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.

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared during 2014 in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer and at his blog site (skrason.wordpress.com). He argues that, despite the criticism of President Obama’s seemingly excessive exercise of executive power to further an ideologically leftist secularist agenda, the strong and maybe unprecedented use of presidential power after him may be the most certain way to try to restore weakened American constitutional principles and traditional liberties and to begin to reverse our serious cultural decay.

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared during 2014 in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer and at his blog site (skrason.wordpress.com). It discusses how Catholic social teaching does not mandate particular public policies and must not be confused with a point of the teaching itself. It emphasizes that there can typically be many different policy approaches that can be used to make sure that moral demands are met.

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared during 2014 in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer and at his blog site (skrason.wordpress.com). He argues that the common strain running through such political developments as the rise of Islamism, modern political ideologies, and contemporary leftism is the fact that, one way or the other, they represent man trying to make himself God. To paraphrase Irving Babbitt and others, as the notion of God goes, so goes philosophy, and society and culture, and politics, and economics—the religious outlook is at the core of all other perspectives.

Since the pontificate of St. John Paul II, the Pope has been a leader of world significance, which brings the Holy Father into contact with the President of the United States (POTUS). John Paul II dealt with five chief executives. The recent history of presidential-papal interactions suggests five roles into which Presidents cast the Pope and three lessons about the relationship between POTUS and Peter.

Adding the phrase “Roman Catholic” to “political philosophy” implies that political philosophy is a work of reason that, in its own order, reaches legitimate issues and problems that it cannot itself resolve. This phrase suggests that, contained within revelation, are responses to the unanswered issues as posed in political philosophy. These responses suggest that there is a coherent relation between reason and revelation that arises directly out of political philosophy as such.

What has concerned me most is the coherence of political philosophy in the light of what is not political philosophy. Reality, what is, is always richer than our knowledge of it. If we are to understand political things, we have to understand more than political things—things like history, science, literature, practical living, common sense, philosophy itself, and yes, the terms and content of revelation.

Orestes Brownson is regarded as one of the most important contributors to Catholic social thought that the United States has ever produced. Although he is famous for changing his views during the course of his intellectual career, he in fact consistently defended several core principles. His defense of community and social obligation never wavered. He called for greater social equality as a young socialist and Transcendentalist; as a mature Catholic he urged his readers to take seriously Jesus’s command that they love one another. Although Brownson wrote in the nineteenth century, his views remain relevant in the second decade of the twenty-first century. His work challenges the narcissism, individualism, and selfishness that plague our world today. In contrast to our culture’s tendency to focus on the individual, Brownson calls for us to think about our communities. He asks us to rise above our sinful natures.