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The Catholic Tradition: Religion, Morality, and the Common Good*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2015

Lisa Sowle Cahill
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Extract

The distinctive contribution of Roman Catholic moral theology to public policy discourse has been to insist that it be open to conversation partners representing quite diverse religious and philosophical traditions. Thus Catholicism has what might well be considered a peculiar way of addressing “religiously” both civil rights and legislation: it dissociates the legitimation of rights and laws from specifically religious commitments. A key category in the Catholic approach is “common good,” as a normative description of social coherence; and its corollaries, including “justice” as its standard, mutual “rights” and “duties” as its constituents, and “public authority” and “law” as its guarantors. It is to the possible context and meanings of these terms that I wish to devote attention. Despite the fact that they are the focus of virtually all social theory in Catholic tradition, there is far from unanimity on their interpretation and implementation. I will focus on contemporary Catholic social thought, though I will refer briefly to some of its origins, especially in Thomas Aquinas.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Law and Religion , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , 1987 , pp. 75 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 1987

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Footnotes

*

© 1988 Catholic University of America.

References

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34. Id. at 107. Maritain clearly sees the importance of both sets of rights, and says that “a new age of civilization will be called upon to recognize and define the rights of the human being in his social, economic, and cultural functions….” Id. at 104.

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52. Id. at § 63.

53. On Relative Equality, supra note 47, at 666.

54. See Hollenbach, supra note 9, at 127-28. To this, contrast the trivialization of economie rights by Maurice Cranston. He maintains that to accompany the affirmation of civil rights with too many affirmations of economic rights is “to push the political and civil rights out of the realm of the morally compelling into the twilight world of Utopian aspirations.” He gives examples to support his point: “ ‘It would be a splendid thing,’ people might say, ‘for everyone to have holidays with pay, a splendid thing for everyone to have social security, a splendid thing to have fair trails, free speech, and the right to life—and one day, perhaps, all these beautiful ideals will be realized’” Cranston, , Are There Any Human Rights?, 112/4Daedalus 12 (1983)Google Scholar.

55. Bread and Freedom, supra note 17, at 8-10.

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