BOSTON COLLEGE MAGAZINE 35
THE TROUBLE WITH CATHOLIC
SOCIAL THOUGHT
In speaking out on urgent matters, like the economy and
nuclear warfare, the bishops may be neglecting
their most important task
BY ERNEST L. FORTIN
Toward the close of Vatican II, a
distinguished Protestant theologian,
himself an observer at the council,
remarked that, in its endeavor to
come to terms with the modern world, the
Roman Catholic Church was trying to com-
plete in less than five years what Protes-
tantism had failed to accomplish in well over
a century. The statement was intended as a
friendly warning that the domain into which
the council fathers had ventured was strewn
with pitfalls that the euphoria generated by
their deliberations could easily cause them to
ignore.
The truth of that statement has been
amply borne out by more recent devel-
opments, not the least notable of which is the
church's unprecedented involvement in prob-
lems of a directly political nature. Typically,
in the twenty-odd years that separate us from
the end of the council, the bishops have
published more documents dealing with
social issues than they did throughout the
first 200 years of their existence as an in-
dependent hierarchy.
No one denies that many of these docu-
ments, and above all the widely publicized
pastorals on nuclear warfare and the
American economy, represent a substantial
contribution to the national debate, which
the bishops are eager to elevate by injecting a
strong moral note. What is less obvious or
less often said is that the same documents
bring into sharper focus a number of ten-
sions inherent in the church's current posi-
tion on social matters. My aim is not to de-
fend or criticize that position but to indicate
wherein, as I see it, the tensions lie and in
what sense the chord sounded in the pas-
torals and related texts differs from the one
to which Catholics were formerlv accus-
tomed. With all due respect to the authority
of the bishops, I shall argue that their latest
teaching is implicitly grounded in a bifur-
cated anthropology; that it simultaneously
pursues two sets of goals that are not easily
reconcilable with each other; that it combines
traditional Christian doctrine with ideas that
once were and may still be fundamentally
antithetical to it; in short, that it suffers from
a latent bifocalism that puts it at odds with
itself and thereby weakens it to a con-
siderable extent.
Anyone who reads the new documents
against the background of the older ones can-
not help being struck by the overwhelming
emphasis that they place on the notion of
human rights, the hallmark of modern
Ernest L. Fortin, AA, is a professor of theology at Boston College.
A version of this essay first appeared in "Free Inquiry."
BOSTON COLLEGE MAGAZINE 37
ethical theory. What once presented itself as
first and foremost a doctrine of duties and
hence of virtue or dedication to the common
good of one's society now takes its bearings,
not from what human beings owe to their
fellow human beings, but from what they
can claim for themselves. This observation is
only apparently belied by the fact that
Chapter 2, Section B, of the letter on the
economy opens with an "outline of the duties
all people have to each other and to the
whole community"; the rest of the text
makes it clear that these duties are rooted in
pre-existing rights which everyone is obliged
in conscience to honor and which must,
therefore, be regarded as the primary moral
phenomenon.
unlike the bishops, the Bible never goes
so far as to propose that something
might be owed to the poor, the afflicted,
and the underprivileged simply by
reason of their poverty.
At first glance, the difference between the
two views might be looked upon as one of
approach rather than of genuine substance,
and the more so as rights and duties are to
some extent correlative. If I have a duty to
do something, I must also have the right to
do it, although the converse need not be
true. Moreover, there is no reason to think
that the use of different approaches to the
same problem leads of necessity to substan-
tially different results. Climb to the top of
Mt. Everest from the north or from the
south, and you arrive at the same destina-
tion, even if one side turns out to be easier
or otherwise more suitable than the other.
Differences of this kind are not uncommon
in the Christian tradition and are in part
responsible for the vitality that it has
demonstrated across the centuries. The early
church fathers were attracted to Plato and
found him better adapted to their purpose,
which was to implant Christianity in a world
that was as yet unfamiliar with it. For
reasons of their own, the medievals preferred
Aristotle, whose philosophy is eminently
suited to a situation in which Christianity
was already fully accredited. No one would
describe the two groups as being at log-
gerheads with each other.
Such is not always, the case, however. If
one's method of procedure has been delib-
erately chosen with a view to a different end,
rather than as a different means to the same
end, its employment is bound to have an im-
pact on what is accomplished. It is significant
that the notion of universal human rights,
understood as rights that inhere in each
human being by reason of the fact that he or
she is a human being, does not occur
anywhere in premodern thought and, until
very recent times, only sparingly in Roman
Catholic thought. The Bible itself, which
shares to some degree the perspective of
classical philosophy on this point, does not
promulgate a Bill of Rights, of which it
knows nothing; instead, it issues a set of
commandments. For centuries, the corner-
stone of Catholic moral theology was not the
natural or human rights doctrine but
something quite different, called the natural
law. Rights, to the extent that they were
mentioned at least by implication, were con-
tingent on the fulfillment of prior duties. Far
from being absolute or inalienable, they
could be forfeited and were so forfeited by
the individual who failed to abide by the law
that guaranteed them. Simply stated, what
the church taught and tried to inculcate was
an ethic of virtue as distinct from an ethic of
rights.
To the best of my knowledge, the true
originator of the rights doctrine is Hobbes,
from whom it was taken over by virtually all
of the great early modern thinkers, Spinoza,
Locke, and Rousseau foremost among them.
That doctrine emerged by way of a reaction
against premodern thought and signals a
radical departure from it. Its underlying
premise is that, contrary to what had been
previously assumed, human beings are not
intrinsically ordered to a natural end, in the
attainment of which they find their happiness
or perfection. In Hobbes' own words, "there
is no such finis ultimus, utmost aim, nor sum-
mum bonum, greatest good, as is spoken of in
the books of the old moral philosophers."
Human beings are universally actuated, not
by a desire for the good of reason, but by an
amoral passion, and not the most noble one
at that; to wit, the fear of violent death,
which constitutes the sole foundation on
38 BOSTON COLLEGE MAGAZINE
which a viable theory of justice can be
erected. For, as Hobbes observes elsewhere,
"as often as reason is against a man, so
often will a man be against reason." To be
sure, reason is still involved in the process,
but only in an instrumental capacity, that is
to say, as a faculty whose function is to
"reckon consequences" and, by so doing, in-
sure one's self-preservation.
This is not to suggest for one mo-
ment that the bishops are pure and
simple Hobbesians; far from it.
Like most contemporary ethicists,
they are vastly more influenced by Kant and
his latter-day disciples, who managed to give
the original rights theory a more exalted
status by grounding it, not in a selfish pas-
sion, but in practical reason or the dignity of
the individual person as an autonomous
moral agent. Yet in the final analysis, Kant's
theory is still only a modification of the Hob-
besian theory, whose nonteleological orienta-
tion it preserves and with which it has more
in common than it does with classical moral
philosophy. Rights remain paramount and
the actualization of the just social order is
made to depend more on institutions than on
moral character. Virtue, although desirable,
is not essential to the scheme, and one need
not acquire it in order to reap its benefits.
Human beings may stay as they are as long
as the laws under which they live are as they
ought to be. The only condition is that these
laws be devised in such a way as to be
equally favorable to everyone, to scoundrels
no less than to saints. Wars will disappear,
not because their atrocities offend one's
moral sense, but because with the progress of
modern science they are rapidly becoming
too costly, if not downright suicidal. Com-
merce will curb the spread of religious
fanaticism and bind people together more
closely than ever before. A strong league of
nations will insure the proper relations
among the peoples of the world, and a day is
coming when no one will have to worry
about sacrificing himself for the good of
others. In Kant's famous phrase, the per-
fectly just society does not require that the
bulk of its citizens be angels or even
minimally decent human beings; it can be
made up entirely of "devils," on condition
that they be intelligent. The key to its proper
functioning is not genuine moral virtue, on
which one can rarely depend, but en-
lightened self-interest.
compassion, for all its attractiveness, is
a passion, only distantly related to what
the Christian tradition calls 'mercy' and
'charity, ' both of which, as virtues,
require the control of reason.
I am well aware that the preceding ac-
count of the relationship between premodern
and modern ethical thought runs counter to
what is still far and away the most
fashionable view among present-day scholars,
the majority of whom look upon the rights
doctrine as nothing more than the perfected
version of the old natural law doctrine. Ac-
cording to that interpretation, there is no real
breach of continuity between premodern and
modern thought. The latter is a child of the
former, whose intention it does not oppose
but rather seeks to fulfill more effectively.
Such was the position taken a short genera-
tion ago by Jacques Maritain and John
Courtney Murray, and such also is the one
taken in our day by John Finnis and Felicien
Rousseau, to name only a few Catholic
thinkers who speak for a host of others in
this regard. It is emphatically not the posi-
tion taken by the early modern thinkers
themselves, all of whom were firmly con-
vinced that, like Columbus, they had
discovered a new continent and stood on
fundamentally different ground. Modernity,
they thought, had its own independent prin-
ciple and was not to be viewed as a mere
prolongation of what had gone on before. At
the deepest level, it owed nothing of impor-
tance to either the classical or Christian tradi-
tion, from which it was separated by an
abyss. The issue was stated with the utmost
clarity, for the last time or just about, by
Jonathan Swift, who pictured the two camps
as solidly entrenched, each on its own sum-
mit, which neither was willing to surrender
to the other. It is only with Hegel and, some
years later, with Nietzsche, that a powerful
attempt was made to bridge the chasm be-
tween them by showing that the modern
world was nothing other than the culmina-
tion of a process that had been unfolding
since the dawn of history or, in Nietzsche's
case, since the dawn of philosophic
BOSTOX COLLEGE MAGAZINE 39
consciousness. And it is from them that the
unitary conception of the development of
Western thought was passed on to assorted
philosophers and historians down to our
time.
We shall gain a clearer understanding
of what is at stake in all of this if,
by way of illustration, we glance
ever so briefly at a few of the
specific issues with which the bishops have
been confronted or to which they have been
forced to address themselves. One of these is
abortion, the case against which, not sur-
prisingly, they now base on the rights of the
unborn. Earlier theologians would have
begun by asking, not what abortion does to
the foetus, but what it does to the person
who performs it or undergoes it. Duties took
precedence over rights and determined the
conduct that was appropriate in a given set
of circumstances. The more complex the
case, the more it called for deliberation in the
light of certain general principles which re-
main the same at all times but whose degree
of applicability varies greatly from one in-
stance to another. Considerable room was
thus left for prudence, through the exercise
of which one could hope to arrive at a sen-
sible decision. The same cannot always be
said of the argument from rights, which
deprives us of the ability to determine in a
principled way which of the two supposedly
unconditional rights, that of the mother or
that of the unborn child, has the green light
when they come into conflict with each
other.
whatever gems of Christian wisdom
may be embedded in the pastorals are
lost in a maze of academic detail and
references that only a specialist or a
born masochist would care to look up.
Nor is this all. On the ground that all
human life is sacred, some bishops have been
invoking the same principle to ban not only
abortion but nuclear warfare and capital
punishment as well. Actions as disparate as
the taking of an innocent life, the execution
of a common criminal, and the defense of
one's country against a foreign invader have
been lumped together and condemned in the
name of a would-be "consistent ethic of life"
or an abstraction derived from modern
science, which in large part is what I take the
rights doctrine to be. Perhaps there are no
ready-made solutions to any of these prob-
lems, but even a morally sensitive person
may find it strange to see them treated as if
they were identical.
A similar problem arises in connection
with the church's efforts to deal with
theologians who dissent from its official
teaching. Having endorsed the principle of
freedom of conscience and freedom of ex-
pression, the bishops have been hard pressed
to defend the sanctions imposed by Rome on
some of the dissenters. One cannot publicly
proclaim the rights of the individual con-
science and then take action against the per-
son who exercises them and thus appears to
have justice on his side. It might be replied
that the church, too, has its rights, which
need to be defended when they are infringed.
But, never having been spelled out with the
same degree of precision, these rights remain
somewhat vague or less compelling than the
ones claimed by and guaranteed to the in-
dividual person. The problem becomes even
more acute when one considers that the
dissenter is himself a member of the
organization whose rights are being urged
against him. All of this is to say that the
church is having to pay a price for espousing
the principles of the Enlightenment along
with their hidden premise, the ideology of
progress. Only a stronger notion of the com-
mon good, coupled with a more subtle for-
mulation of the notion of individual rights,
could justify its stance and posture in regard
to this thorny problem.
My last series of comments concerns the
bishops' teaching on the economy and their
so-called "preferential option for the poor,"
one of the pivots of that teaching, where the
argument is again made predominantly in
terms of rights. One can hardly fault the
bishops for wanting to do something about
the scandalous persistence of pauperism in
the midst of a society that is daily becoming
more prosperous. On this score, they are
merely heeding the injunctions of the Bible,
which, as they correctly point out, evinces a
good deal of concern for the poor, the af-
40 BOSTON COLLEGE MAGAZINE
flicted, and the underprivileged. Unlike the
bishops, however, the Bible never goes so far
as to propose that something might be owed
to them simply by reason of their poverty.
Here as elsewhere, it looks at the problem
from the standpoint of the doer of the
righteous or merciful deed rather than that of
its beneficiary. The good Samaritan is the
one who is indebted to the man who had
fallen among thieves for the opportunity to
serve him, and not vice versa. The thrust of
the New Testament message is that the
Christian, who has received everything from
God, must imitate Him by sharing his super-
fluous goods with those who lack the
necessities of life. The poverty about which it
speaks is more often than not spiritual pov-
erty, which sometimes goes hand in hand
with material poverty but which cannot be
equated with it. God wants all people to be
saved, the rich as well as the poor.
It is true, as the bishops likewise remind
us, that Jesus himself lived in a ten-
thousandfold poverty and did not have a
stone on which to rest his head; but it is also
true that he had some fairly rich friends,
whom he does not condemn and of whose
hospitality he was quite willing to avail
himself. And he apparently had no qualms
about allowing his equally improvident
disciples to steal a few ears of corn from
neighboring fields from time to time. Im-
agine what human society would be like if
everybody were to live like that! On balance,
one is almost tempted to say that the Bible is
more concerned with the rich than with the
poor. From its perspective, they are the ones
who need help. Besides, if the poor are really
closer to God, I suppose one should think
twice before robbing them of their poverty.
Even more striking is the fact that the
New Testament has nothing at all to say
about the reform of social structures or the
establishment of institutions geared to the
relief of human misery. What the bishops
and others today call "social justice," as
distinguished from, say, legal justice, is a
nineteenth-century invention usually at-
tributed to the Roman Catholic theologian
Taparelli d'Azeglio, who never bothered to
clarify its meaning and thus created a prob-
lem with which social ethicists have had to
struggle ever since. The pedigree of that ill-
fated notion can easily be traced to
Rousseau, who did call for the reform of
society along egalitarian lines. The change
was a momentous one. Prior to that time,
everybody took it for granted that one was
rewarded by society in the measure of one's
services to it. Widows, orphans, and the vic-
tims of undeserved misfortune were obvi-
ously to be cared for, but they presented a
special case demanding special treatment.
Rousseau went further, stipulating that
rewards were to be meted out on the basis of
need rather than merit. The less one was in
a position to contribute to society, the more
one could expect from it. Compassion rather
than reason became the stamp of human
dignity and would henceforth dictate one's
comportment toward the needy. The battle
cry was taken up by countless authors
I he vast amount of time, energy, and
resources devoted to practical issues risks
being interpreted as a tacit acquiescence
in what has been described as the demise
of transcendental Christianity.
throughout the century that followed. In the
Legend of the Centuries, Victor Hugo could say
of a horse that steps aside to avoid trampling
a toad: "Wiser than Socrates and greater
than Plato" — Plus sage que Socrate et plus grand
que Platon. But compassion, for all its attrac-
tiveness, is still, as its name indicates, a pas-
sion. It is only distantly related to what the
Christian tradition calls "mercy" and
"charity," both of which, as virtues, require
the control of reason. John Stuart Mill was
not far off the mark when he noted a century
and a half ago that the new mood among
Christians owed more to Rousseau's sen-
timental deism than it did to the spirit of the
gospel, for which neither he nor Rousseau
had much use.
But if social, rather than personal, reform
is the key to the problems of civil society,
training in virtue loses much of its impor-
tance. There is no real need to dwell on it,
and, in fact, the bishops show relatively little
interest in it. Like their modern predecessors,
they appear to have more faith in institu-
tions, or so one gathers, for example, from
the list of concrete proposals to which more
BOSTON COLLEGE MAGAZINE 41
than half of their pastoral on the economy is
dedicated, and which includes such specific
items as tax reform, the reform of the inter-
national economic system, the right to
employment, trade unions, farm policy, food
distribution, cooperation with firms and in-
dustries, national and international coopera-
tion, welfare programs, job training and job-
creation programs, and foreign investments.
Part of the danger is that the vast amount
of time, energy, and resources devoted to
practical issues of this sort risks being inter-
preted as a tacit acquiescence in what Robert
Nisbet has described as the demise of trans-
cendental Christianity. One begins to wonder
whether the bishops have not abandoned
their most important task for the sake of a
possibly more urgent one. That it should
sometimes be necessary to do this goes
without saying. If my house is burning, I
had better put the fire out, even if that
means postponing any attempt to figure out
what the bishops are up to. Unfortunately,
there are always urgent matters to be taken
care of; but if I am constantly preoccupied
with them, I shall never be able to attend to
the others. What is more, paying the proper
attention to important matters at the right
time is often the best way to forestall
emergencies.
It is curious, to say the least, that bishops,
whose first duty is to preach the gospel,
should suddenly have become so obsessed
with problems that Christianity has always
identified as the proper province of the civil
authorities. As a professor of Catholic
theology, I find it regrettable that I cannot
recommend their texts to my students with-
out inviting a minor disaster. In the vast ma-
jority of cases, these students come away
from them with the feeling that they can do
better by reading the works of experts on the
subject. Whatever gems of Christian wisdom
may be embedded in them are lost in a maze
of academic detail and references that only a
specialist or a born masochist would care to
look up. By contrast, the same students re-
spond with enthusiasm to books such as
Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American
Mind, which give them an inkling of what
the world would be like if we were all better
human beings or of what they could see in it
if they themselves were to become better
human beings. It surprises them that the
bishops, to whom they still look up, should
spend so much time talking about self-
preservation (as they do in the letter on
nuclear warfare) and about comfortable self-
preservation (as they do in the letter on the
economy), and so little time talking about the
love of the good and the beautiful. Few ob-
ject strenuously to any of the specific points
made in those letters, which they are quite
willing to accept as one opinion among
others, but they unconsciously resist what
they perceive as an attempt to reduce Chris-
tianity to a teaching on rights or a form of
deontological moralism.
I began by suggesting that the bishops'
teaching was predicated on a bifurcated an-
thropology, one part of which reflects a
teleological and the other a nonteleological
view of nature. It might be more accurate to
say that it suffers from the lack of any
definite anthropology. A pastoral letter is ad-
mittedly not the best place to engage in
remote philosophic disquisitions about the
nature of the human being, but one would
nonetheless expect its authors to exhibit a
greater awareness of the theoretical implica-
tions of the doctrines expounded in it. It is
no accident that the bishops have failed to
win the wholehearted support of at least two
groups of sympathetic critics within their own
fold: the Neo-Conservatives, who agree with
them about the end or ends pursued in their
letters, but disagree about the the means to
those ends, and a smaller or less noisy band
of scholars who perversely insist that there
can be no fruitful discussion of the means
unless the ends themselves are first clarified.
My point, and it is the only one I have
tried to make, is that the bishops may have
confused some of their readers by using
language that looks in two different directions
at once: that of rights or freedom on the one
hand, and of virtue, character formation,
and the common good on the other. They
would certainly be ill-advised to give up their
vigorous defense of rights, especially since the
pseudomorphic collapse of Neo-Thomism in
the wake of Vatican II has left them without
any alternative on which to fall back; but
they have yet to tell us, or tell us more
clearly, how the two ends are supposed to
meet. Reading their letters reminded me of a
little ditty my gang used to sing when I was
a kid:
I love Carolina,
I love Angelina too.
I can't marry both,
So what I gonna do?
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