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261.
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J. Budziszewski
Response
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J. Budziszewski responds in turn to each of the papers that were presented as part of the session honoring him at the twenty-fourth annual conference of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists held in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in October 2016. He responds to the comments of John P. Hittinger, William McCormick, SJ, Kevin E. Stuart, Matthew J. Wright, and Paul R. DeHart.
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262.
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Kenneth L. Grasso
The Future of the Catholic Church in the American Public Order:
Introduction
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263.
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Steven Brust
Catholicism, the American Nation, and Politics:
Being Transformed or Transforming?
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This article explores the relationship between Catholicism and American culture and politics. It begins by presenting the foundation for why there has been an inherent tension in this relationship from the Founding era on. It then addresses this tension as manifested in the phenomenon known as Americanism. It focuses on one aspect of this phenomenon whereby Catholics downplay the teachings of the Church, and demonstrates how this has occurred with prominent Catholic politicians in particular and Catholics in general. The paper concludes with a brief contemporary assessment and recommendation for the relationship between Catholics and American politics and culture.
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264.
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Ryan J. Barilleaux
Put Not Your Trust in Princes:
Catholics in the American Administrative State
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This article considers the fate of Catholics in the American administrative state, which has replaced the original constitutional system of three-branch government and checks and balances. It looks to the Catholic political experience in the United States, with an eye toward extracting lessons for contemporary Catholics about that experience. It then turns to the rise of an American administrative state and how it threatens Catholics and other believers. Finally, it considers the prospects for believers in secular democracies such as the United States.
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265.
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Gary Glenn
Tocqueville’s Prediction about the Pantheistic Tendency of ‘the Democratic Social State’ and Catholicism’s Present Situation
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This article explores Tocqueville’s fears about the future of religion in the “democratic social state” (owing to democracy’s affinity for “pantheism”) and their relevance to the future of Catholicism in America. While Tocqueville valued the Protestant public culture democracy inherited from aristocracy because it provided the “moral ties” needed to prevent “democratic freedom” from becoming “democratic despotism,” he worried that this culture would not endure in the face of democracy’s inner dynamism. It also explores why Tocqueville thought that Catholicism might survive democratic pantheism (now called “secular liberalism”) longer than Protestantism. The fact that events seem to have vindicated his “dread” about the future of religion so far, suggests that democracy’s recent attempt to suppress Catholic morality on abortion and contraceptive coverage in employee health insurance, the definition of “family” in adoption policy, and so on, puts that survival in question. The dangers to the religious liberty of Catholics today thus seem rooted in the democratic social state’s permanent nature rather than in more recent and historically contingent developments.
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Kenneth L. Grasso
Response:
Catholics and the New American Public Order
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This article focuses on the conclusion in which the analyses of the previous papers converge, namely, the emergence of a new and radically different public order that is emerging in contemporary America. While Catholics could never feel completely comfortable in the older order that preceded it, the culture that informed this order had many features that were consistent with the Catholic vision of man, society, and the human good; and it secured for the Church a broad freedom to exercise her ministry and for Catholics the freedom they needed to practice the faith. In sharp contrast, the new order installs at the heart of public life an ethic of human autonomy incompatible with the Catholic understanding, and jeopardizes the freedom of the Church and of Catholics to practice the faith. The emergence of this new order will require Catholics to rethink their relationship to American culture and the American state.
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267.
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James V. Schall, S.J.
Political Philosophy and Catholicism
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Political philosophy and revelation are often considered antagonistic to each other. They are distinct in their approach to their subject matter. However, they are not unrelated within their own scope. What is treated here is how this non-contradictory relation can be stated and maintained.
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João César das Neves
The Economics of Pope Francis
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Strong denunciations of the capitalist system have become one of the most controversial aspects of the early years of Pope Francis’s pontificate, reverberating far and wide. This article places these statements in context. After elucidating the economic role of the pontiff as a religious leader, the text identifies the two core elements in his approach—the universal destination of goods and the preference for the poor—as basic and traditional concepts of the Church’s social doctrine. The economic teachings of Francis are then described in a tripartite structure called “the economic canon of the pope.”
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269.
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John Joseph Williams
Bishops’ Conferences in the Wake of Humanae Vitae:
Commentaries that Missed the Mark
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Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968) failed to have an immediate positive impact on the decisions of Roman Catholics in many places. Statements issued after the encyclical by a number of episcopal conferences had a deleterious effect on the implementation of the traditional teaching reaffirmed by the pope during an era when its message was urgently needed. These commentaries deprived the encyclical of its energy to influence the course of contemporary culture. The article presents some texts emanating from four episcopal conferences—France, Canada, Indonesia, and Scandinavia—and offers observations. The statements drew liberally from the pool of contemporary theological thought and pastoral practices then circulating, and the complementarity of these and a number of other episcopal conference statements created a compounding effect.
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John P. Moran
Between Scylla and Charybdis:
Legitimacy, Public Opinion, and Church Doctrine
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Alexis de Tocqueville and Fyodor Dostoevsky provide differing solutions to the tensions that can emerge between public opinion and Church doctrine in their classics Democracy in America and The Brothers Karamazov. For Tocqueville, Christianity can only survive in democratic times by compromising with democracy’s inclinations toward materialism. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, denounces catering to public opinion by providing an illustration of a distorted Christianity which relies upon public demands for “miracle, mystery, and authority.” In spite of these differences, however, these timeless works seem to agree upon the dangers associated with ignoring sacred truths in pursuit of a legitimacy based upon public opinion.
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Carmine Gorga
Return to Economic Justice:
From Entitlements to Rights
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The principles of economic justice outlined by Aristotle ruled the world up until 1776, when, undermined by Adam Smith and the Enlightenment, they were replaced by a program that eventually came to be called “social justice.” While the world of economic justice was composed of firm rules rooted in morality, the program of social justice responds to the ideals of freedom and refuses to be pinned down in any fashion. This paper suggests that if we recognize that we are currently facing a social, economic, and intellectual crisis of vast proportions, and we want to resolve the crisis, we had better undo what Adam Smith did: We need to restore morality to the social sciences and the understanding of hoarding to economics. If we do that, we return to the Aristotelian/Aquinian world of economic justice—not in a passive return to the past, but to perfect it with the explicit addition of the plank of participative justice. We are then in a position to integrate economic policy and practice as never before, with practice specified in economic rights and responsibilities. From a legal point of view, we set the stage for a transition from entitlements to properly earned rights.
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Richard Upsher Smith, Jr.
Jacques Maritain’s “Integral Education”:
Its Context, Content, and Feasibility Today (Part I)
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The purpose of this article is to provide the context of Jacques Maritain’s teaching about integral education, to sketch the content of integral education, and to examine the feasibility of integral education today. The argument will consider, in particular, Maritain’s books Integral Humanism and Education at the Crossroads, as well as his essays on education anthologized in The Education of Man.
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Jerome C. Foss
The Contemplative Mentality in Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People”
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Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” offers readers a chance to better understand the shortcomings of modern political theory. The story makes explicit references to the modern thinkers Malebranche and Heidegger, both of whom sever philosophy from sensual reality. Hulga embraces these thinkers’ approach, but is unprepared for the con artist, Manly Pointer. Mrs. Hopewell accepts the ideas of early modernity without question, and is likewise deceived by Pointer. Mrs. Freeman, who relies on her senses, immediately recognizes deception. The story reflects O’Connor’s preference for a Thomistic approach to political thought that honors the senses and cultivates contemplative habits.
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274.
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Joseph Zahn
Josef Pieper on the Festival in Light of Culture
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The festival is an essential component of human cultural life. Amidst the emerging scholarship over the past century on the festival, we find that Josef Pieper provides a philosophical account of the festival accompanied by a sound account of the human person. This essay both reaffirms Pieper’s account of the festival and reintegrates his account within a larger context of culture. Fundamental to Pieper’s treatment is the human person’s power to love and be open to transcendence, without which true festivity is lost. In reintegrating Pieper’s account of festivity in light of a Dawsonian vision of culture, we find that the festival flows from the common vision of a people, that the change in a religious vision of culture results in the change of the festival, and that not just any shared vision of a people will engender a genuine festival.
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Stephen Nakrosis
History and Hagiography:
Researching Modern Saints and Beatification
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Many people think of a “saint” as someone who lived centuries ago, failing to consider the possibility that there may be among their contemporaries people who the Church will one day canonize as saints. Yet there are researchers who are charged with the difficult task of investigating the lives of contemporary candidates for sainthood. Little has been written about the research methods employed by these investigators and scholars. For the most part, authors have written about dealing with ancient or medieval sources, or have attempted to explain hagiography from the perspective of sociology or psychiatry. This paper will examine some of the issues facing the researcher and writer who is exploring the lives of contemporary candidates for canonization, and will raise for consideration some of the challenges they face.
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Charles Bellinger
The Use of Historical Analogies in the Abortion Debate
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Pro-life and pro-choice advocates have both accused the other side of being similar to the defenders of slavery and/or Hitler. This essay seeks to clarify this debate by outlining the three main dimensions of reality as it is inhabited by human beings: the vertical axis (God and nature), the horizontal plane (sociality), and individual selfhood. These dimensions have corresponding political forms (monarchy, democracy, individualism) and they also serve to channel and rhetorically justify violence. “Re-enactment” is a better term than “analogy” when one understands that othering and violence are shape-shifting phenomena in human history.
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Cynthia Nolan
The Edward Snowden Case and the Morality of Secrecy
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When Edward Snowden decided in 2013 to hand over thousands of classified documents to reporters, he launched a firestorm of criticism aimed at both himself and the US National Security Agency. The NSA’s collection of metadata ended in 2015 as a direct result of Snowden’s revelations. He continues to leak classified documents from his political asylum in Russia. This article uses just war theory, theories of civil disobedience, and Church teaching on resistance to political authority to examine Snowden’s whistleblower decision. It applies the following categories of variables: moral order and the common good; virtue and rights; redress and subsidiarity; and success and proportionality.
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Andrew Cummings
The Habermas-Ratzinger Discussion Revisited:
Translation as Epistemology
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In 2004 a much-publicized discussion took place between the political philosopher Jürgen Habermas and the Catholic theologian Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI). Essentially, the role of religion in the public sphere was at stake. Habermas, speaking of a “post-secular” age, attempted to find a more vocal place for religious views, subject to a “translation proviso.” Ratzinger, while acknowledging the need for better dialogue between the religious and the secular, argued that there was no longer a common basis for it in “natural reason.” Both figures can be seen as speaking to the practical and the theoretical aspects of the dialogue, respectively. Once this difference is understood, Habermas’s suggestions can be accepted.
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Stephen M. Krason
The "Benedict Option":
Beware of the CPS
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This was one of SCSS President, Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appear monthly at his blog site (https://skrason.wordpress.com/) and in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer. This column tells families and others proposing the “Benedict Option”—i.e., trying to separate as much from the secular culture as possible and trying to build up small Catholic subcultures where their children can be effectively reared in the Faith and family integrity preserved—to be attentive of the threat posed by the current child protective system and the need to seek to reform it.
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Stephen M. Krason
The New Literalism and Fundamentalism
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This was one of SCSS President, Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appear monthly at his blog site (https://skrason.wordpress.com/) and in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer. This column speaks about what might be called a new expression of literalism and fundamentalism, especially among liberal Catholics and some in Church leadership, to take certain Scriptural passages and Church teachings and apply them to current situations and public questions without regard to the context of the situations or full attention to nuances or even to the facts present—to in a certain sense absolutize the contingent. Sometimes this is done to promote certain policy agendas and without even considering the full statement of the Church’s teaching, as it is expressed in the social encyclicals and other documents.
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