Catholic Social Science Review

In these remarks to the co-author, I offer general support for their overall argument, especially the relationship between faith and reason, the retrieval of religion as a virtue and its relation to the political community, and their emphasis on the confessional nature of any political community. I also offer some remarks on the importance of their ecclesiological argument.

The virtue of religion should be practiced by individuals and societies. Catholic theologians have disagreed about how religion can be practiced in the U.S. Msgr. John A. Ryan believed it could be practiced by the state, while John Courtney Murray, S.J., believed it could only be practiced by American civil society. Scott Hahn and Brandon McGinley are chiefly concerned with showing how the virtue of religion can be practiced in civil society by individuals, families, and the Church. Only then will it be possible to reconsider liberal politics. But what comes next?

The authors of It Is Right and Just bring to the public’s attention serious questions of political thought and practice. That they do so from the standpoint of theology provides an opportunity for a fresh look at the American founding and the American regime. Though the questions raised are important, the authors unfortunately do not provide a helpful foundation for fruitful reflection. Instead, the book makes sweeping claims without adequate evidence. It Is Right and Just will disappoint any serious student of American politics and, worse, may mislead well-intended American Catholics searching for a more just polity for themselves and their children.

American Catholics during the 1850s expressed deep concerns about the legacy of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, fearing that radicalism was spreading to the United States and would harm both the Church and the state. This paper explores the reception of Fr. Antonio Bresciani’s novel The Jew of Verona (translated and published in 1853) in the diocesan newspapers of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Charleston, South Carolina. Both papers reacted to the book in a similar fashion and used it as a lens to understand domestic politics. Bresciani’s themes of international conspiracy and the dangers of secret societies resonated with Catholics in both dioceses and led some to propose a Catholic conservative alliance to prevent the spread of radical revolution. Fears of revolution, then, drove the American Catholic responses in these dioceses even as sectional concerns ripped the nation apart.

The writings of John Courtney Murray, S.J., are preoccupied with the problem of reconciling the American experience of religious liberty with Catholic doctrine on relations between Church and state. This essay examines four analytical tools the Jesuit priest applied to problems of Church-state relations: thesis and hypothesis, applying unchanging principles to variable circumstances, the development of doctrine, and historical consciousness. Though he was wary of formulating universal rules, Murray articulated four enduring principles of Church-state relations. These analytical tools and enduring principles may help guide current debates about matters of Church and state.

Pope Francis’s evangelistic rallying cry in has rendered the Catholic Church’s mandate to evangelise unmistakable. At the parish level, the response to this mandate has varied from wholehearted and intentional cultural change to polite indifference. Sociologically, structure and culture inescapably influence individual agency in embracing missional identity at every level of the Church’s life. The question of structure—and specifically, pastor transitions from parish to parish—is considered in terms of its impact on a parish’s effectiveness at mission. Structural change may seem impossible; and yet, taking the lid off the question of structure allows us both to acknowledge its influence on the Church’s effectiveness at evangelisation, and to raise questions indicating instances where change might be possible.

This article responds to the theory of Common Good Constitutionalism as posited by Adrian Vermeule. He argues that a powerful centralized government composed of wise rulers must use law to direct the public towards a proper political and substantive morality to achieve the ends of the common good. This article then explores the broader concept of Integralism, in which Common Good Constitutionalism is rooted, similar in its belief that politics must be concerned with the human good through the centralization of sovereign power. Natural law adherents created Common Good Constitutionalism and Integralism to combat the legitimate societal threat of modern liberal individualism and reintroduce the spiritual common good into our political and legal discourse. Though these arguments have some appeal, both theories are misguided in their understanding of the nature of politics, law, and the United States as a constitutional republic. This article instead suggests a more authentically Catholic salve for the societal wounds inflicted by acidic individualism; a true natural law understanding of the common good which respects the decentralized history and tradition of our country, the limits of political authority, the social priority of local communities above the state, and most importantly, the reality that man’s ultimate end is God’s gift of salvation.

The weeks-long rioting and the destruction of property were more than just a hyper reaction to apparent racial discrimination in 2020. We might interpret this anti-social and criminal behavior as having its origin with an envy and resentment over things material. We were warned about this misuse of our freedom more than forty years ago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Finding our way back from a materialist-saturated vision of the good life depends on taking up a Christian humanism which was championed by Pope Saint John Paul II. We see that Christian humanism expressed vividly in family life.