A Review Essay on An Introduction to Catholic Social Teaching

It is a cliché in Catholic circles that the Catholic Church’s social teaching is her "best kept secret." But like many clichés, there’s a great deal of truth to it. Few Catholics seem aware that the Church even has a body of social teaching and fewer still seem to know what that teaching includes. That shouldn’t surprise us, really, since surveys of Catholics over the last thirty years reveal a general decline in knowledge of the faith. Why should knowledge of Catholic social doctrine be exempt from the trend?

Well, that’s the bad news. The good news is that Oxford’s Jesuit Father Rodger Charles wants to reverse the trend and has done something about it. A decade and a half ago, he wrote The Social Teaching of Vatican II (Ignatius Press), a large-scale summary of Catholic social teaching in light of the Council. Recently, he published a hefty two-volume work, Christian Social Witness and Teaching: the Catholic Tradition from Genesis to Centesimus Annus (Gracewing). That monumental contribution to Catholic learning won’t make much of an impact at your local parish–at least not right away. Written primarily for those doing graduate work in theology, the two tomes that comprise the project would probably be as intelligible to the average, even otherwise well-educated Catholic as an academic paper on quantum mechanics. And not because Father Charles’ prose is dense—it isn’t. But because the average, even otherwise well-educated Catholic must start from scratch when it comes to Catholic social teaching, while Father Charles’ two-volume work necessarily assumes a fair amount of theological background.

Not so the hundred-and-so-page distillation of Father Charles’ work recently published by Ignatius Press. Titled An Introduction to Catholic Social Teaching, the book is a much-needed primer on the subject, written for the non-theologian. In fact, a good deal of the book consists of excerpts from magisterial documents, so the layman can become acquainted with the original doctrinal sources as he gains a basic overview of Catholic social teaching.

An Introduction to Catholic Social Teaching is just the sort of volume that can and should be used to good effect in parish adult faith formation. It presupposes only the rudiments of Catholic theology. It is written in straightforward, explanatory prose. And it covers the terrain very well. Furthermore, unlike many other volumes that purport to give us Catholic social teaching, this book presents the real thing—authentic Catholic teaching, not modish theories and dubious mixtures of Catholicism and radical political ideologies of either the right or the left.

Catholic social teaching is about at least two things–personal morality and social morality or ethics. Personal morality concerns how I act with respect to moral norms, including how I act toward you and toward others. Some personal moral acts may have little or no social impact. In other cases, they can have tremendous impact. For example, if I were the head of a major corporation that employed hundreds of thousands of people and I arbitrarily decided to relocate the corporation in another country and hire all new workers, my personal moral act would have far-reaching social implications, especially on the workers and their dependents.

Social ethics or social morality, on the other hand, isn’t primarily concerned with my personal morality or ethical choices–although it is concerned with that indirectly. Rather, it concerns the ordering of society as such, not merely my individual moral actions, however great a social impact they may have. Social ethics tackles the question, How should society be structured to protect the dignity and rights of the human person, to foster justice and to limit or eliminate injustice, to encourage and promote the common good? The answer involves not only my individual moral choices; it also involves you and everyone else in our society.

An Introduction to Catholic Social Teaching is relevant to both personal morality and social ethics. The focus of the book is, as it should be, primarily on social ethics–on what kind of society ought to exist. But the conscientious reader will ask himself about his own role in fostering a good and just society. He will consider how his own personal, moral choices either help or hinder realizing such a society. The book’s final chapter aids the reader to discern his personal responsibilities in that regard.

Father Charles begins by mapping out three regions of common life that Catholic social teaching addresses: civil society, political society and economic society. Civil society is the larger, less formalized society, including social units such as the family or cultural groups and institutions. Political society refers specifically to the state and the government of a society, which exist to serve civil society. Finally, economic society refers to organization of human economic life–the society that results from man’s efforts to earn a living and develop his material conditions of life by agriculture, industry, trade, etc. We will examine Father Charles’ treatment of each of these three areas. But first let us look at his summary of general principles.

Starting with Principles

Father Charles identifies a number of fundamental ethical principles that should govern the ordering of any human society, including civil, political and economic society. First, the human person is the end and purpose of every social organization. In other words, societies exist to serve the people who comprise them, not the other way around. This principle is based on the fact that man is made in the image of God. He is, in other words, a person, and therefore the subject of rights.

The second basic social principle, according to Father Charles, "is that human beings are by nature social, and that they need to live in an organized society with others so that they can develop socially, intellectually, economically and spiritually." With few exceptions, human beings need others to thrive and to develop fully their basic human potentialities.

Related to human beings’ social nature is the family, which Father Charles calls "the first society." Here the author explains that this once seemingly self-evident notion is under attack today. What’s more, people are no longer clear about what, in fact, constitutes a family. He argues that a stable society needs the model of family based on monogamous marriage and the family needs the recognition of its unique status as the foundation of society in order to flourish. Later, Father Charles explores the impact of sexual permissiveness and contraception on the family, but more on that in a moment.

The third principle of social organization, writes Father Charles, "is that man is born into freedom and for freedom." He links this basic human freedom to man’s obligation to obey God’s law. Because man is obliged to obey God, he must have the political and economic freedom by which he may do so. Thus, according to Father Charles, political and economic freedom rest ultimately on what might be called a primordial religious freedom, the freedom (and therefore the responsibility) to obey God.

That brings us to Father Charles’ fourth principle of social organization: the idea that freedom must be lived according to God’s law as known to man through his conscience. It is not enough that man is free; he must use his freedom properly. In this regard, Father Charles distinguishes between the objective and subjective aspects of conscience. In his earlier work The Social Teaching of Vatican II, he more precisely referred to "the ultimate and objective ethical norm," which is the law of God, and the "proximate and subjective ethical norm," which is the judgment of man’s conscience. In his more popular treatment here, he refers to the "objective, true conscience," which reflects in one’s conscience the law of God, and the "subjective conscience," which, "is the faculty, the power of the intellect and will, which enables man to apply the objective law of God to particular circumstances."

Failure to distinguish the objective and subjective aspects of conscience in discussions of the obligation to follow one’s conscience has led to enormous problems in the modern world as well as the contemporary Church. Why? Because the subjective conscience is fallible, hence liable to error. It can, as Father Charles points out, "err through ignorance or through conditioning in evil by outside influences. It can also err by the decision to close the mind to a moral truth that could be know if the individual so wished." That is why the conscience operates soundly—people make sound moral judgments—only when the conscience is properly formed. And conscience is properly formed only when it is informed by knowledge of God’s law, the objective norm on the basis of which we should make our subjective judgments about right and wrong.

Dimensions of Social Life: Civic, Political and Economic

Three Having outlined these basic principles of social ethics, Father Charles then applies them to each of the three dimensions of social life–civil society, political society and economic society. He begins his treatment of civil society with a discussion of, "the family as the foundation of Church and Society."

In this respect, Father Charles is not timid; he states at the outset, "The family is the most important and basic of human societies, and it is founded on the sexual love between man and woman from which love new human life is born." Sexual love must be

1. between a man and a woman, which rules out so-called "same-sex unions";
2. monogamous, which means exclusive and faithful;
3. lifelong, which means permanent and therefore excludes divorce and remarriage.