Arguing About Catholic Social Teaching

Dr Stephen Watt writes about Catholic Social Teaching and how we need to use it better than we do at the moment for the feature; Spirit, Nature and Politics.

Arguing About Catholic Social Teaching

By Dr Stephen Watt

Stephen has taught philosophy for the last twenty years at Edinburgh University and for the Open University. He is a regular contributor on the Coracle writing currently about the Scottish Churches need to engage with Philosophy.

Here is a caricature of Catholic Social Teaching which, I hope, will be at least a recognisable caricature. Catholic Social Teaching (it has to be capitalised) is an undoubtedly good thing, the worth of which the secular world will gradually come to realise: it is the Church’s ‘Best kept secret’. Although it has roots in scripture and the earlier teachings of the Church, it is primarily developed through Papal documents beginning with Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891. It has an established content which may be reduced to a number of key unchallengeable principles, and the key problem with its establishment in the modern world appears to be a lack of willingness to follow it among the powerful rather than any theological, philosophical or political problems with its content. It is heavily identified with the work of Catholic relief agencies, and those of a conservative cast of mind harbour the suspicion that it’s been rather overrun with leftie progressivism and an abandonment of a focus on our supernatural end in the Vision of God in favour of ‘immanentizing the eschaton’ in a secularised republic.

Now most of that caricature is grotesquely unfair to everyone concerned. But I hope that the shock of what is analogous to daubing a moustache on the picture of a well-loved family member might provoke some needed reflection on how Catholic Social Teaching is often presented and developed, and how that presentation and development might need to be changed if it is to have a more effective engagement with social reform and wider politics. Perhaps the best place to start with this reflection is on the essentialising of the term, ‘Catholic Social Teaching’. Other Christian denominations, other religions and secular world views tend not to brand their own reflections on society, politics and economics in quite the same way, so how does Catholic Social Teaching fit into the spectrum of related terms such as political philosophy, political theology or simply politics? In addition, did Catholic Social Teaching spring (almost) fully formed into life in 1891, and, if it did, what was the Church doing about society in the almost two millennia preceding this sudden birth? Finally, if one looks at politics or even the academic handlings of politics such as political science or political philosophy, why are those treatments of society so disputatious and riven with unended arguments both about fundamental principles and the application of those principles, while the barque of Catholic Social Teaching sails tranquilly on, untroubled by such inconvenient questions?

I’m going to deal with the worries touched on in the preceding paragraph as representing three widely encountered narrowings of Catholic social teaching. First, there is a narrowing down of the teaching from a wider Catholic understanding of everything: by disconnecting social teaching from, for example, Catholic understandings of anthropology, salvation and the Church, that social teaching loses both content and the theological environment that makes sense of it. Second, by narrowing down the teaching from its historical roots in theology and philosophy, the teachings become focused on a narrower set of problems and lose the ability to engage effectively with more fundamental questions about the social nature of humankind which are becoming increasingly pressing in late modernity. Finally, by adopting a primarily magisterial tone, in part influenced by Papal documents, whatever is gained in terms of a prophetical cutting through of political and moral noise has a loss in terms of a realistic acceptance of the diversity of political solutions and of the argumentativeness of politics and visions of living well in society.

Let’s give an example of these three narrowings by looking at one term that regularly appears in summaries of Catholic Social Teaching: ‘subsidiarity’. In the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ summary of subsidiarity, (https://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/what-we-believe/catholic-social-teaching/call-to-family-community-and-participation)  it is described in this way:

Government should not replace or destroy smaller communities and individual initiative. Rather it should help them contribute more effectively to social well-being and supplement their activity when the demands of justice exceed their capacities.

Now there is nothing wrong with such an explanation of subsidiarity, and nothing wrong with emphasising such a principle in a world that tends either to focus on the State or on the individual. But as it stands, it fails to provide the theological and anthropological background that makes sense of this principle, fails to give the historical background to the theology and philosophy that informs it, and finally, fails to acknowledge and attempt to respond to the disagreements with the principle that will inevitably arise. An approach to subsidiarity which started to undo these three narrowings would have to say something about the anthropological nature of human beings that leads them to form communities, but to form them at different levels: we live in families; we live in local communities; we work together; and we live in nation states. The tradition of classical political philosophy can help here, with its treatment of politics as founded on human nature and its flourishing. Thus, Aristotle in his analysis of philia (friendship) in the Ethics or of the evolution of the City State in his Politics provides the philosophical background which historically has informed much of the Catholic tradition in this area which resulted in subsidiarity as a principle of government.  This classical emphasis on human nature as essentially social fits in well with a zoological turn in modern thought as a result of Darwinism and natural selection: we are clearly some sort of social ape, whatever else we are, and yet, perversely, everyday politics seems blind to the ways that the various communities such creatures need to survive and flourish are part of our nature rather than something that can be reshaped and ignored if inconvenient. Without engaging with this anthropological and philosophical background, it’s hard to see subsidiarity and other principles of Catholic Social Teaching as anything other than bold assumptions from an institution used to command, but without the current intellectual and moral authority to back these assumptions up.

That takes me on to the final narrowing: a loss in terms of a realistic acceptance of the diversity of political solutions and of the argumentativeness of politics and visions of living well in society. If Catholic Social Teaching is going to take its place in the marketplace of ideas, it’s going to have to take on the argumentativeness and fluidity of that marketplace: not everyone is going to accept its arguments, even if fully developed. Modern politics in the West at least has lost an awareness of possibilities of social order beyond the familiar, and is too often reduced to a technocratic shuffling around of detailed policies. To combat such an environment, an increased discussion of the fundamentals of social organisation is needed. Here there will be inevitable disagreement, but to omit a Catholic contribution to the debate is to create a discussion which has been deprived of much the resources of over 2000 years of intellectual development in the West.

Finally, there is also -and I mention this not because I have much idea how to deal with it but because it is a an important reality in any modern public debate in which Catholics get involved- that any suggestion of a particular expertise of the Church in dealing with understandings of community and anthropology is liable to be met with a list of charges of historical abuse and oppression which, whatever their merits, serve rhetorically as a very effective way of shutting out any Catholic contribution. Instead of an assumption that the Church might well have a treasury of wisdom that can be drawn on even just as a valuable contribution to a debate, too often these days the assumption is that anything in the way of social analysis that the Church might contribute is obviously and literally perverse, and thus can be immediately dismissed. As I say, I have little idea of how to deal with this, but I’m pretty sure that adopting a magisterial tone rather than relating the teaching to a wider background of philosophical wisdom (which the Catholic Church has engaged with over two thousand years) is probably not the most effective strategy, certainly outwith the Church and possibly, given the way that Catholics have adopted the ‘buffered self’ of modernity which needs to check and decide on beliefs for itself before letting them in, even within the Church.