Archive for Category: "Catholic Social Teaching"
Subsidiarity and Libertarian “Small Government”
There may be those who are confused and think that the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity is the same as libertarian or other “small government” doctrines common in the United States. James Baresel highlights some of the differences between the two.
HHS Mandate: Morality and the Common Good
The questions to ask are not whether social services limit personal freedom. The questions to ask are, rather, whether they are in accord with Catholic teaching and benefit society.
Is Usury Still a Sin?
One can certainly find a nearly universal practical neglect of the question of usury, but one looks in vain to find that the Church ever retracted, abrogated, or substantially altered her teaching on usury.
Catholics, Distributism and Occupy Wall Street
Although most people focus on dissent from dogmatic truths and in certain areas of moral theology, such as contraception or abortion, the social doctrine of the Church is another area in which Catholics have failed to espouse the Church’s teaching.
Seeking the Common Good
Citizens is an excellent primer in the Church’s social doctrine. Handy study questions that follow each chapter make it perfect for classroom use as well as for independent study with friends or within the parish.
The Continuity of Centesimus Annus
Another thing Centesimus does not do, is discard those “third way fantasies” Mr. Weigel is so excited to dismiss. The implications are that we either have the concentration of property in the hands of the State or in the hands of the few. But the very document he adamantly defends as embracing the “free market” debunks this position.
Three Strategies for Evasion
While one is hardly surprised to find dissent from Catholic teaching among liberal Catholics, it is just as common to find it among conservative Catholics. These latter, however, since they see themselves as faithful adherents to Catholic doctrine, necessarily must create some strategy of disguising their dissent from Catholic teaching.
Labor Rights Reality
It is ironic that those who propose to remove government intervention in the economy are amongst the biggest proponents of using government to tear down unions that “get in the way” of the market. What these folks fail or refuse to recognize is that unions have as much of a right to be market participants as corporations.
Is the Acton Institute a Genuine Expression of Catholic Social Thought?
Liberty the highest political end of man? Not justice, not virtue, not the common good? All else flows from this fundamental error, the error, in fact, of Lucifer, who desired liberty above all else.