Speaker 1:
Welcome to Ordain and Establish, a podcast of The Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition at Catholic University. To learn more, visit our website at cit.catholic.edu.
Sarah Gustafson:
All right. Hello. Welcome to the final panel of today. My name is Sarah Gustafson. I’m an assistant professor of politics, and I’m a faculty member involved in the Carroll Forum. Very happy to be chairing, moderating this last panel of today. Professor Walsh gave us a great layup in his comments towards the end of the last session, saying that you can do a lot with a bit of Thomistic anthropology and social ontology. We’re here to provide some of that… there’s the mic, because of course the title of our panel is Catholic Social Thought and the American Experiment.
I have with me a wonderful group of panelists, and I’ll briefly say a few words about their backgrounds before handing it off to them.
First, we have Professor Russell Hittinger, who has too many distinctions to name, but, among them, he has been a member of two different pontifical academies. For many years, he has taught at CUA. He was also the chair of Catholic Studies, Warren Chair of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa. He’s held positions and been affiliated with many wonderful, prestigious universities and groups, both in the Catholic world and beyond, specifically Catholic world. His most recent book, On the Dignity of Society, was published in 2024, which Professor Walsh also gave a shout out to.
We next have Professor Ken Grasso, who’s the professor and department chair of political science at Texas State University, and his research focuses on democratic theory, religion and politics, and Catholic social thought. And he’s written and edited a number of books and volumes on the future of the Catholic Church, rights theories, and Vatican II and religious freedom.
And lastly, we have Ryan Anderson, the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. For nine years, he was the William Simon Senior Research Fellow at Heritage, and he’s written and co-authored a number of books for both academic and popular audiences, including with Robbie George, on topics such as abortion, transgenderism, marriage, and religious freedom. He writes regularly and contributes to many outlets. In May 2025, he was appointed by President Trump to the Religious Liberty Commission.
And so we will go in the order… Professor Hittinger start off, and then move this way.
So, Professor Hittinger.
Russell Hittinger:
Okay. Thank you, Sarah, and hello to Ken and Ryan, real partners in intellectual crimes.
Sarah Gustafson:
Can everyone hear him? Is his mic…
Russ, try… tap the button at the bottom of your mic.
Russell Hittinger:
It’s on. No?
Ryan Anderson:
There it is.
Sarah Gustafson:
There we go.
Russell Hittinger:
Now, it’s on. Perfect. Thank you. Okay, 10 minutes.
I want to zero in on an issue that I believe connects both Leo XIII and Leo XIV to the United States. Leo the XIII is the first Pope who paid any serious attention to the United States. By the way, at the time of our founding, there were only 25 priests in the United States. We’re not talking about Louisiana Purchase territory then. By the 1860s, ‘70s, because of immigration, Catholics are from coast to coast, our primary force in certain parts of the Western expansion, both Episcopal and missionary.
Leo started paying attention to the US. We were a continental power. We were on every ocean on earth by the time he was elected in 1878. But here’s the thing, what he was fascinated by was our Republican form of government. Now, that was never mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, but it comes close. For instance, the reason for independence, because the king had taken away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our government, to say republicans talk about a form of government, for suspending our legislatures, and he has abdicated government here declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.
Soon after the Declaration, talk about republican form or forms becomes paramount in the United States, and it really never lets up for more than a century. Leo had a great description or admonition. It’s in Rerum Novarum. “Nothing is more useful than to look upon the world as it really is,” and he starts doing that, especially in the second 10 years of his pontificate, which is when he writes an encyclical on both France, a republic, and the United States. At this time, there were only three republican governments in all of Europe. That would be third republic, France. That would be the tiny place of San Marino. In fact, San Marino is the oldest European republican government. It was then, and it is now.
Of course, we have the case of Switzerland, which had become a republic. Two of them had caused enormous problems for Leo and his predecessors in Europe because republican forms of government historically, reads in Augustine on the matter and many other people, are notoriously jealous of their Republican form and are usually very resistant to any religion interfering. The Swiss were, especially this one. They kicked out the religious warders. Third Republic of France was already closing down schools. But the third republican France was a weird one because it was under the 1801 Concordat with Napoleon, so we have this anti-clerical, very much laicist Republican government who’s not that friendly to the Vatican, but friendly enough, didn’t cancel the Concordat. They don’t do that until Leo dies out of a kind of reverence for him. They canceled it two years later after his death. Okay.
We always have these problems. In 1925, Leo’s dead, but the Mexican republican government, if you go through the list of pre-World War II Republican governments, post 1789, and then bring them up, trouble for church-state relationships, and I think this goes way back even into the Middle Ages, but that’s another story. Leo writes in encyclical to the French, 1892, on supporting the republic, “Rally to the Republic,” was the cry for Leo. And then, in 1899, he writes an encyclical to the American hierarchy on similar topics. The letter to the Americans is much more friendly than the letter to the French. He became an admirer of American things. We look all around us. This is the university he built.
What was the problem with Republican forms of government besides the fact that there were only three in all of Europe? By the way, there were 20 in the Americas when he was pope because of all of the revolutions in Central and South America. They were kind of unreliable and had trouble keeping themselves steady. Well, the problem is, on the republican premise, that it is the people, that is the citizens, who govern through their elected representatives, just put Concordats in trouble right away. Republican forms of government are, as Augustine said, prideful, but as Israel said, well earned, if you can keep a republican form of government going for very long.
He was very curious about four… I’ll just give you a Thomistic reason, because the common good means two things, and they should not be conflated. They should be unified, but not conflated. On the one hand, a common good is a common end of a multitude, what a multitude is trying to achieve, like a crew team is trying to win the race, but common good in its intransitive sense is the form by which they do it together. It’s not just winning the race, it’s doing it as a team. He began to understand why, in some places, internationally, people were beginning to understand that a Republican form of government is noble if you can keep it.
Now, I would say it’s not long after Leo’s death in 1903, the trouble emerged. World War I caused a ton of trouble, and we began to have forms of government in Europe, which you all know about what began happening in the 1920s in Italy, in the ‘30s in Germany, and in many other, in fact, in predominantly Catholic places, great disturbances and debates in which governments were no longer real governments. They were parties that had seized government authority. So there was a big change in between Leo, and that big change was World War I and the wars in which any pope who follows by the late 1950s, for sure, is going to inherit a different picture and a different theme.
Post 1950, the form of government internationally rarely arises. Indeed, today, there are 150 polities that call themselves republics, including China and North Korea, but everything else too. So the notion of there being a form that’s important, that indeed the American Revolution would have been fought over to some extent, and the country built politically on the basis of understanding of republican form begins to fade. One reason is just the need to repair relations between nations post World War II. In the early 1950s, of course, the move of the Europeans to found a union, and the union would seem to be as important, but not quite a republic either. But we find this all over the globe today, that the interest is in not the formal cause, the formal common good, whether it’s republican or democratic or kingly or any of that kind of stuff, it’s over the end, and the end is today typically described in terms of human rights and things that are adjunct to human rights talk.
No one today questions North Korea’s ability to call itself a republic. It has a place, a flag, and a name, it’s a republic, so far as North Korea is concerned. We’re concerned about international human rights and the moral treatment of citizens much more than what the form of that community is. Form is almost entirely dropped in international talk today. A flag, a postage stamp, and a name does the trick for the most part. But whether a regime treats its neighbors and its own citizens in a morally correct way is what’s on everyone’s mind.
I was seized by this thought several years ago in the Vatican when Cardinal Bertone, Secretary of State, gave a talk in which he says, “I go all over the world to international bodies and to particular countries, and people tell me not to use the word government. Rather, we should use the term,” and Bertone said, “I’ve been in this job for 10 years. I have no idea what means as an improvement on the term government.” But, here, I propose that that’s exactly what has tended to prevail. Diluted government is, but it may be quite interested in and even dedicated to common good as the way whatever the government is treats its citizens.
I’ll just conclude with this thought. Can you really have an end of government in terms of its moral treatment of the community without its form? Imagine a crew team, they all want to win the race, but what if they have no form of doing it together? The dropping of that old Aristotelian term that’s been reworked through several resurrections of Thomism today is almost complete, from what I can tell. Who has the tougher era to explore Catholic social teaching? I think it’s going to be Leo. He’s inheriting a much different situation. The boundaries of moral talk about what a government is and what it does is pretty lopsided toward a Euro kind of conception, but we know that you can have a government that can do a lot of different things nationally and internationally and be completely jejune about the form in which it’s done. That’s a problem for a Catholic understanding of the common good, “Drop the form. What is the end?”
That’s 10 minutes already, surely.
Sarah Gustafson:
Yes.
Russell Hittinger:
Good. I will shut up.
Sarah Gustafson:
Okay. Thank you, Russ.
Mr. Grasso?
Ken Grasso:
Thanks. Hopefully, I won’t run over. As we all know, John Courtney Murray’s fame today rests on his account of the American proposition and on the compatibility of that proposition with Catholicism. That’s an interesting topic. I thought about talking about that, but I decided to talk about a different aspect of Murray’s thought. Because although Murray in some sense was a celebrant of the American experiment, admirer the founding fathers, somebody who celebrated America’s success, he also thought that America was in deep trouble. The moral tradition, the matrix of principles, and affirmations that provided the justification and substance of the American experiment and had been the source of its success, the very moral tradition which made American democracy compatible with Catholicism no longer lives in the minds and hearts of Americans. As a result, he worried that America was on the verge of becoming a mass democracy, slipping its and reason.
Murray approaches this crisis from three different dimensions. Hopefully, I’m going to try to touch on each of them. But if need be, I can limit it to two. The first one takes us back to the founding. In Murray’s intellectual history, the church, Catholic thought, played a critical role in creating a new tradition in political thought. He calls this tradition the Western liberal tradition, and the Western liberal tradition is committed to government that’s limited in its scope, subject to its operations, to the rule of law, and which acknowledges the sovereignty of God and its duty to conform its actions with the universal moral law, which includes protecting the rights of the person. It’s this tradition that he thinks that finds classic expression in the Declaration of Independence. On one hand, the metaphysical and moral realism, we hold these truths. On the other hand, the dignity of the human person, the sacredness of the human person. The human person is a bearer of rights.
The American experiment was largely in continuity with that older tradition. Now comes the but. Unfortunately, Murray believed the founders made contact with this tradition after it had been touched by the rationalism, voluntarism, secularism, and individualism of the 18th century. And as a result, the founders encountered this tradition at a time when it had been weakened from within and begun its decline. While the American founding was substantially true to that tradition, in some respects, it held a distorted understanding of that tradition’s principles, and, within it, he felt there were seeds. The exact quote is, “The seeds of dissolution were already present in the ancient heritage in the form it reached the shores of America.” And Murray’s argument is that, over time, these seeds grew and came to dominate America’s public culture.
Let’s say at the heart of the enlightenment heritage are our rationalism and our nominalism that drives us away from a metaphysical realism and toward a suffocating naturalism, shallow emotivism and corrosive individualism. Murray believed that an experiment in self-government and ordered liberty could not survive in that kind of environment. Unless we’re able to justify in terms of ultimates and our thinking, the affirmations that constitute the moral substance of the liberal tradition, “We are writing on sand,” he says, “in a time of hurricanes and floods.” Problem number one, philosophical in nature.
Problem number two, more I guess you’d say political or sociopolitical, and it concerns the so-called American solution to the problem of religious pluralism. A political society, at least one not on the imminent danger of dissolution, is more than a purely external order of command and ascend. At its heart is found a consensus, a body of shared beliefs regarding the political and moral principles on which the polity rests and which specify the content of the common good and the ends of public policy. This agreement about those principles, in turn, unfolded against the background of some type of broader agreement regarding the nature of man, the character of the human good, and the structure of social relations that should inform human life.
Thus said Murray, “There was a limit to how much and what kinds of pluralism a pluralist society can stand while remaining a functioning body politic.” Where religious pluralism comes in, obviously, if you have different religious groups holding different convictions about the nature of man, about the precepts of morality, it’s going to be hard to form that underlying consensus that the body politic needs, the conventional wisdom. If you wanted political unity, you had to have religious unity.
America rejected that. America said that there’s a way of reconciling the demands of civic unity with those of religious integrity, and it was a two-part solution, basically as follows, America’s unity was to be a unity of a limited order extending only to civil and contrast to religious matters. America was not a church. It was simply a civic community dedicated to the pursuit of a limited order of goods, secular goods, but nonetheless, moral goods. Because of that, the limited nature of the goods were seeking, we didn’t need a full-fledged theological consensus. The demands of consensus were more limited.
The other part of the solution, the religious provisions of the First Amendment, which limit the power of government in the area of religion. “They embody not articles of faith,” said Murray, “but articles of peace,” a commitment to limiting the scope of the state. Now, Murray says, “This experience did indeed prove some important things. It proved that political unity and stability are possible without uniformity of religious belief and practice,” but note that he says possible, not inevitable, not guaranteed, not easily achieved, and that he stresses the demonstration is limited, if only, because experience is yet to show how, if at all, the moral consensus on which society depends can survive amid all the ruptures of religious division.
Moreover, Murray said, “There are certain preconditions that were found in America that enabled the American solution to work.” To begin with, the religious traditions in America all are in the Judeo-Christian tradition, they shared a common religious foundation, and what that meant is there was a substantial amount of moral agreement there. We had a multitude of religious branches that sprang from a common stem, held the Bible in common and taught largely the same moral code. It was an open question whether the consensus could be achieved with a different group of religions. Secondly, America’s articles of peace seemed to presuppose a distinction between church and state rooted in the Christian distinction between the spiritual and the temporal. Those distinctions are not universal features of human culture, but the American solution depends for its intelligibility on those distinctions. Would it be workable in a situation in which a significant portion of the religious traditions in play rejected these distinctions? Again, might historic success of the American solution have something to do with the specific and limited character of our pluralism.
Having said all that, Murray was acutely aware that American pluralism was changing in his lifetime and changing dramatically. We no longer agreed on what a human being is, no longer agreed on the nature of the human good, no longer agreed on the structure of social relations that should inform human life. We face a new and more radical pluralism, and it’s an open question whether civic unity and religious integrity can be achieved under these conditions.
How much time?
Sarah Gustafson:
Two minutes.
Ken Grasso:
I can squeeze in number three.
The third concern, third dimension of Murray’s critique is theological in nature. Before I get into that, I’ll be talking about the modern political experiment. That’s the setting in which Murray does his theological critique. Is America an example of the modern political experiment? Yes and no. The America of the founding maybe was touched by the modern political experiment around the edges, but was basically okay. But as America evolved more and more, we retheorized our public life along the dimensions of the modern political experiment. At the heart of the American experiment… or rather the modern political experiment is secularity, values like human dignity, human rights, et cetera, et cetera. The modern experiment said are now known to be imminent in man. Man has become conscious of them in the course of their emergence and historical experience. Whatever may have been the influence of Christian revelation on the earlier phases of this experience, those values are now simply a human possession and achievement of humanity by man himself. “Now, that I’ve arrived,” modernity said, “Christianity may simply disappear.”
The question is, can the modern political experiment succeed? Can it be… Obviously, the face of it is not compatible with Catholicism. At the heart, this modern experiment is some kind of political sexualism, just briefly, I have a long paragraph discussing it, a drive towards new houses, naked public square. Okay? Public life must be cabined off from religious beliefs and religious doctrines and religious influences. Murray adds that the events of the 20th century demonstrate that this experiment had failed. Enlightenment rationalism, rather than finding a support for human dignity, ended up in metaphysical and moral nihilism. The popular culture has collapsed into the morass of moral emotivism.
We’ve seen a market decline, and you might say public virtue. We’ve seen increasingly demoralized political environment. Murray’s response is that this modern experiment not only can be seen to have failed, but it is a mirage projected by a prideful human reason. An experiment… A body politic dedicated to human dignity cannot be sustained on a purely secular basis absent Christian revelation. Matter of fact, modern culture’s rejection of the Christian mode of existence had created a spiritual vacuum. “This vacuum will inevitably,” he argued, “be filled by an explicitly non-Christian mode of existence.” This mode of existence will manifest itself in violence, the violence that is the mark of, quote, the “architect of chaos, the evil one, whose presence in the world is part of the structure of this world, of violence that threatens to destroy freedom, order, and justice.” Where does this… Well, the American experiment will not long survive the revelation that was its ultimate inspiration. Where does this leave us? Murray says, “Well, it leaves the body politic in a grave crisis.”
I’ll conclude with this. We may safely say about our America what Murray with characteristic understatement said about his. The situation is not such as to glad in the heart.
Ryan Anderson:
Great. Well, thank you. It’s a real honor to get to speak on this panel with Russ and Ken. I’ve learned so much from both of these scholars. It’s a little intimidating because I think Russ and Ken have probably forgotten more about Catholic social thought and about the American experiment than I will ever know. I don’t know, it was 21 years ago this past summer that I first met Russ over pints of beer in Krakow, where we were debating the finer points of natural law theory. And then a decade ago, it was over craft cocktails and Eastern Market where he helped me finish my dissertation, which has a chapter that draws heavily from his social ontology.
What I want to do in the, I guess, nine minutes that I have remaining, having now cleared my throat, is talk a little bit about Catholic social thought, the American experiment, as applied to public policy, and I want to focus on three basic areas, a triad following the life, liberty, pursuit of happiness triad in the Declaration, focusing on life, the abortion issue, liberty focusing on religious liberty, and then the pursuit of happiness rather than focusing on the Lockean triad of property. We could talk a lot about capitalism here in America. I want to talk about marriage in the family, which I think, and from a Catholic social thought perspective, is the basic sell of civilization and is the source of some of deepest happiness and contentment for most people, Father Dominic excluded. He is a different source of deep transcendent fulfillment.
All right. For life, I think there is a certain… I don’t want to re-litigate the Philip Muñoz -DC Schindler debate from this morning. And if you weren’t here this morning, it’s worth watching once they put the videos online. I don’t want to relitigate that, but I think there is a certain compatibility between what the Declaration is talking about and what Catholic social thought is talking about. They’re not the same thing, but there is a fundamental compatibility. When the Declaration says, “We’re created equal,” so it’s not the secularism that Ken was just describing. We’re endowed by a creator with certain inalienable rights, and the first right that the Declaration talks about is the right to life.
Catholic social thought, you get the compendium on Catholic social doctrine, there are four fundamental basic principles of Catholic social thought, human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, solidarity. Human dignity is right there. It’s not the secularist human dignity that Ken was just criticizing. When you look through how the compendium phrases this, it talks about the, so there’s a transcendent source of our dignity, but it also talks about a transcendent orientation that we’re all created for friendship with God. So it’s both the origin and the end of the human person that explains the nature of human dignity.
The compendium, it quotes John XXIII saying, “The whole of the Church’s social doctrine, in fact, develops from the principle that affirms the inviolable dignity of the human person,” and then the compendium goes on to talk about human rights. So there is a Catholic account for this that is distinct from the secularist or the enlightenment account. This should easily, whether working from within the Catholic social thought perspective or the Declaration perspective, speak directly to the abortion issue, and it comes to a conclusion that we have not yet come to in the American political experience. Fifty some years ago, first with Roe where they created a right to abortion out of privacy, and then 20 years after that in Casey where they reconfigured this right as a liberty interest and we get the obscene controlling opinion from most likely Justice Kennedy saying, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define your own concepts of existence and meaning and the sweet mystery of human life,” et cetera, et cetera.
All right, so we’re now three years post-Dobbs. Pro-lifers, we’ve lost 14 out of 17 state ballot initiatives. One of those that we won was only because the bad guys had to get to 60%, and they only got to 53%. Even in Florida, which reelected Trump, we lost the majority vote on the pro-life side of that ballot initiative. Public opinion has gone really, really badly for the pro-life side in the past decade. After having been stable for relatively 30 or 40 years in the past decade, we’ve seen wide divergences. For the sake of time, I won’t read you all of the depressing statistics that I have on my iPad. But over drinks, I’ll be happy to share some of those. All right, so now there’s a question of why. I think it’s too quick to say that American political culture has nothing to do with this, and it’s too quick to say that there’s a straight line from Thomas Jefferson to drag show story hour and a straight line from Thomas Jefferson to abortion on demand. I think both of those are too quick.
The original public meaning, if we want to use kind of jurisprudence language of the Declaration, when it says, “All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights,” and the first one of those rights is the right to life, they weren’t doing Lockean personhood theory. The ordinary public, when they heard that clause wasn’t thinking that this only applies to Lockean persons. But lurking behind the surface, there is a Lockean theory here, and this came out during the exchange between Philip and David Schindler, where there is a certain conception of self-ownership in Locke, which relies on the self being a self, which is distinguished from the body. Locke is one of the first modern thinkers. You can trace this back to Descartes into certain form of dualism in Plato, but Locke wants to say that it’s the thinking self-conscious self-awareness thing, the self that’s the person, which is distinguished from the body, which is more or less the argument that people like Peter Singer make, David Boone and a variety of modern bioethicists.
It’s not clear to me at all that that’s what’s motivating people who are voting on the pro-choice side of these ballot initiatives though. I think it’s too quick. As thinkers, we want to say ideas have consequences, as if ideas are the only things that have consequences. And so I think it’s worth actually thinking through what might be some of those other things that have changed the terrain of public opinion against both the Declaration and Catholic social thought when it comes to life. I don’t normally quote Bill Maher, period, let alone when talking about Catholic social thought, but it was two and a half years ago now when he kind of let the cat out of the bag. He said on his late night talk show, he says, “They think it’s murder,” referring to people like me, “And it kind of is. I’m just okay with that,” and I think we have to wrestle with why.
It strikes me that there are four exceptions that people want to have for abortion laws, the standard three, rape, incest, life of the mother, but then the fourth exception is my situation or my girlfriend’s situation or my daughter’s situation or my wife’s situation. I don’t know if that’s being driven by Lockean personhood theory. We could say more about that during the discussion.
All right, second is the account of liberty and religious liberty in particular. There are tensions, but there’s also a surprising overlap and harmonization between the account that Madison gives us in Memorial and Remonstrance in which he says, “The reason that we have rights to religious liberty is because we have duties to the Creator.” He says, “There’s a vertical relationship of each of us as a creature. We have to figure out what we owe the Creator, and that the only way of doing that that’s pleasing to God is if we do it not by force or violence, but by reason and conviction.” And then he has a therefore, “Therefore what this duty to the Creator is a right amongst men.” And then he closes that paragraph by saying, “This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation to the claims of civil society,” something the church is going to echo. Then he says, “Before any man can be considered a member of civil society, he must be considered as a subject of the governor of the universe.” So nice rejection of any of the secularism that Ken was talking about.
Dignitatis Humanae has a very similar defense of religious liberty for the church. It’s about our nature as truth seekers, particularly seeking the truth about the things that matter most, transcendent nature of God. It’s to be exorcized communally, not individually. And there has to be a certain sphere of liberty, of freedom, for us to engage in that pursuit, to then adhere to the truth that we find and to then live it out. So there is a certain overlap.
All right, so how are we doing today as a society? I’ve been on the president’s Religious Liberty Commission for the past year and just hearing horror story after horror story during our hearings for the past 12 months. The little sisters of the poor have been in court for the better part of almost two decades now because of their free exercise of religion. There were attempts to shut down Catholic adoption agencies and nursing homes just…
Was it yesterday or the day before that the Hawthorne sisters, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have to sue the state of New York because they are forcing them to engage in transgender nursing homes for the elderly who are dying. Little Sisters of the Poor who take care of the elderly as they’re dying. They had a contraception mandate imposed on them. Now, it’s the Dominican sisters who take care of the elderly poor as they’re dying who are having a transgender mandate. You’re going to have to call people by their preferred pronouns and house people by their preferred gender identity. So imagine your grandparents being assigned a room with a man who thinks he’s a woman, et cetera, et cetera. It’s a crazy law in New York State, and yet they’re forcing this on the nuns. We’ve had the baker, the flowers, the photographer, et cetera, et cetera.
All right. We should ask questions of why. Again, I think it’s too quick to say the founding has nothing to do with this, but it’s also too quick to say that Jefferson’s to blame for everything. It was already mentioned that Jefferson wants to get rid of monkish ignorance and superstition, both of those things. I embrace both. It must be raining. I’m just too sinful to see it. That’s the illusion in the Brideshead. All right, so there’s something there. There’s something in the letter concerning toleration in which Catholics can’t be tolerated because of our allegiance to a foreign prince. But I think it’s more in this culture, and can hit on this, is that anyone who believes there is objective morality that isn’t conventional… And if it touches on sexual issues and you have bright lines that you can’t cross, “You can’t bake the cake. You can’t design the flowers. You can’t trans the kids,” that’s where you’re getting these most heated religious liberty issues.
Am I out of time?
Sarah Gustafson:
No, no.
Ryan Anderson:
Okay, sorry. And then the last thing I wanted to say was about marriage and the family. The Declaration, look, it’s obviously about the self-ownership and then, “What are the things that I need? I need liberty. And then I need the ability to acquire property.” Jefferson uses happiness as a nicer phrase for that, but I don’t think the American people thought about this in a narrowly economic sense. I think by happiness, they meant flourishing. When you read through some of the scholars of the founding and what they thought about marriage and the family, there’s virtually no daylight between the founder’s vision for marriage and the family and contemporary Catholic social thought vision for marriage and the family. It’s a man and a woman, husband and wife, mother and father, a nuclear family, extended family. Yes, there are going to be disagreements about contraception, but that’s much later. It’s only 1920s in the Lambeth Council that we have the first Protestant communion that authorizes contraception. There’s a huge agreement on the nature of the human person, nature of human family.
You look at today’s problems, obviously most recently we could talk about Windsor and Obergefell. I have various hate mail, battle scars, security limitations from those debates. But I think those are consequences of Griswold and Roe. Much of this is going to be traced back to prior constitutionalizing a certain technological revolution. I think it’s only in light of the contraceptive pill that we get the sexual revolution. The introduction of no-fault divorce, there’s a Lockean foundation to that. Locke’s understanding of marriage and the family is that the spouses are to stay together at least until the kids are out of the home. But then after that, it’s just a contract. It’s not a covenant. It’s a special contract for Locke, but it’s not a covenantial relationship, certainly not a sacramental relationship. Our bigger problems today is that people aren’t getting married, and they aren’t having replacement level kids. We’re not even doing the marriage and family thing, and I think it’s worth asking why. And again, it’s not clear to me that there’s a straight line from the founding either in support or against these things.
All of which is to say I think the founding is an amalgam of sources. It’s both Protestant political theology and its enlightenment philosophy. It’s natural law tradition, but mediated through Protestant natural law thinkers, modern natural law thinkers, not so much Thomistic or Aristotelian natural law thinkers, it’s the common law tradition, et cetera, et cetera, and that’s going to be a mixed bag of influences that went into the founding. And as different strands have been emphasized over the past 250 years, we’ve seen both strengths and weaknesses, Ken draws this out from John Courtney Murray. Today, we’re in a tough spot.
I’ll stop with that because then we’ll have discussion about how do we get out of this.
Sarah Gustafson:
Okay, great. Thank you. I want to just open this time of discussion by allowing each of you to have the opportunity to respond to anything else another panelist said. Either in support or in virulent disagreement, all are acceptable.
Ken Grasso:
I can’t think of anything substantial I disagree with. Let me just emphasize a point that Ryan made in terms of studying the American founding. There are many different influences in play there, and we have a tendency to simplify our understanding. “It’s only this. It’s only that. It’s this one thing,” and that makes it kind of nice and simple to deal with and explain, but it really is not the historical reality of different currents and different streams at work there. Over time, the balance of forces differs, and certain streams that had once been influential fade in the background, and other currents of thought become roaring rivers that’s threatening to drown everything else. I think that’s important to keep in mind in handling and avoiding overly-simplified accounts. That’s why Murray… By the way, it’s so hard to grasp on it because there are sound parts and there are parts that, “Well, maybe they’re sound, maybe they’re not. What does that mean? It’s not simply all good or all bad. Predominantly good, but there are problems.”
Murray once said something that never gets quoted. He was once on a panel. He was asked, “Was the solution to go back to the founders?” and he said, “No, the philosophy of the founders was good, but it’s not good enough.” We now, in current circumstances, demand something richer, deeper, better. Murray said that not to diminish the founders, he greatly admired them, but simply understanding the limitations of America and the founders and whatnot.
Sarah Gustafson:
Russ, anything?
Russell Hittinger:
No, continue.
Ken Grasso:
Well, that was my two cents.
Sarah Gustafson:
Okay.
Ryan Anderson:
I agree with everything that was said, so I don’t have… Yeah.
Sarah Gustafson:
All right. I’m happy to jump in with the question then. It seemed to me that one of the many through lines, three or three comments, was the relationship between political or social form and virtue, institutions and virtue, I don’t know, and how that maps on… To return to Russ’s point, many things call themselves republic that are not republics, right? Pope Leo was in Monaco last week praising the virtues of monarchy, right? It’s pretty rare these days that we see that because everything is a liberal democracy or claims to be a liberal democracy. What does Catholic social thought have uniquely to offer to Americans in thinking about the relationship between the institutions that form them and the virtues that they then carry into participating in these institutions?
Russell Hittinger:
Well, your mentor at Harvard put tons on this.
Sarah Gustafson:
Put the mic on.
Russell Hittinger:
Whether you start with institutions or you start with the conduct of individuals, you’re probably going to get to about the same point. I like the study by Case and Deaton on the pathologies of a certain group of citizens, demographically, who die young, who are constantly in trouble. At the end of that study, they mentioned three things. Failure at marriage, they may have been married once or even twice, but they can’t pull it off, which means also with their children and 35-year-old guys at home playing video poker. They can’t keep that institution together. It doesn’t seem to work for them. Secondly, polity, and they had a very strong research position on this, is that, listen, they hate the mayor, they hate the governor, they hate the president. There’s, in the order of polity, contempt. And third, religion. By the way, they had a very flexible understanding of religion, just going to a CYO fish fry could count for them, but just plummeting connections.
Each of the three of these are kind of basic communities, I would say. The religious, the political, and the matrimonial and familial. But I’m wondering what the study would look like if you just didn’t get people who are dying at 35 from drugs and video poker, how much that pattern is going to be found in people who aren’t so disabled, and I’ll bet you that there’s some similarities.
Ken Grasso:
Yeah. I don’t know why. As you asked your question, I started thinking about not so much Catholic social thought, but Alexis de Tocqueville and the American Republic. Why has the American Republic succeeded? First, they identified serious factors. First, accidental factors, the oceans separating us from Europe in the European war. By the way, I think this is an important one, the lack of a great capital city. He admired the tiny Washington, DC of his day, contrasted it favorably with the Paris of his day in terms of its political consequences as opposed to its cultural achievements, of course. Over and above accidental factors, there are institutional factors, things like federalism, untraditional, local, self-ruled, judicial review. But the most important of the factors was, of course, character, the character of the people, their beliefs, their values. At the if you have the right kind of people, they can establish a republican government even under really unpromising conditions. If you have the wrong kind of people, even under optimal conditions, they cannot establish it.
I think the centrality of virtue, the centrality of a correct understanding of man and whatnot looms very large in the contemporary crisis. But then you circle back, this is going to circle around like a snake, I’m going to devour my tail here, it circles back to, how do you get the right kind of people? Well, you go back to the institution. Dysfunctional families, dysfunctional schools are not going to give you people with well-ordered souls. At the end of the day, I think the fate of the republic depends on a religious revival. The crisis is ultimately spiritual, and, without that, nothing else is going to avail.
Ryan Anderson:
Mine’s not turning green. There we go.
When you asked your question, what came to mind to me is how Catholic social thought can contribute to institutions that should be shaping and forming us is simply by saying that we need that formation. It strikes me that there’s a Belgian Dominican, Servais Pinckaers, who in his two books, his big book, The Sources of Christian Ethics, and his small book, Morality: A Catholic View, contrasts two visions of freedom, freedom of indifference, what he calls, which is more or less where the will is primary. What matters here is that the will is choosing. It doesn’t matter what it chooses, so long as it’s choosing. He traces this back to William of Ockham, rise of nominalism, voluntarism. So if we have a villain, need not to walk, it could be Ockham. But then you contrast that with the Catholic vision, which is freedom for excellence, in which both reason and will work together, neither one is before the other, and that they’re intrinsically ordered towards truth and goodness, and so there’s a directionality to freedom.
Therefore, this would make sense, for example, of why St. Paul will refer to sin as slavery. When we sin, it’s not that we’re freely choosing. There’s a certain sense in which, yes, we freely sin, but also there’s a sense in which sins are a form of slavery to passions, to misplaced desires, things like this. So it strikes me that the Catholic anthropology doesn’t just provides us with correct conclusions about life or about marriage or gender ideology, something like that, but it also just highlights the nature of the human creature as a creature that needs moral and social and spiritual formation, which would also say that, in a healthier legal and political culture, we would’ve had laws that would reinforce this.
When Ravi was introduced during the lunchtime fireside chat, which didn’t have a fire, I might point out to Joel… I hope tonight’s fireside chat has a fire, otherwise it’s just a chat. His first book was titled Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality, and it’s that tension of having both, both protecting civil liberties and promoting public morality, which is what I think the Catholic tradition in her developed form has embraced. It’s what the American tradition had embraced until I would say the past 50 years of bad jurisprudence and of, I think, bad secularism, a certain liberal ideology that sought to get rid of anything that stood in the way of the sovereign choosing itself, right? The rise of expressive individualism here combined to the legal theory that says, “Anything that got in the way…” You can have Griswold, you can have Lawrence v. Texas, a variety of Supreme Court decisions, striking down moral legislation. But just in turn, you even have conservative libertarians who said the government has no role in promoting morality. The law should be neutral all the way down, which is a metaphysical impossibility.
So I think one of the contributions of Catholic social thought here would simply be the recognition that we need this moral formation, and it should happen at all levels of society. It should happen at the ecclesial level, the political level, the familial, the educational. The idea that we can have morally neutral education is just asinine. Every form of education is forming someone. It need not be that we need the state to do a better job morally forming our children. The solution here may be to do what Arizona has done and have universal school choice, which will empower the church to open up more schools and actually do the job of being with parents, the primary educator of citizens of children, et cetera, et cetera.
So anyway, it strikes me as that’s a unique value add that, besides Yuval Levin, I don’t see anyone else making the argument that we need this formation, that institutions are important for this formation. Yuval is not technically Catholic, but he has a Catholic soul and a Catholic intellect.
Sarah Gustafson:
Everyone loves Yuval Levin. That’s very easy to say.
Many of you will know Russ’s piece on the three necessary societies, right, and it seems that… and this is something in the invocations of religious liberty today, mentioning of the family, right? Since someone else has mentioned Tocqueville, I feel empowered now to mention Tocqueville as a good Tocquevillean, study with Mansfield and Putnam. Tocqueville pays most attention to the voluntary associations of America. Not that he doesn’t discuss what you might call the natural or the necessary, including the family, he does talk about the family, but what he finds really distinctive about America are the voluntary associations, right? I submit to the panel for consideration, are we in danger of our necessary societies seeming voluntary? And if so, how does CST help us to correct that? What else can be done to correct that on the level of policy?
Because that seemed to me to be one thing that you were suggesting though, saying it slightly differently, Ryan, that we view family as voluntary rather than necessary, marriage as voluntary rather than necessary, church as voluntary rather than necessary. And that seems to be one place where the liberal tradition comes into conflict with the Catholic tradition, that, from the liberal point of view, family is necessary, but only just so and beyond which you are free as an empowered individual and that religious liberty entails choosing your denomination or your church, that there’s not a particular form to that religion that is natural or necessary.
I invite your comments and reflections on that.
Russell Hittinger:
Tocqueville, of the many things that he found interesting in the American voluntary societies were religious people who went west of the Appalachians in south, simply started organizing their lives, building barns together, improving the wilderness. For them, it wasn’t hifalutin to have to cooperate socially. You had to do it, maybe not Kit Carson, but you had to do it. It was an imperative of any kind of human flourishing was to cooperate to get things done, whether it’s building a barn or founding a school or whatever. And that’s not so true today. Most people probably cooperate with their financial advisors more than they do with the people they live with. There will always be social cooperation one way or another. Even criminals have to do it to some extent. But it’s not rich today. Well, we can see every sociological study points it out.
Ryan Anderson:
Yeah, mine doesn’t work. Joel’s trying to send me a message.
Let me say two things by way of answer. It strikes me that while I think you’re right about liberalism being somewhat intentioned with the three necessary societies, I don’t think that means America is… because I don’t want to conflate liberalism with America. Within our Supreme Court jurisprudence, there’s developed a doctrine known as the ministerial exception, which more or less recognizes who is a minister of any given church, not just the one true church, but churches, plural, is a decision for that house of worship, that ecclesial community to make for itself, that the secular law has no authority to determine what the job qualifications are for transforming bread and wine into body and blood. No federal employment laws, Title VII, nothing like that’s going to apply to the ministerial priesthood. And they’ve extended this beyond just the sacramental priesthood, who’s capable of being a Catholic school teacher and teaching the faith to children. We’ve had important legal victories using the ministerial exception.
I do think there’s a certain sense in which there is a recognition in American political thought that there are certain things that are not Caesar’s. There’s a primacy of the spiritual in that sense, and that that places a limit on what the secular jurisdiction can do. This was part of the argument that several of us made when it came to the marriage debates, that marriage isn’t a creation of the state. The state recognizes marriage, but marriage is a natural society. If you’re not familiar with Russ’s article and the three necessary societies, there’s political, ecclesial, and familial institutions that are kind of built into human nature or, in case of the church, divine nature, but they’re not creations of either contract or social convention, social contract theory, even if that may be where you locate who has the authority. Man’s, by nature, a political animal. Man’s, by nature, a conjugal animal. Man’s, by nature, an ecclesial animal. We were unsuccessful at the court, but also in the court of public opinion. And I think people have been habituated into viewing everything as conventional and contractual all the way down.
Ken Grasso:
All right, here we go. Let me comment on what Ryan just said, which I will actually agree with. Let me start with the notion… Let’s speak of enlightenment liberalism, and so distinguish it from liberalism as such or the liberalism of the founders. Let’s say that enlightenment and liberalism was an element in America’s DNA, but it was not the entirety of it. Again, there are multiple traditions in play, but let’s look at enlightenment liberalism just for a minute. It started out as an individualistic ideology beginning with the autonomous individual building institutions via consent and whatnot. But over time, it’s become a progressively more individualistic vision. Back in the day, it was restrained by some notion of an objective moral order. Locke state of nature is not a moral vacuum. We still have responsibilities there. But over time, the individualism just devours everything till you’re left with basically, I forget the phrase Ryan used, human beings as sovereign choosers, sovereign wills, free to make of themselves and make of the world what they choose. They move progressively in this direction.
Michael Walzer speaks of this enlightened liberalism as a self-subverting tradition. Because every time it puts up limits to individualism, it then gradually dissolves them. It’s a very powerful force and it’s a very powerful solvent, eats through everything. So if you’re looking to dissolve a society, that would be a great ideology to base it on. That’d be a great vision to base it on. I think what has happened in America is both enlightenment liberalism is radicalized, but also it’s become more and more predominant. It’s become the predominant driving force. Not the only one, there’s still older elements in play, but the older elements seem to be slowly dissolving and falling by the wayside. And it seems to be basically taking, eating everything.
Ryan Anderson:
Can I add one?
Sarah Gustafson:
Yeah.
Ryan Anderson:
I agree with everything that Ken just said, and I just wanted to add one thought that came to mind while he was speaking. It strikes me that the radical individualism goes hand in glove with big government collectivism as well. It’s been over a decade since I last read Tocqueville, but I’m pretty sure this is also a democracy in America point that Tocqueville makes, and you can see this most clearly with… The radical individualism, “It’s not enough that I can now be a woman, but I need the government to tell the nursing home run by Catholic sisters that they have to treat me as a woman. It’s not enough that I can have whatever sort of sex I want to have, but I need the government to tell my employer, including the Little Sisters of the Poor, that they have to provide me with cost-free contraception.”
You can see how the individualism and the ideology is then, in this case, a sexual ideology, coupled with the autonomous individualism then gives rise to the need for the state to compel other people to both facilitate it and to celebrate it. It’s not enough that the three of us could get married as a throuple. We need the evangelical baker to bake us the cake because he has to bend the knee and celebrate us. I think in a weird way, individualism gives rise to some of the coercive forms of collectivism or just liberty violations, and then it dissolves in a spiral. And then more and more of the civil society institutions actually get caught in the crossfire.
Sarah Gustafson:
Okay. All right, great. I have one further question, and then I think we’ll open it up to audience questions. Pope Leo has been pope for about a year now, first American pope, as we’ve all talked about today. There’s speculation about his first encyclical that may be coming out soon, perhaps on technology, AI, something like this. What do you think we as Americans should hear from Pope Leo? What can Pope Leo, as an American exercising his pastoral authority, say that you think would vastly improve our American civic culture, spiritual culture, that he could uniquely contribute as the first American pope?
Ryan Anderson:
I’m happy to say something to kick us off.
It strikes me that because intellectuals we like to focus on the consequences of ideas so much, we haven’t spent as much time thinking about the consequences of technology. And if Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum was writing about the industrial revolution… The speculation, when he took the name of Leo XIV, he said it was partly because we’re living in a technological revolution, and the speculation is now that this first encyclical will be on technology, might be specifically on AI, and I would welcome that. I think many of us are too blase about our relationship with modern technology. We all have these devices in our pockets, and many of us give these devices to our kids and just uncritically thinking about this. It would be helpful to have a catechesis of technology, an examination of conscience for technology, the rules about slander and detraction, you’re not exempted from those when it comes to social media, for example, and just in general how we think about neither being Luddites nor the techno-optimists, Silicon Valley tech bro, but the virtuous mean between the Luddites and the uncritical embracing of technology.
Having some Thomistic principles that could be articulated based upon a sound anthropology, a sound metaphysics, thinking through how can we harness technology for the good, how can we avoid allowing technology to habituate us… I think many of us have been shaped by our technological devices more so than either our neighbors or our investment consultant, et cetera, et cetera. I hope he says something about technology. I hope it’s not just kind of like platitudes. I hope we get a serious theological, philosophical discussion of this. Just in general, I would say that’s an area that it strikes me that the church could do more on. It’s something that I think the Catholic intellectual tradition here at CUA and other entities could be thinking more about how to think about the technological revolution that we’re living through, the impact on kids, the impact on employment. If everyone has an autonomous long-haul truck within a year, what happens to all of those people who lose those jobs. Long-haul truck driving is actually a surprisingly good middle-class job for working class men. That’s just one example, but something like that I think would be quite welcome.
Russell Hittinger:
Well, that would be a very interesting first encyclical. I’d go for that, but-
Ryan Anderson:
I hope you go straight it.
Russell Hittinger:
Here’s the way I’ve understood for some time, there cannot be excellence in human action without exigency. We’re needy. So those three necessary societies, the meaning of necessary for Pius XI is men and women need to do it together, children need their parents, a team needs an order to even play the game. It’s neediness all the way down to learn how to speak, to learn how to think, neediness, but people shy away from this to actually admit that’s the truth. I might have to be an apprentice to a professor for 15 years before I can even pretend to give one of his lectures or something like that. Neediness is good, and it’s at the very center of sociality. Aristotle begins that way right in the ethics, neediness. But if you get it right, it’s the ground for excellence.
Excellence arises from neediness, and that’s where human ingenuity in society is absolutely crucial. Yet you need someone as a partner in all kinds of things, and sometimes for quite a few years. Now that I’m reading reports about college students, even 30-year-old graduate students, man, they’re needier than a 7 year old. It has to be addressed. It has to be addressed, and it’s something that you can’t make yourself excellent from your neediness without society, in fact, more than one of them. This is just not admitted. We need. It’s physical, it’s psychological, and, especially today, a long apprenticeship. In the old days, Abraham Lincoln could begin practicing law with virtually no law training. Can’t do that today.
Sarah Gustafson:
Ken, do you have any thoughts?
Ken Grasso:
Yeah. I wasn’t sure if Russ was done or not. I didn’t want to interrupt. Just very, very brief thought. Something on AI, on social media, on that whole world, I think would in a lot of ways be very helpful. It’s not something… The magisterium has obviously dealt with a lot in the past. It’s sort of new terrain as the Industrial Revolution was. And we’re maybe a little bit late out of the gate on this, so I think that would be very worthwhile and very helpful. But I do worry, on the other hand, who’s going to listen.
Sarah Gustafson:
Okay. All right. Questions from the audience.
Speaker 6:
Thank you all-
Sarah Gustafson:
Oh, just wait for the mic. Just a sec.
Speaker 6:
No one wants to hear me without a mic. Thank you all so much for your time.
Professor Anderson, curious if you could talk about the future of the pro-life movement. It seems to me like one of the reasons why the pro-life movement and the conservative legal movement were so successful in overturning Roe against Wade is that the movement had a single goal, and it was the overturning of that horrible case. Now, three years on from Dobbs, the number of abortions hasn’t decreased. If anything, it’s actually increased by a pretty significant amount. And it seems more than anything that there’s disagreement among conservatives over what our form of government enables us to do about that fact. How do we make the case, not just to society at large, but to our fellow conservatives, that the right to life and the Declaration is not just a core founding principle, but is in fact legally actionable as applied to the unborn?
Ryan Anderson:
There is someone in the White House Office of Legal Counsel who has made that case in a very prominent law review article. I’m referring to Josh Craddock, who’s… Is he the deputy? I forget his exact title. Look, there are people inside of this administration who understand that and the Craddock article, and it’s then been developed in interesting ways by John Finnis and Robbie George, has argued that the original public meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, the word person, would apply to every human being, and that would include the unborn child in the womb. From a proper understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment, this would empower Congress to pass legislation under section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the unborn. I don’t see Congress doing that. And even if they attempted to, I don’t see the 60-vote threshold in the Senate being achieved.
More immediately, the Trump administration could simply reinstate the safety provisions for the abortion pill that were in existence throughout the entirety of the first Trump administration, that Biden got rid of using COVID as an excuse, but they have been afraid of their shadow on pro-life issues. They think trans is a winning issue, and they think abortion is a losing issue. They blame some of the previous midterm electoral losses for Republicans on Dobbs, and they’re afraid that, if they do anything bold on life right now, it will hurt them in the upcoming midterms. And then, of course, it’ll be the general election. They always will be my fear as a political excuse. Part of this would be actually saying, “I think that’s a bad political analysis.”
There’s not a single pro-life elected official who has lost reelection. Every one of the pro-life governors, including people like Ron DeSantis, who signed into law six-week bills, got reelected. In some cases, the governors won by wider margins than Trump did in their states. So the voters, when they go to the ballot box voting on abortion, I think it’s a binary choice, 14 out of 17 times voted against the pro-life position on these ballot initiatives. The voters have not punished a single pro-life elected official. Senators who are pro-life… People like Rubio, who sponsored federal legislation, the 15-week bill in the Senate, Rubio was one of the few that was willing to do that post-ops. He sailed the reelection. One would be helping the political class realize that they should stop listening to the consultants who are largely pro-choice, even if they’re Republican consultants, that this won’t hurt them, and that some leadership, political leadership on this, could actually shape public opinion. More or less, pro-lifers are locked out of every other area of influence, media, academia, Hollywood, sports with one or two exceptions.
But politics is a place where you can actually be outspokenly pro-life, get the microphone in front of your mouth, and actually shape public opinion. I think Trump did that very well in the first election when he described partial birth abortion and said, “This is what Hillary Clinton stands for,” and I think that was a teaching moment and actually shaped the nature of the debate. He could be doing something more aggressive when it comes to chemical abortion and some of the horror stories there and just the danger of the chemical abortion pill.
Second thing I’ll say is that the root cause of abortion is not the cost of diapers, nor is it the cost of childbirth, and so the provisions to make birth free don’t actually address it. It’s a nice symbolic thing to say that we like babies, but it doesn’t actually address why a woman thinks she needs an abortion. And the two statistics that I think best illustrate this is who has an abortion and who gets aborted. 87% of abortions are performed on unmarried women. Only 13% of women who have an abortion are married. If you are conceived out… So that’s the question. Who has an abortion? 87% of the time, it’s an unmarried woman. If you’re the child and you’re conceived outside of marriage, 40% of the time you’re going to die in abortion. If you’re conceived inside of marriage, 4% of the time. The statistic from the perspective of the baby, 4% chance of dying if I’m conceived by married mom and dad, 40% if I concede outside of it. From the perspective of the mother, 87% of them are unmarried. Marriage is the best protector of unborn human life.
Everything I said about the problems that we’re having on the marriage and family side, we have to crack that nut. I do not think the church has mounted a sustained response to the sexual revolution. I don’t think either political party, if anything, I think both of them, one more aggressively than the other, is more or less acquiesced to the sexual revolution. George Weigel in Witness to Hope describes the theology of the body as a ticking time bomb. We’re still waiting for it to go off. We’ve not had an adequate either intellectual or kind of formation-wise response to the sexual revolution. That’s the actual driving source of abortion. It’s non-marital sex.
Sarah Gustafson:
All right.
Speaker 7:
Hi. We haven’t much yet touched on the possible economic tensions between American founding and Catholic social thought, and I welcome your thoughts on how our economic systems, particularly as they exist today, sort of tussle with or work in cooperation with Catholic social thinking.
Ryan Anderson:
I feel like I’m speaking too much, but I’ll say something and then I want to toss it to Russ because… My dissertation was partly on this question, and I borrowed some of… I developed some of Russ’s scholarship on this. Maybe borrowed is the right way of actually phrasing that. I attempted to go somewhere beyond, but no, I was just borrowing, recapitulating what Russ actually said.
From a Catholic perspective, you’re going to have both property rights and duties, and I think the primary kind of fault in the way that most Americans think about economics and private property is that we only talk about property rights, and we very rarely talk about property duties. Catholic social thought has an understanding of both the justice of private ownership of property, but also the justice of the universal destination of earthly goods. And if that phrase is something you’ve never heard before, that’s a scandal of our own kind of catechesis information that even many Catholics aren’t aware of more or less the social mortgage of our ownership of private property is to be deployed for the benefit of the common good. Aquinas has a discussion of the duties that we owe to others vis-a-vis our property, both in his discussion of justice and his discussion of charity. So it’s not just charity the way that you’ll have some economic conservatives who want to say that, “Anything that we owe to the poor is just a matter of charity,” it’s also a matter of justice.
I think there’s some intellectual tensions there in the two competing intellectual traditions or plural traditions for the American side, but I don’t think there’s any necessarily legal tension there. The legal system, the constitutional system that we have allows me to fulfill all of my property duties, and it’s not just through redistribution taxation. I’m incentivized to engage in charitable giving. I can do a tax deduction beyond the standard deduction when it comes to April 15th. I have great freedom to invest in companies that will employ people and provide dignified work to those people. So there are a variety of ways in which the economic system and the legal system allows Catholics to fulfill their economic duties, but it doesn’t require it. And I think we could possibly talk more about that.
Sarah Gustafson:
Russ.
Russell Hittinger:
The opening argument of Rerum Novarum is right there. The opening argument is not, “Well, we have to keep the starving unemployed off the street,” and so on. The opening argument is, “Human beings are rational agents, and the worker has to be provident for himself and his family.” The opening argument is providence, and therefore it’s not exactly the amount of money or help that the worker gets. It’s protecting the providence of it. Then he has other arguments, but the very first one is human agency. The ability to work and take care of a family, that’s what the first debt is, let’s say, of owners. The workers should be provident, not just workers, but provident workers. You can’t be provident if you don’t know what you’re going to make tomorrow morning.
Sarah Gustafson:
Ken, did you want to say anything?
Ken Grasso:
Yeah. I agree with what both Ryan and Russ have said. The only thing I think I would add is the phenomenon of change or maybe, more specifically, the rapid change the modern world has experienced. Industrialization doesn’t happen slowly and gradually over a couple centuries. Boom, it’s here. You have this unprecedented system, haven’t encountered before. You have to think through in a Catholic take on it in a way of reforming the system to make it serve the common good. It’s not simply, “Okay, we had the Industrial Revolution.” Now, we’ve got a whole new economic situation with a global economy that fundamentally changes the on-the-ground realities in a lot of ways, creates new possibilities, forecloses certain areas of action, the financialization of the economy. There’s a lot going on, and there needs to be a lot of Catholic reflection on this. Remember Rerum Novarum, new things, we’ve had a series of new things since then. They seem to come with each generation. It’s hard to keep up. Whereas in pre-modern times, things unfolded a little more slowly.
Sarah Gustafson:
Okay. I think we have time for one more question.
Riley.
Riley:
My name is Riley. I’m a graduate student at Columbia. Thank you for the wonderful talk. It was a great panel. My question is, I had this thought when you guys were discussing Tocqueville. Tocqueville seems to state in multiple places that one of the reasons religion flourishes in the United States is precisely because it’s not political. It can have an indirect effect on politics, but it’s not institutionalized into politics. And this kind of brings us to this dilemma, where if it has an indirect effect from civil society onto the political, why isn’t that happening now? And if we’re not going to use the instruments of political power in order to have this spiritual rejuvenation, what exactly are we supposed to do practically? It almost seems paradoxical. Religion flourishes when it’s not necessarily politicized, but we’re in such a contemporary social moment where it almost seems necessary to involve religion into politics. I was just wondering what you guys think about this potentially paradoxical nature of religion and politics.
Ken Grasso:
Yeah. I’d just say Tocqueville does indeed talk a lot about the importance of separating, I hate to use that term because it pulls us at your jurisprudence and whatnot, but keeping religion and politics in some sense separate. But keep in mind a couple things. One is that, in Tocqueville’s America, as he stresses, there was a very strong moral consensus. Fundamental moral principles by and large were not on the political table. They were not being negotiated politically. Indeed, there was a strong religious consensus underlying the political consensus and whatnot.
Today, that’s broken down, and it’s hard to see how you get back to a situation like that. There’s a fundamental divide here between two different views of the world, I don’t know what names you want to give them, and it unpacks religiously, but more importantly it’s political level morally. I think religion being drawn into the current political divides is just to be expected and is unavoidable and something to be lived with, if you could argue that the rigid origin of this political divide is ultimately religious itself in nature.
Sarah Gustafson:
Okay. I think that’s all we have time for because we’re at five. Join me in thanking our wonderful panel.
Speaker 1:
Thank you for listening to Ordain and Establish. Subscribe to our podcast. And if you’d like to learn more, visit our website at cit.catholic.edu.
