The European Referendum

With whatever enthusiasm (or lack of it) we face the coming EU referendum, it does raise important political issues that Catholics need to reflect on in the light of the principles of social teaching.

To kick off, a few interesting (albeit random)  resources I've come across:

1) A discussion of subsidiarity in Catholic social teaching and the EU. From the Reimagining Europe blog (here).

2) For the wearers of tin foil hats amongst us: 'Is the European Union a Catholic Plot' (From First Things here.)

3) 'Catholic origins of the European Union' (From Zenit, here.)

4) Address of St John Paul II to European Parliament 1988 (here) and Pope Francis 2014 (here).

5) The section of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church dealing with International Organizations here (sections 440-443).

No doubt I shall be returning to this...

Christian Human Rights

Samuel Moyn's book on the development of human rights in the twentieth century has been on my 'to read' list for a while now.

His thesis seems to be that modern human rights represents a very recent secular takeover (roughly 1970s onwards) of a Christian movement which arose in the 1930s as a response to the encroachment upon Christianity of totalitarian regimes. A key figure in this Christian movement was Jacques Maritain. If he's right in this historical analysis, human rights owes far more to Christianity (and in particular Catholicism) than it does to the Enlightenment. On the other hand, Moyn celebrates the 'capture' of the concept of human rights by secularism and its broadening to concerns wider than the essentially defence of subsidiarity that was key to the original Catholic position.

I still haven't read the book! (I have, however, finally bought a copy so I guess that's progress!) There's a very helpful podcast of an interview with Samuel Moyn here. There's also a series of papers on The Immanent Frame website discussing his thesis here.

My hunch would be that he's right to emphasize the role of Catholic thinkers such as Maritain in the development of modern human rights, but wrong to regard its post-Christian development with favour. Not much of a surprise there perhaps! But apart from the kneejerk reaction resulting from personal prejudices, I am for many reasons philosophically suspicious of recent developments in the understanding of human dignity, the concept which in Moyn's view (rightly, I think) underpins modern human rights, and view with favour an understanding of government which allows and indeeds encourages the subsidiarity of the little platoons of society. Anway, we'll see...

Here's a taster from Moyn's introductory essay on the book from The Immanent Frame discussion:

The essay on so-called “personalism” under scrutiny here deals heavily with Catholic publicist Jacques Maritain, certainly the most prominent philosophical defender of universal human rights in the 1940s, and a pivotal player in the political transformation of Christianity across the transwar divide. The other chapters in Christian Human Rights, when it appears, will start with the history of human dignity in constitutions: the first of this sort was Ireland’s 1937 document, not coincidentally perhaps also the first Christian Democratic constitution in history; then there was Marshal Philippe Pétain’s abortive 1944 French constitution; and only later the postwar West European constitutions. The book looks at Protestant versions of Christian human rights, notably in the work of Gerhard Ritter, the dean of German historians of the period. If Maritain was the leading theoretician of human rights then, Ritter was their preeminent historian. Finally, the book concludes with an account that offers some inking of the legacy of Christian human rights today, in European Court of Human Rights cases about the Muslim headscarf and the meaning of religious freedom.

In the 1940s, as much as in and through some of their legacies today, Christian human rights have not so much been about the inclusion of the other, but about policing the borders and boundaries at which threatening enemies loom. Human rights have a complex history, and it is—like all inheritances—worth tough criticism, not subservient adulation.

Ash Wednesday

Aquinas on fasting:

The mean of virtue is measured not according to quantity but according to right reason, as stated in Ethic. ii, 6. [ie in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics]. Now reason judges it expedient, on account of some special motive, for a man to take less food than would be becoming to him under ordinary circumstances, for instance in order to avoid sickness, or in order to perform certain bodily works with greater ease: and much more does reason direct this to the avoidance of spiritual evils and the pursuit of spiritual goods. Yet reason does not retrench so much from one's food as to refuse nature its necessary support: thus Jerome says: "It matters not whether thou art a long or a short time in destroying thyself, since to afflict the body immoderately, whether by excessive lack of nourishment, or by eating or sleeping too little, is to offer a sacrifice of stolen goods."  In like manner right reason does not retrench so much from a man's food as to render him incapable of fulfilling his duty. Hence Jerome says... "Rational man forfeits his dignity, if he sets fasting before chastity, or night-watchings before the well-being of his senses."
[...]
The fasting of nature, in respect of which a man is said to be fasting until he partakes of food, consists in a pure negation, wherefore it cannot be reckoned a virtuous act. Such is only the fasting of one who abstains in some measure from food for a reasonable purpose. Hence the former is called natural fasting [jejunium jejuni] while the latter is called the faster's fast [jejunium jejunantis] because he fasts for a purpose.

[STh IIaIIae q.147 a.1 here.]

Explanation: One eats normally to sustain human  nature. In some circumstances, it is reasonable to reduce consumption of food below this normal intake for some special purpose (say, to avoid sickness). Given our supernatural end is superior to our natural end, it is reasonable to reduce intake of food to advance our supernatural end. It is not virtuous, however, to do this to the extent of damaging our body.

Simply going without food isn't virtuous. It is only virtuous when done to fulfil a (good) purpose of the faster.


Picture: Bernardino Pinturicchio - Saint Jerome in the Wilderness  [Wiki page here.]

Donations to SCIAF can be made here.

[Reblogged from last year]

Social Justice Isn't What you Think It Is (Book review)

Michale Novak, Elizabeth Shaw and Paul Adams' new book looks interesting:

The book Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is isn’t what you think it is. The dust jacket of the latest from Michael Novak (with coauthors Paul Adams and Elizabeth Shaw) promises to rescue the term from “its ideological captors” by clarifying “the true meaning of social justice.” What it provides is a careful reading of select papal encyclicals, and application of them to the concept of social justice and contemporary social work—especially that being done from a Roman Catholic perspective. The book’s aim, in practical terms, is to make social justice safe for conservative Catholics both in theory and in practice. Novak humorously notes that this anti-market rallying cry of the Left has an “operational meaning”: that “we need a law against that.” One response to such social justice boosterism—Friedrich Hayek’s, in fact—is to reject the phrase altogether. Novak summarizes Hayek’s critique succinctly: Either social justice is a virtue, and so is about individuals and not about redistribution; or it is not a virtue and “its claim to moral standing falls flat.” Because its advocates treat it “as a regulative principle of order, not a virtue,” the slogan serves as an instrument of coercion, not a call to good habits of character, so the Hayekian conservative should set it aside.

From Library of Law and Liberty here (review by James Bruce)

I haven't read the book so can't do more than point it out as a potentially interesting read. But the review does suggest a few points:

a) Catholic social teaching mustn't be taken as a simplistic rule book. Justice and concern for res publica requires the application and development of the virtue of prudentia (practical wisdom). There are themes and basic observations about human nature, but how these are to be applied in concrete historical and cultural circumstances is a matter for that virtue of prudentia.

b) One of the biggest issues in modern Western societies (and particularly in the United States) is the role of government in achieving justice. In particular, there is a tendency in some countries to allow the state to destroy the associations of civil society and the family. On the other hand, in other countries, there is a failure of the state to support such associations. Catholic social teaching is clear that the family and the associations of civil society cannot rightly be replaced by government action. Equally, the state is more than a nightwatchman state the purpose of which is simply to protect basic physical welfare: it is there to promote human flourishing. Between these extremes, there is a range of possibilities which might be required in particular circumstances.

c) Politics essentially involves debate and disagreement. That some positions are clearly excluded by Catholicism does not imply that we should expect all Catholics to agree on what remains. (We might, however, expect Catholics to conduct that debate virtuously.)

One message I'd like this blog to reinforce is that Catholic social teaching is not some simplistic package which can be reduced to chucking a few more pennies in the SCIAF tin (laudable though such efforts are!). It is essentially an application of theology and philosophy to the hugely complex area of the social nature of human beings. It requires hard thinking and engagement with the fullness of the Catholic intellectual tradition.


Related post here.