Fostering the Global Common Good: The Relevance of Catholic Social Teaching to Public Health Debates

Abstract

Given the scope and intensity of its impact, the COVID-19 pandemic proves instructive as an example of the shortfall in regnant legal and policy approaches to global health issues. Secular discussions of such issues tend to rely on a perspective best described as “policy realism”, with current international arrangements and institutions viewed as the acceptable context for future reform. Much of recent Catholic social teaching (hereinafter, CST) has challenged such realism in fundamental ways. While CST is often dismissed as merely prophetic in its tone, I defend its salience by assessing several aspects of its distinctive perspective: (1) the broad theological and anthropological vision reflected in the Catholic framework of basic norms, especially the norm of solidarity; (2) issues that arise in identifying different modes of moral discourse in modern CST; and (3) an effort to resolve such apparent tensions that unifies a distinctively Catholic approach to global health even as it suggests a series of “talking points” between the Catholic theological vision and various secular philosophical and political perspectives.