Modern Catholic Social Teaching Research Articles

Work in Roman Catholic Thought

AbstractThis essay examines the idea of work in the Catholic social tradition. Following introductory comments about the Christian vision of work found in the writings of St. Paul and other early Christian authors, the essay provides seven claims as a summary of how work is treated in modern Catholic social teaching. Based on those summary claims, a vision of what good work in the Catholic tradition looks like is then developed. Finally, the phenomenon of the “gig economy” is presented as a contemporary threat to the meaning of good work.

Just Work? Catholic and Feminist Perspectives on Labour and Livelihood

Just Work? Catholic and Feminist Perspectives on Labour and Livelihood1 Christine Firer Hinze This brief essay is premised on two convictions. The first is that modern Catholic Social Teaching and thought, though it has many limits, provides a contemporary, Gospel- and tradition-based understanding of human flourishing, a specific orientation toward people and institutions, and a set of moral principles or base-points. Together, these create a dynamic, imaginative, discursive and practical field within which to understand and generate policy directions for political economy, business, work and labour markets. The second conviction is that bringing into Catholicism’s angle of vision feminism, more specifically, feminist critical theory and economics, provides Catholic Social Teaching with a needed corrective lens, and uncovers potential – if surprising – alliances between two powerful forces for economic and work justice.2 A feminist-inflected, Catholic social perspective has light to shed on and policy-shaping contributions to offer contemporary debates about political economy, labour and its regulation, economic disparities linked to gender, racial and ethnic discrimination, class, citizen-status and what it takes to ensure inclusive access to dignified work and livelihood. Most readers of Studies are familiar with the palette of principles and priorities attributed to modern Catholic Social Teaching, which typically includes human dignity, the common good, justice, the dignity of work and rights of workers, civic rights and duties to participate within a free, multi-associational polity; subsidiarity, solidarity, an intentional option for/ commitment to the poor and vulnerable, and stewardship of creation. Catholic Social Teaching’s treatment of economy and work –my focus here – differs from the neo-liberal market orthodoxy that heavily influences current US, Irish and global economic thought and practice in several fundamental respects. Catholic Social Thought and neo-liberalism First, Catholic Social Teaching departs from modern neo-liberalism to put forward a classically normative understanding of economy and work. On this Just Work? Catholic and Feminist Perspectives on Labour and Livelihood Studies • volume 108 • number 432 377 view, political economy’s primary function is to ensure access to participation and provisioning for all members. Inclusive livelihood, not growth or the Gross Domestic Product, is the criterion by which an economy’s success is evaluated. Modern Catholic Social Teaching regards work as a necessary and valuable human activity, both personally and socially significant, whereby people toil for material sustenance, cultivate and use their gifts and talents and participate in and contribute to our communities.3 An inclusivelivelihood metric assesses an economy’s health by asking questions such as: Is everyone, according to their capacity, able to participate? In particular, can all adults participate, especially through their free, meaningful and contributive labour? And through their economic contributions, are all these adults able to provide adequately for themselves and for their families or households? Second, social Catholicism’s integrated understanding of economy regards the household sector and the public waged sectors as interdependent and complementary, rather than divorced or opposed. It also refuses to identify productive work only with paid work, and expects domestic and formal waged economies to cooperate in serving personal and social welfare. Finally, while denying allegiance to any particular economic ideology or system, modern Catholic Social Teaching bears the DNA of a kind of ‘Catholic social economics’ with roots in European corporatist and solidarist economics, and, before that, in pre-modern Western economic thought.4 In contrast to modern mainstream economics, all of these economic traditions take as given, and operate with commitments to, several premises: the basic dignity, sociality and interdependence of human beings; economy’s inclusive, participative and provisioning purposes, which in many cases lead to a priority concern for the economically vulnerable and non-elite (that broad spectrum of people outside the upper-middle or upper tiers of wealth and income); and the special obligations of government, civil society and those who are better-off to serve the common good through policies and practices that enable access to economic participation and provisioning for those currently lacking them. Monsignor John A Ryan In the twentieth-century United States, social Catholicism’s substantive brief for work justice found one of its most influential interpreters and spokespersons in Irish-American priest-economist and public intellectual Christine Firer Hinze...

Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations. 2nd ed. Edited by Kenneth R. Himes OFM, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Charles E. Curran, David Hollenbach SJ, and Thomas A. Shannon. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2018. xii + 660 pages. $49.95 (paper).

Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations. 2nd ed. Edited by Kenneth R. Himes OFM, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Charles E. Curran, David Hollenbach SJ, and Thomas A. Shannon. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2018. xii + 660 pages. $49.95 (paper). - Volume 46 Issue 2

Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations

With an equal emphasis on every word in the title - and with a distinctly American perspective - Himes and his distinguished associate editors and contributors have assembled the most thorough and authoritative assessment of modern Roman Catholic social teaching to date, likely to remain the touchstone volume for decades. This culmination of many years of effort by twenty stellar scholars has produced a reference work for anyone interested in understanding or studying the key documents that comprise the central corpus of Catholic social teaching. In addition to interrogations of the major documents, this volume provides an understanding of the biblical and philosophical foundations of Catholic social teaching, addresses the doctrinal issues that arise in such a context, and explores the social thought leading up to the "modern" era, generally accepted as beginning in 1891 with the publication of Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum. Finally, there is a review of how Catholic social teaching has been received in the United States, and an informed look at the short-comings and questions that future generations must address. By any standard, Modern Catholic Social Teaching is a remarkable work - intellectually rigorous and deeply faithful, it provides accessible and thought-provoking insights into the heart of a belief tradition that every Catholic will find invaluable.

We Are Not God: Reflections on the Theology of Laudato Si

We Are Not God:Reflections on the Theology of Laudato Si* Reinhard Hutter "We are not God. The earth was here before us and it has been given to us" (Laudato Si §67) by "a Father Who Creates and Who Alone Owns the World" (§75) Is Catholic Social Teaching a specifically theological enterprise? And if so, can one show it in the case of the most recent magisterial instantiation of Catholic Social Teaching, Pope Francis's 2015 encyclical letter Laudato Si, On the Care for Our Common Home? I think that a positive answer must be given to both questions. Part of the reasons I think so are of an autobiographical nature. About forty-five years ago I founded an environmental youth group, the first ever in my hometown in northern Bavaria. This youth group was part of a youth network that was a branch of a national environmental organization. I am talking here about the academic year 1974–1975, just about four years after Greenpeace had been founded in Vancouver, Canada, and five years before the Green Party was to be founded in then West Germany. The wake-up call and catalyst for my initiative had been a memorable encounter with the first Club of Rome Report from 1972, The Limits to Growth. This report shocked me and my friends into an acute awareness of an approaching ecological crisis. Our environmental youth group was a first local activist response. In our high-school chemistry lab, we tested the—at that time rather alarming—water [End Page 639] quality of the main river in our area and publicized our findings in the local newspaper; we organized polls, public events, and demonstrations in order to raise the awareness of the local population about environmental challenges and threats; we also organized the first municipal glass-recycling program; and we overall acted as "mud rakers," exposing in the local newspaper pollution caused by companies, municipalities, and private organizations. Needless to say, we did not only have friends. Most members of our youth group eventually joined the Green Party when it was founded in 1980. I, however, decided to study philosophy and theology at the university. And this decision is part of the providential chain of events that brings me to this conference today and to the topic I am speaking about. Those among you my age or older might remember that in the mid-1970s in Europe and in the United States neither the Catholic Church nor the Protestants were really concerned about the unfolding global environmental crisis. One noteworthy exception was Blessed Pope Paul VI, who in his 1971 apostolic letter Octogesima Adveniens—written on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the foundational text of modern Catholic Social Teaching—referred to the ecological crisis as "a tragic consequence" of unchecked human activity: "Due to an ill-considered exploitation of nature, humanity runs the risk of destroying it and becoming in turn a victim of this degradation" (§21). Together with other important teachings of Pope Paul VI, this prophetic warning remained almost completely unheeded. The post-conciliar progressives were then engaged in the "theology of revolution," a largely Marxist-inspired radical precursor to the subsequent more moderate and more theologically grounded "theology of liberation." Most post-conciliar progressives dismissed our ecological concerns as a bourgeois and possibly even reactionary strategy of distraction that pulled away attention and energy from the one cause that mattered—the class struggle and the eventual overthrow of global capitalism. That forty years later, the magisterium of the Catholic Church would issue a teaching document of the magnitude, scope, and depth of Laudato Si was then utterly unimaginable and beyond the range of our wildest hopes. Why did I decide to turn to philosophy and theology while most of my friends from the youth group joined the Green Party? They, quite obviously, desired to help transform our local initiatives into national and even global policies of environmental protection and ecological sustainability. While I continued to share these concerns and, as a matter of fact, voted for the Green Party regularly at all elections on the local and on the state level in then West Germany, my...

Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations (2nd edition). Edited by Kenneth R.Himes, O.F.M. et al. Pp. xii, 660, Washington DC, Georgetown University Press, 2018, $45.95/£38.50

Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations (2^nd edition). Edited by Kenneth R.Himes, O.F.M. et al. Pp. xii, 660, Washington DC, Georgetown University Press, 2018, $45.95/£38.50

Virtue Ethics and Natural Law Responses to Human Rights Quandaries in Business

AbstractThis article is motivated by certain issues for which, in current Business and Human Rights (BHR) discourse, largely framed in terms of the Ruggie reports, no satisfactory solutions have been found to date. These quandaries refer to (a) foundational matters: the link between human rights law and ethics; (b) normative force: the obligatoriness of human rights claims on corporations; and (c) scope and content of human rights claims on corporations. Turning to the virtue ethics and natural law (VENL) tradition, we encounter the following possible responses: (a) positive laws, such as those concerning human rights, ultimately require a basis in natural law; (b) although the public use of the coercive force of law belongs to the state alone, its private use by non-state actors such as individuals and corporations may be legitimate in some cases; and (c) practical wisdom is necessary in the proper interpretation and implementation of human rights claims on corporations, taking into account relevant contingencies. The blending of BHR discourse with the VENL tradition is best captured in modern Catholic Social Teaching (CST). Although historically CST has adopted the VENL language, engagement with social issues in the modern world has enabled it to reach an understanding with rights theory as well, particularly in connection with business and the economy.

I. The Nonviolence–Just War Nexus

Gerald Schlabach wrote that a key test of progress for Catholicism in its dialogue with the historic peace churches on nonviolence and the use of force would be that the church's teaching on nonviolence would become “church wide and parish deep.” While modern Catholic social teaching has recognized nonviolence since the time of the Second Vatican Council, and Pope Saint John Paul II gave nonviolence strong, formal endorsement in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, the church's teaching on nonviolence is hardly known in the pews. If they are familiar at all with Catholic teaching on peace and war, most Catholics would know the just-war tradition, especially through the US bishops’ 1983 pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace. But the newer and still relatively slight teaching on nonviolence is hardly known at all. Only by rare exception do Catholic preachers address issues of peace and war.

A Reflection on China’s Economic Reform from the Perspective of Catholic Social Teaching

Abstract It has been nearly four decades since China initiated its economic reform in 1978. In spite of the fact that this reform has brought unprecedented economic growth to China, it is viewed by many (including myself) as problematic and has recently been caught in a tension between recession and inequity. This article explores the structural flaws of China’s economic reforms in the light of modern Catholic social teaching, with particular reference to the basic theological principles it applies within the political-economic spheres. On the basis of the Catholic understanding of economic liberty, market, government, and equity, this article furnishes a public theological agenda for China’s economic reforms, in order to help resolve the problems they are facing. Meanwhile, based on the same theological standpoint, it also provides a critical assessment of the New Left’s negation of the liberal economy.

Democracy, society and truth: an exploration of Catholic social teaching

AbstractThis article maintains that modern Catholic social teaching took shape by positioning itself between revolutionary ideologies that sought to destroy the church and reactionary forces that sought to instrumentalise it. Among the factors that contributed to this development were the emergence of a theologyical and socio-political conception of the laity, reflection on the question of how humans participate in Christ's rule, the development of a consociational vision of sovereignty in distinction from top-down or monistic views, the importance of labour to a proper understanding of human dignity, and the discovery of ‘society’, as distinct from the market and the state. Appreciation of these factors resulted in the magisterial defence of democratic politics as a necessary condition for telling the truth about what it means to be human.

Catholic Social Thought and Work Justice

This article anticipates the 125th anniversary of the publication of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical, Rerum novarum (May 15, 1891) by briefly surveying modern Catholic social teaching (CST) and recent, related scholarship in four areas, focusing on the US context: CST on political economy; work and worker justice; labor unions, with attention to recent controversy over unionization of adjunct instructors at some Catholic colleges and universities; and gender and justice issues surrounding political economy’s relationship with the paid and unpaid labor in the so-called “care economy.”

A Little Common Sense: The Ethics of Immigration in Catholic Social Teaching

Modern Catholic social teaching recurs to the idiom of human dignity and human rights. Our moral entitlement to equal respect or consideration, in concert with the ethical ideal of the common good, moreover, justifies preferential treatment for those whose basic rights are most imperiled. Thus states are morally bound to respect and promote the basic human rights of both citizen and resident alien, especially the most vulnerable—and of these, in particular, women and children. Indeed, the duty to protect grounds the subsidiary duty to rescue, for example, through diplomatic initiatives, sanctions, and in extremis, humanitarian intervention in the case of genocide or mass atrocity. Disciples thus see and have compassion, even as compassion becomes a way of seeing. Compassion, then, not only guides them in the fitting application of universal, essential norms, for example, the rights of migrants, but gives rise to existential (personal and ecclesial) imperatives as they come to the aid of wounded humanity.

Toward an Ethic of Risk: Catholic Social Teaching and Immigration Reform

Immigration reform is a highly complex and multifaceted task with significant economic, political and religio-cultural repercussions thereby bringing tremendous ethical challenges and implications. This article explores the possible contribution of modern Catholic Social Teaching in addressing the ethical challenges of immigration reform, particularly in the United States, by examining key themes that could address critical issues in the current debate on immigration reform and arguing how an ethic of risk which, the author submits, runs through the key themes of Catholic Social Teaching explored in this paper, could then serve as an approach in articulating how Christian discipleship could foreground citizenship in the context of immigration.

The Drama of Social Sin and the (Im)Possibility of Solidarity: Reinhold Niebuhr and Modern Catholic Social Teaching

Recent Catholic social teaching’s treatments of social sin and its proposed remedy, neighbor-love conceived as solidarity, represent genuine advances in this modern Christian tradition. This essay asks what Niebuhr’s ethical analysis might add to, or question about, these Catholic interpretations. After briefly describing how these themes are enunciated in post-Vatican II documents, and Niebuhr’s approach to like issues, I identify several challenges, cautions and additions that Niebuhr might offer to Catholic leaders seeking to understand social sin and to promote solidary action. Suggesting the merits of a more ‘Niebuhrian’ Catholic social ethic, and a more ‘Catholic’ Niebuhrian realism, I argue that articulating a Catholic social agenda with a Niebuhrian perspective can address weaknesses that undercut each tradition’s ability to motivate and sustain effective work for justice. Both traditions also need to better connect social ethics and spirituality, and more systematically account for the social-theoretical assumptions their moral discourse depends upon or implies.

Misunderstood Civic Duty: The Center Party and the Enabling Act

In the late nineteenth century, Pope Leo XIII cautiously abandoned the reactionary positions of Pius IX and defined teachings with which to begin engaging the evolving modern secular state. While Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum famously provided a foundation for modern Catholic social teaching, two other encyclicals, Diuturnum Illud of 1881 and Immortale Dei of 1885, defined Catholic teaching about the state and the role of Catholics as subjects and citizens of the state. This teaching sought mostly to insulate the life of the Church from the political world and by doing so, weakened the ability of the Church, both hierarchy and faithful, successfully to influence the secular state on the basis of Catholic values. The German Catholic Center Party's tortuous decision to support the Enabling Act of 1933 which provided the constitutional basis for the Nazi regime is a case in point.1 In Diuturnum Illud, Leo XIII defined as Catholic teaching a principle that became known as accidentalism. Two primary tenets characterized accidentalism. First, the modern state was a secular contrivance to meet secular needs without any particular relevance for the life of the Church. Conversely, the Church did not prefer one form of government over another as long as the life of the Church—largely defined as the sacramental life of the Church but also the communal life—remained unaffected. Governments were accidents of history, the Church was eternal. Second, Catholics should accept any existing authority as legitimate and deserving of Catholics' loyalty and service as long as the life of the Church remained intact. After World War I, this accidentalism proved quite useful, for it permitted some Catholics and forced more reluctant Catholics to adapt to the new political realities.

MODERN CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING: COMMENTARIES AND INTERPRETATIONS ‐ Edited by Kenneth R. Himes

MODERN CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING: COMMENTARIES AND INTERPRETATIONS ‐ Edited by Kenneth R. Himes

Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations. Edited by Kenneth R. Himes, O.F.M. et al. An Introduction to Catholic Social Thought. By Michael P. Hornsby‐Smith Catholic Social Teaching and the Market Economy. Edited by Philip Booth

Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations. Edited by Kenneth R. Himes, O.F.M. et al. An Introduction to Catholic Social Thought. By Michael P. Hornsby‐Smith Catholic Social Teaching and the Market Economy. Edited by Philip Booth

Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries & Interpretations – Edited by Kenneth R. Himes

Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries & Interpretations – Edited by Kenneth R. Himes

BLONDEL, MODERN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY AND THE LEIBNIZIAN EUCHARISTIC BOND

AbstractThe category of substance is fundamental in Leibniz's philosophy, and conceived in specifically theological terms in his late correspondence with Bartholomaeus des Bosses. The exchange develops as a discussion of the bond of substance (vinculum substantiale) in the transubstantiated eucharistic host, but the bond also provides the basis for a general theory of universal substance. This eucharistic vision of the substance of the world is appropriated by Maurice Blondel as the basis of his philosophy of action, in which divine transforming activity is necessarily implied, and which he describes as a form of transubstantiation of both the subject of action and its material object. This Leibnizian‐Blondelian theology of the divine transformation of the substance of the world provides eucharistic foundations for modern Catholic social teaching.

Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations, edited by Kenneth Himes, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Charles Curran, David Hollenbach & Thomas Shannon

Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations, edited by Kenneth Himes, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Charles Curran, David Hollenbach & Thomas Shannon