Christ told Pilate that his kingdom was not of this world, which, he had prophesied, was doomed to end in catastrophe.
He lived without worldly ties: without a job, wife, children, steady source of income, or fixed place of residence. He recommended the same to others and commented on the narrowness of the way that leads to life. And he called Satan “the prince of this world.”
It seems clear that Christianity isn’t primarily social or political, and it’s not surprising that clergy and religious are normally expected to refrain from marital, economic, and political involvements. Notwithstanding the universal call to holiness, there haven’t been many Catholics canonized for the way they carried on such things.
On the other hand, Christ gave us the Golden Rule and expected us to follow ordinary moral precepts such as the Ten Commandments. More basically, God created the world and called it good, and man is social, so there should be some way of living a Christian life while participating in ordinary social functions.
The Church praises the religious life based on poverty, chastity, and obedience, but also the lay life in which the faithful live much like other people. And she tells lay Catholics that their manner of living should bring the Gospel into ordinary secular affairs and so help sanctify the world. So, it’s evident that Christianity has social and political aspects.
But how does that work? If Satan is the prince of this world, making ordinary contributions to its life appears to require some sort of cooperation with him. Ordinary and necessary social functions include family and economic life, which are intertwined with sexual bonds and acquisitiveness, and politics, which involves a willingness to use brute physical force, including war. All these things routinely lead us astray.
The Holy Father has linked the last of them—war—to a “demonic cycle of evil,” and he has a point. As Thomas Hobbes said, the two cardinal virtues in war are force and fraud. And thoroughly just wars are hard to find: the Allied cause in the Second World War was more just than most, but the demand for unconditional surrender and mass bombing of cities was less so.
Even so, the Church has praised particular wars as just, and canonized Saint Louis and Saint Joan. How do we sort it out?
Catholic social teaching is intended to tell us, but it doesn’t tell us very clearly. Its main features are an emphasis on prudence, as well as on legitimate authority, man as a social being, the need for mutual assistance, devolution of responsibility, respect for every person, and the principle that there are intrinsically evil acts that can’t be done, no matter how necessary they seem.
All these raise difficulties. As someone who is neither a philosopher nor a theologian, it is not clear to me how that last principle is consistent with the practical possibility of a just war. Intentionally killing people, who are often morally innocent, to keep them from contributing to grave evils—perhaps only indirectly or prospectively—looks very much like doing evil that good may result. It may sometimes be necessary, but we are told that necessity is no excuse.
Perhaps that consideration was behind the attempt of the Fourth Lateran Council to ban military use of the bow and arrow against Christians. Arrows were literally the first ballistic missiles, and routinely kill soldiers who are too far away to attack anyone, simply because they support or are in league with the attackers and may become attackers themselves.
There are also difficulties in applying other aspects of Catholic social teaching. Whatever the ultimate reality or proper formulation, for us here and now, mutual assistance can easily conflict practically with giving people serious responsibilities of their own. What should the ant in the fable do if he is initially helpful, but the grasshopper always has an excuse for doing the same thing year after year?
And it can be hard or impossible to reconcile the supreme dignity of the individual with the practical need to rule effectively, when information and choices are limited, over people who are often stupid, irrational, dishonest, and even downright evil. The situation in El Salvador, where Bukele’s anti-crime measures have cut corners but improved life greatly for almost everyone, apparently provides an example.
We speak of war and peace, and apply different rules to them, but how should we classify the situation in El Salvador when Bukele took office? The declaration of a “state of exception” seems to put it halfway between the two, which, at least from a distance, seems reasonable. Or how should we classify the relation between Iran and Israel, along with its ally, the United States, before February 28? “Peace” might be the wrong term when the destruction of Israel, supported by proxy wars, cyberattacks, assassinations, and covert operations, has been fundamental Iranian policy for decades.
But the state of exception in El Salvador has gone on for more than four years. And the seemingly permanent state of war in the Middle East, with its indirect and unconventional tactics and blurring of the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, undermines the distinction between war and peace. Going farther afield, the rise of concepts like “institutional violence,” and the identification of law with policy that now pervades discussions of judicial decisions, blur the distinction between lawfulness and the reign of force.
It appears that social order on a scale larger than natural connections like the family is contingent and fragile, and the Hobbesian war of all against all, which abolishes distinctions like law and violence, war and peace, is closer than we like to think.
None of these difficulties can be wished away. The basic problem, it seems, is that politics, which necessarily involve decisions that are debatable and the threat or use of deadly force, is mostly a matter of prudence in situations that are often ungovernable. As such, it slides easily into the plea of necessity, which Milton rightly called “the tyrant’s plea” but sometimes seems unavoidable. And it essentially depends on predictions of the future and understandings of how the world works, which are notoriously uncertain and variable.
Pope Leo, for example, attributes extreme poverty to unequal distribution of wealth. He says the problem is getting worse, but it’s solvable, and the solution is a more equitable distribution—apparently (he suggests no alternative) to be achieved through state action and thus force or the threat of force. He has also tied war to business and profit, and especially to the arms trade, speaking of the “money-making that is behind every war.”
His critics note the radical global decline in extreme poverty in recent decades [https://ourworldindata.org/poverty], and attribute that development to greater economic freedom rather than the redistributive measures used by socialist and communist countries. And they see no reason to attribute the Ukraine war, the chronic conflict in the Middle East, the proxy wars of the Cold War period, or the two world wars to the machinations of arms dealers or other business interests.
The Pope and his critics evidently agree that war and extreme poverty are bad. Where they differ is how such things come about and how they can best be mitigated and made more rare. The critics make points that are at least reasonable. Under such circumstances, claiming the Pope is simply preaching the gospel seems out of place.
All in all, it seems that Catholic Social Teaching can’t be viewed as a system of clear doctrine that readily provides usable answers. It seems rather a matter of prudence and natural reason oriented toward human well-being, with nothing specifically Catholic or Christian about it. Otherwise, why present it as acceptable to non-Christians? As such, it can’t easily demand heroic virtue—like the absolute exclusion of the plea of necessity—that can easily jeopardize the continued existence of societies espousing it.
It appears useful mostly as a way of organizing our thoughts and making productive debate possible. It is therefore helpful to those who want to navigate the uncertainties of political and social life as intelligently and cooperatively as possible. So they should appeal to it, but not claim it proves much without regard to circumstances and assumptions about how the world works that are rationally contestable.
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
“There is no ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of love.”
Deus Caritas est.
Catholic social teaching post ppBXVI is no longer just economics/political theory, it is rooted in a Christian understanding of Charity.
One is reminded, reading ppBXVI, of Jean Vanier’s insistance on the need for a voluntary service of the needy…
The love of the poor – as in Sisters and Brothers of Charity – is where the challenge of applying Catholic Social Teaching is met.
Catholic Social Teaching as revisited by ppBXVI is not top down, but rather bottom up. And that is where the Gospel Truth meets man eye to eye?
Perhaps a little of both?
You’re probably right brother Jaques, ideally.
However, bottom up is sufficient?
Mother Tereasa of Calcutta is the proof 😉
The work of Father William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D. in analyzing the social justice theories of Pope Pius XI is useful in this context, explaining the distinction between individual and social virtue — not what many people think — and how to reconcile being both a good person and a good citizen. This is summarized in his pamphlet, “Introduction to Social Justice” (1948). https://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/introtosocialjustice.pdf. Practical applications of the principles of economic and social justice are described in the short book, “Economic Personalism: Property, Power and Justice for Every Person (2022): https://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/FIN-EconPersonal_Formatted-24-1223.pdf
We read: “Pope Leo, for example, attributes extreme poverty to unequal distribution of wealth. He says the problem is getting worse, but it’s solvable, and the solution is a more equitable distribution—apparently (he suggests no alternative) to be achieved through state action [?] and thus force or the threat of force.”
QUESTION:
Or—in the actual circularity between cause and effect—when do radical or subtle Marxism also attach themselves to the unequal “distribution” (?) of wealth?
With instant internet visibility and ubiquitous cell phones might thee be no end to “relative deprivation”? (Even in a society of only millionaires, half will still be below average.) So, what is the unmentioned and deeper/higher alternative to state action? A really good “challenge” for Catholic academia to blow life into the non-ideological Catholic Social Teaching…but wait, there’s the adolescent 1968 abdication in the Land O’ Lakes Declaration!
RESPONSE:
As a much-delayed point of departure—from the closed Marxist worldview—might we consider some points in the “’Portland Declaration’ born on the Western rim of Christendom”? (The Western Humanities Institute, first published in the National Review, Oct. 16, 1980, with additional German and Spanish versions).
A fragmentary summary of the 26-point “Portland Declaration”:
“[.….] The Declaration emphasizes the personalistic supremacy of diversity [written in 1980] over identity-sameness, rejects horizontalism in favor of verticality, places Right over Left; it also understands the radical difference between men and women, the importance of the family, the loving friendship between the sexes, the separateness of state and society [take note!], the moral supremacy of authority over coercion [!], the principle of subsidiarity [!], and it rejects the centralization [!] as well as the totalitarian Provider State [distinguished from the ‘welfare state’][.….] The administration must be of the ‘highest quality and minimum size’ rather than today’s ‘lowest quality and maximum size’ [….]” (Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot,” Regnery Gateway, 1990, p.326.)
I enjoyed Kalb’s article and his going over stuff in his portfolio. Keeping things in a lived attenuation is crucial skill.
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2022/11/03/catholic-social-teaching-in-a-time-of-dissolution/
This is what I had attempted to post last night as comment on the current essay (with minor edit).
Kalb provides an array of questions in essay form.
One can consider particular headings as an introduction to answers to Kalb’s question on his subjects; headings for study taken from the CCC: participation, common good, dignity of the person, formation of conscience, natural law, morality.
Inevitably, some interactions overlap into the Church while others involve people with their own respective traditions. The CCC has some direction on this, see Part III, Chapter 3, Articles 2 and 3.
The Hobbes thing reflects fiercely-held-to ideology within some camps. It often is not admitted honestly, or, it is often justified in some fashion; precisely because it is leading and leads to societal, economic and political deviance. And it is armed for refuting challenges even without being challenged. So a right kind of work is needed, depending on circumstances, to bring it out in the open.
It occurs to me to add that, too often in debate, the move is made to decide the issue using an extreme situation to provide the answer as a standard for all situations.
On another note, natural law has different meaning outside Catholicism. It will be necessary to identify when this is pertinent and how to address it. Look at how natural law went down for Mr. S. Graham –
‘ The graham cracker was inspired by the preaching of Sylvester Graham, who was part of the 19th-century temperance movement. He believed that a vegetarian diet anchored by bread made from wheat coarsely ground at home was how God intended people to live, and that following this natural law would keep people healthy. Towards that end, Graham introduced the world’s first graham wafer product. It was a dull, unsifted flour biscuit baked by Graham himself. ‘
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_cracker
The action in this movie seems designed deliberately to dissolve sensitivities and substance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detective_Story_(1951_film)
“Pope Leo, for example, attributes extreme poverty to unequal distribution of wealth. He says the problem is getting worse, but it’s solvable, and the solution is a more equitable distribution—apparently (he suggests no alternative) to be achieved through state action and thus force or the threat of force.”
It’s embarrassing to have Popes so ignorant of economics and so eager to demonstrate it. Wealth is not “distributed” like slices of pizza. As for the state being an effective and efficient mitigant of poverty or any other malady, that’s laughable. We had a war on poverty, beginning during Leo’s lifetime and it’s produced intergeneration dependence, indolence, ignorance and immorality.
If we could cut the out of wedlock birth rate in half, we would eliminate a lot of poverty. The question is how?
The question is how?
Indeed. The $64.000 question.
We have spent almost 70 years encouraging out of wedlock births.
Both through a mass media push as well as government subsidies. And there are those that believe any effort will increase abortions, so they fight for continued subsidies (EITC, TANF, SNAP) and are reluctant “stigmatize” illegitimacy.
I spent some time as a Medicaid Maternity Care Auditor and had full access to the medical and social service records, because to pay for maternity care, you need to know what you are paying for-is the patient MA eligible, pregnant, what was the outcome?
I remember two cases in particular of what were called “spontaneous abortions’. The first was a 40 year old woman whose was pregnant with her 7th child. The first six had three different surnames, and two had the same first name. The second was a 16 year old high school student who lost her first, and refused grief counseling-informing her caseworker that she would be pregnant again soon, as she was confident that she could handle high school and a baby.
Completely different cases, with a common outcome. It’s not like getting pregnant before being married is new. I had a great aunt who “had to get married”. She’d be over 100 today.
How we restore maternity to marriage, I don’t know. I think first, we have to restore marriage. I’m shock at the number of friends and coworkers who are divorced. Some, despite being Catholic immediately enter the dating scene and post pictures of the new honey.
There’s some evidence that younger people are less accepting; but with some populations exhibiting 70+ percent of all births to unmarried women, it’s going to be hard to upend the trend that’s now commonplace.
Out of wedlock births are killing us. The successful single mother thing is a myth. Raising children is a two parent job. And even then, it is difficult. Too many kids from single mothers fall through the cracks. Some do fine,but many do not.
Yes, we encouraged this for 60+ years, and now we are paying for misguided sympathy.
To your excellent comments, I’ll add that this ignorance is willful. It is not as if there does not exist a vast literature that documents the fatal flaws and the grave injustices with socialism and welfare state economies that have predominated in the world over the last century. Yet, there is little evidence in their writings on economics, the environment, and immigration that Popes and bishops have ever consulted any sources that counter their softcore Marxism. Instead, with every new letter, we get the same fact-free nonsense that can’t even imagine legitimate differing viewpoints on what are decidedly matters of prudential judgement.
The only Pope I am aware of that consulted an economist was John Paul II, who spoke with F.A. Hayek, a nominal Catholic. Francis was abysmally ignorant, by his own admission of being allergic to economics, because as an old man he still harbored resentment about his father, an accountant working long hours, but I’m not sure what one thing has to do with another.
I am grateful for the essay of Mr. Kalb, who is, as usual, presenting the great tensions that persist in the real world for Catholic citizens.
I incline toward his sense that the Pontiff Leo misses the mark regarding the immense issues of poverty and war.
I also lean toward ‘The Pitchfork Rebel’ that the Pontiff Leo fails to grasp the problem of poverty, and having misunderstood the cause of poverty, he mistakenly proposes a nakedly Marxist solution.
The Man we worship warned us all about poverty: “The poor you will have ALWAYS with you.” His supreme counsel ought to guide our thinking here.
In connection with Jesus’ prophetic counsel about poverty, the economist Thomas Sowell has (somehow) provided us a prescription to consider. Sowell says that the natural state of man is poverty, and that given that axiom, the effort to relieve and reduce impoverishment is NOT to study poverty, but instead to study what produces prosperity, and pursue the ways and means of creating prosperity.
A fundamental challenge for us is to devote ourselves to live as virtuous and prudent citizens, to foster a civilization of prosperity and peace, which includes the grim necessity of confronting poverty and war.
Yet we have this promise, from the Man we worship: “In this world you will have troubles. But behold – I have conquered the world.”
“I also lean toward ‘The Pitchfork Rebel’ that the Pontiff Leo fails to grasp the problem of poverty, and having misunderstood the cause of poverty, he mistakenly proposes a nakedly Marxist solution.”
To be clear I don’t think he understands the scope, the cause or the limits of remediating poverty caused by immorality or indolence.
Growing up, my Mother was among a diminishing number of “stay at home” mothers, mostly due to recurrent migraines. When they got married, my parents expected they would follow the model that they matured with in the 50’s and 60’s, where a man who completed high school would be able to provide for his family. Dad had a white collar job as a “production planner”.
Then a funny thing happened along the way. The government started a war in Vietnam and one at home against “poverty”, the result was inflation and women increasing going to work. So here’s my Dad, armed with a high diploma, now trying to compete against rising prices and two income families.
By the time the 70’s came about, the TV was still black and white, the cars were old and me and my siblings, in our infinite ignorance were irate that we didn’t go on vacation to the Carolinas or have a snowmobile like my aunt and uncle.
By the time my dad was in his 50’s, and trying to deal with the bottomless trough of two teenagers and the lesser one of my sister, he was told one Friday that his position of decades was being eliminated. After that, he drove a school bus and worked in a physical labor job in a factory in his late 50’s and 60’s after a heart attack.
Then one day, after I was gainfully employed and living independently, by chance I discovered one of my “gym bros”, a 30 year old who had no problem bench pressing 365 pounds was his coworker. It was only then that I appreciated what “the old man” endured keeping up with Hercules so I could shovel food down my gullet before I split.
Today, we hear about “immigrants” and “single moms” as if illegal border crossing and premarital canoodling should result in canonization.
Where’s the concern for the people who, through titanic effort and diligence, work and provide for their families, and suffer the indignities of having less than people who feed at the public trough?
“Marginalized” is a popular word with pseudo-religious social workers and welfare state advocates (bishops, the ones that want to bankrupt the country after they bankrupt diocese after diocese). If that word had any meaning, it applied to men like my father who marched off to work morning after morning, wondering they could continue as age sapped their health and vitality. Where are the episcopal missives seeking their interest? Where the hell was his “preferential option”?
He received the blessings of strength, industriousness and good health from God. He made good use of his talents and God has promised to reward His servants who do so. Envy is a mortal sin.
Taking Jesus at His word is very challenging. Complicating matters with many excuses doesn’t make living as a Christian in the world any easier. Best to keep things simple basic and true.
Saint Francis was certainly a great saint.
But could he have been a prosecuting attorney? It seems that somebody has to do the job. But if the police arrested a serial murderer plainly guilty of 450 murders, and he said he’s sorry and asked forgiveness, should a Christian prosecutor drop charges on the grounds that Jesus said he has another 40 freebies coming to him?
Another alternative to crypto Marxism alleged to Pope Leo is Pope Francis’ egalitarian Marxism, the distribution of a universal salary. When you take all the opinions, shake them together and roll them out, what do you get?
“All in all, it seems that Catholic Social Teaching can’t be viewed as a system of clear doctrine that readily provides usable answers. It seems rather a matter of prudence and natural reason oriented toward human well-being, with nothing specifically Catholic or Christian about it”.
Nothing determinable except to follow Wittgenstein’s principle that if rich and poor, in betweens manage to live together then ‘Leave the damned thing alone’. There’ll always be skilled earners and ditch diggers. And Catholic Relief services.
People who propose a “universal salary” or as it’s more frequently called “universal basic income” ignores three things: first, the fallacy of composition-in that if I provide a sinecure for one, their position is improved, but to all, not so much. second, a person who provides for themself, or a family gets the dignity of a sense of purpose. They learn things like diligence, industriousness and thrift. A capable person who is relieved of “the grind” becomes indolent, distracted and trapped. Worse, the ruling elite knows just how easy it is to keep a dependent individual politically loyal by feigning advocacy.
The current problem I think is that it’s designed top down but required to be bottom up. What’s needed is a spontaneous upwelling of popular sentiment that (surprise, surprise!) reproduces the views of academic progressives. So they engage people to provide just that. Hence the World Meeting of Popular Movements (and, in a different setting, the Synod on Synodality).
“What’s needed is a spontaneous upwelling of popular sentiment that (surprise, surprise!) reproduces the views of academic progressives.”
If there was truth in labelling, “progressives” would be regressives.
A quote:
“but is also a vision of themselves and of their moral role in that world. It is a vision of differential rectitude. It is not a vision of the tragedy of the human condition: Problems exist because others are not as wise or as virtuous as the anointed.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy
I agree that the Allies demand for unconditional surrender likely prolonged the war and maybe cause more deaths, but I argue the unconditional surrender was still needed. Any negotiated peace would have left the deeply evil regimes in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in place. Those evil regimes would then have continued to threaten their neighbors and the world forever. Therefore, unconditional surrender was needed to finally crush the evil in those two countries.
Why not say our goal was something other than the destruction of Germany as the Morgenthau plan proposed? Getting rid of the ruling cliques would necessarily have been part of any negotiations. In Europe of course that would have meant negotiating with people like those in the army who thought preserving Germany was more important than Hitler and his policies rather than the government itself. The Japanese government was less monolithic and we ended up letting them keep the emperor anyway.
I appreciated this article; it has helped me think through some of my struggles with various applications of Catholic Social Teaching that have caused me, at times, to wonder what it is actually useful for. So I am to commit the closing paragraph to memory and store it away for those moments, because it will help me put matters in perspective:
“[Catholic Social Teaching] appears useful mostly as a way of organizing our thoughts and making productive debate possible. It is therefore helpful to those who want to navigate the uncertainties of political and social life as intelligently and cooperatively as possible. So they should appeal to it, but not claim it proves much without regard to circumstances and assumptions about how the world works that are rationally contestable.”