A Book Review . . . The Heart Of The Matter

By MITCHELL KALPAKGIAN
Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching by Anthony Esolen (Sophia Institute Press: Manchester, NH: 2014, 193 pp.), $19.95. Available through www.SophiaInstitute.com or 1-800-888-9344.

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This book is a welcome contribution to the culture wars and moral relativism of the present day. A careful reexamination of the Church’s social teaching and a fresh reading of the major encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII on the topics of Man, Human Liberty, Marriage, The Family, Social Life, The Church as Society, Work, and The State, it uncovers the riches of Catholic wisdom that address all the economic, political, and cultural problems of modernity with real solutions.
As the first chapter explains perfectly, the Church’s entire social teaching rests upon the Christian view of man stated in Genesis: “He is made by God, in the image of God, for God.” This divine image naturally confers on man not only his nature and destiny but also his human dignity and free will that all governments, economic policies, and moral theories are bound to respect. Man is not designed for slavery in any form or for servitude to the state but is born with God-given, inviolable rights independent of any nation’s laws or political agenda.
All good government, as Esolen lucidly expounds, begins with the recognition that man is not a creature of the state for the sole purpose of labor and productivity but an image of God with both a body and a soul designed for a heavenly destiny. Man as a social being thrives only in a society that honors his God-given origin and that governs according to the respect, rights, and freedom due to man by virtue of his divine origin. Wherever human societies honor the Church’s moral authority and value its cultural influence, society flourishes.
The book cites Immortale Dei to illustrate the relationship between religion and culture:
“Wherever the Church has set her foot, she has straightway changed the face of things, and has attempered the moral tone of the people with a new civilization, and with virtues before unknown. All the nations which have yielded to her sway have become eminent for their culture, their sense of justice, and the glory of their high deeds.”
Just as no just society can exist without respecting man’s spiritual and moral nature, the freedom of worship, and the inviolability of conscience, no human idea of liberty can flourish without obedience to moral law. No man-made inventions of manufactured “rights” have the status of true freedom unless they conform to the dignity of man’s nature and the revealed truths of the Christian faith.
When a state’s laws proceed from the tyranny of an absolute ruler, the will of an ignorant populace, or the power of a ruling political party, then the state usurps the authority of God and suppresses freedom without any reference to natural or divine law as the paradigm for ordered liberty.
Absent the sacred truths of religion in society, secularism follows, man becomes god, and the state regards itself as the source of salvation. Thus the author concludes, “Religion also keeps us from making an idol out of the form the State takes,” and “the Catholic is not compelled to believe that democracy is the finest form of government there is.” Without the supernatural view of man as an immortal soul destined for eternal life, society reduces man to a body, worker, or consumer whose happiness derives solely from material prosperity and creature comforts.
Above all, religion makes man wary of innovations and revolutions in the various forms of liberalism that all purport to achieve equality under the law that amounts to the utopian thinking of “a brave new world” — a point Esolen illuminates. He explains man’s natural inclination to favor and cherish the old (“innocent children love their homes and do not want to trade them in”), refers to the Roman contempt for “innovator,” a pejorative term synonymous with “a deep disdain for the traditions upon which the Romans had built their nation,” and alludes to Leo’s Inscrutabili that warns against “forgetfulness of things eternal” for the sake of “novas rerum conversiones” (the new overturning of things).
Without a vision of the eternal order of things, human passions fantasize and imagine new world orders that amount to nothing more than, as Leo XIII states in Rerum Novarum, “the lust for new things.”
The chapter “Marriage” once again returns to first principles, self-evident truths, and God’s word as the foundation for a human society. As wise philosophers like Aristotle and Church doctrine have always taught, the family precedes the state, and the society of the family — the household — is a microcosm of society. Just as the family serves its members, society serves the common good of families.
For a society, then, to undermine the institution of marriage by redefinition or to change the meaning of a family to an artificial “construct” destroys the cell of society and its entire structure. Esolen unsparingly anatomizes all the moral anarchy that follows the deconstruction of the family.
The book cites Leo’s statements on the sacredness of marriage not only as a sacrament of the Church but also as human knowledge discovered even by pagans. Explaining the truth about marriage, Leo writes that previous Popes like Innocent III and Honorius III acknowledged that “a certain sacredness of marriage existed ever amongst the faithful and the unbelievers” for whom marriage evoked a reality “conjoined with religion and holiness.”
Any government heedless of these basic truths naturally fails to defend marriage from all the “innovators” intent on renouncing tradition, atomizing the family by violating its integrity, and imposing great suffering upon children. Whether by way of divorce that separates children from parents or by contraception that alienates husbands from wives or by abortion that severs a child from the mother or by inventions of marriage that ignore the meaning of mother and father, the state corrupts the source of civilization by poisoning the cell of society.
Esolen always goes to the heart of the matter: “The child without relations — without the history of blood itself — feels deprived of something central to his humanity.”
The chapter “The Church as Society” explains that the Church as the Body of Christ is not bound by an idea of the state that Hobbes equated to a “social contract” or confined to a particular form of government like monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy: “The Church does not subject herself to the political form of the day.” Catholic in the sense of universal, the Church embraces both the one and the many, unity and diversity: one Lord, one faith, one Baptism, one Church, one Pope; many religious orders and vocations from the Benedictine to the Carmelite and 21 rites from the Roman and Byzantine to the Syriac and Armenian.
In the words of Quod Apostolici Muneris, the state, “like the Church, should form one body comprising many members, some excelling others in rank and importance, but all alike necessary to one another and solicitous for the common welfare.” This hierarchical order of spiritual unity opposes socialistic ideas of equality, the welfare state, the redistribution of wealth, unbridled capitalism, and democratic elections as the measure of truth.

A Living Wage

Catholic social teaching is never dated, regardless of the particular crisis or heresy it addressed at the time. Dr. Esolen’s book makes the old, traditional, and perennial teaching of the Church fresh, vibrant, and timely. He revitalizes the encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII and his Predecessors to demonstrate that God never abandons man to the darkness of ignorance.
Where heresies abound, the Church provides the light of truth. Where social ills plague civilization, the Church offers medicine to cure the suffering. There is no social problem that confronts modern man that the Church has not addressed with its magisterial authority and perennial wisdom.
For example, imagine a world that honored some of these timeless truths summarized in the chapter “Work”: No employer shall treat his employee as bondsmen, chattel, or slave but as a human being worthy of dignity. No employer shall overwork human beings beyond their physical or mental endurance but allow them time for family life and religious obligations. No employer shall assign work inappropriate to a person’s sex or age. No employer shall deprive a worker of a living wage.
Imagine a world that valued the gift of human life and cherished children, a society that refused, in Esolen’s words, to “tolerate the seduction and corruption of children,” that protected them from being “hostage to the caprices or the sexual wants of adults,” and that did not “sentence to death unwanted children.”
All this and more the light of the Church offers to societies and thinkers enclosed in procrustean beds and mazes that imprison man in a profane world with no sense of the sacred.