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s re-founding of the American regime.