Christ Pantocrator*
This will be the final post of the four week course on Anthony Esolen's Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching. You are of course very welcome to add comments in the boxes at any time.
In the other posts this week, I've covered general issues such as Esolen's methodology and the question of the depth and detail of his vision of societies. In this final post, I want to say a little about a striking feature of Leo's social teaching which Esolen constantly emphasizes: the importance of the 'little platoons' or societies/associations which are intermediate between the State and the individual.
If there's one thing that characterises Catholic social teaching -and, even if not in all places, this is one place where Catholic social teaching has much in common with 'social conservatism'- it is an emphasis on the centrality of the family and civil society to human nature. Unlike some readings of liberal political philosophy, where individuals enter into social groupings, especially the State, by choice, Catholic social teaching emphasizes the existence of groups such as the family which exist prior to the State and, in many ways, prior to our individuality, let alone our individual choice. This is of course most clearly seen in the family: children find themselves within a family, owing duties and having rights with respect to other people that have not been freely adopted and which as much create a person as are create by it. Beyond the family, other associations (such as the neighbourhood or interest groups) also are not exactly freely chosen: again, there is an element of finding oneself already embedded in those little platoons rather than creating them ab initio.
Whatever else may be said about neuralgic issues such as divorce and same sex marriage, this observation helps to throw light on why these are taken so seriously by Catholics in a way that seems often incomprehensible to outsiders. For the classic liberal, the starting point is the individual and his or her freely chosen associations: the State is there to serve and facilitate those individual choices. For Catholicism, whatever truth there is in that liberal vision (and I would accept that there is much truth in it) it leaves out other key elements, among which, from the perspective of social teaching, the two most important are our relationship to God and his Church, and our relationship to our families. Just as individual rights are fundamental to liberalism, the rights of the biological family are a fundamental part of Catholic social thought. Putting aside our relationship to God for the moment (and Esolen's work stands as a reproach to the thought that such as secularised attitude can ever be an adequate starting point for social thinking), for Leo's social teaching, the family is one of the basic building blocks of society (indeed, in many ways, the building block) and any changes in it (even if possible) would require as much serious attention as attenpts to remake individual human beings. It is this importance of the family -quite apart from what reflection on that importance might bring- which makes recent changes in marriage law and practice so serious an issue for Catholic social teaching, a seriousness which is often completely baffling to non-Catholics.
That's it as far as the formal elements of the course are concerned! Thank you to all those who have followed along over the last weeks. For anyone coming to this course later on, I hope you find some of these posts useful. But, of course, the main thing I'd say is: make sure you've read Anthony Esolen's book! (Here.)
[Details of image here.]
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