A Book Review . . .
Catholic Social Teaching As It Should Be Known And Taught
By GEORGE A. KENDALL
Arthur Hippler, Citizens of the Heavenly City: A Catechism of Catholic Social Teaching; Borromeo Books (2005); 160 pages; price $15.95 plus postage. Order from: Borromeo Books, P.O. Box 7273, St. Paul, MN 55107.
As far back as I can remember, even back before the typhoon hit the Bark of Peter, Catholic social teaching has tended to be regarded as a bit of a foreign body within the Church’s teachings, an appendage whose precise place and function no one is quite sure about.
When I was growing up in the 1950s, in a solidly Republican household and at a time when the American free enterprise system was often a kind of second religion, there was a tendency for Catholics to see papal encyclicals on the social order as pretty much expressions of the Pope’s personal opinion, not connected with the Church’s real teachings, which were, of course, about “spiritual” matters. There was a feeling that the Church might better stick to these “spiritual” matters, and leave practical matters to politicians and businessmen.
Later, things swung off in a different direction, when Catholic activists of the left began to identify the Church’s social teachings with Marxist ideology or with the radical, and also quite Marxist, activism of Saul Alinsky and his followers. In neither case were the social teachings understood with any clarity as an integral part of the Church’s whole salvific message.
Yet, in truth, Catholic social teaching is absolutely central to the Church’s vision of reality, as found in Scripture and Tradition, because it is a vision of all reality as a universal community, grounded in divine love, a community whose vertical axis is the love between God and creatures, and whose horizontal axis is the love of creatures for one another (together, they have the form of the cross).
This community is the order of creation, brought to its fullness in the Incarnation. The imperfect, passing human communities of which we are a part in this life are meant to participate in that universal order. That order is the divine law, embodied for us in the twofold great commandment, love of God and love of neighbor, and expanded in the Ten Commandments. The application of this law in the ordering of human societies, far from being a kind of appendage to the whole Christian vision, is inseparable from it.
This is what Arthur Hippler makes beautifully clear in his new textbook, Citizens of the Heavenly City: A Catechism of Catholic Social Teaching. The title itself tells the story: We belong to the heavenly city, yet our life in the earthly city is, in however small a way, a sharing in that heavenly life, at least insofar as the earthly city is ordered and just. What is important is that, when we try to understand social justice from a Christian perspective, we don’t start from the earthly city, as if it were somehow sufficient unto itself, but with the heavenly city, trying to learn from the latter what is necessary if the order of the earthly city is to mirror that of the heavenly.
Hippler’s text accordingly starts right out from Scripture, specifically from the Ten Commandments, and shows how each commandment calls us to order our earthly life in society. Because Hippler starts from the assumption that the heavenly, transcendent reality has relevance for the ordering of earthly reality — an assumption that flies directly in the face of the modern dogma that one’s relationship to transcendence is a purely private, subjective matter, and must not be taken into account in any way, shape, or form when we try to solve the problems of society — his notion of what kinds of things are concerns for the social order is refreshingly different from what we are used to hearing from our secularized chattering classes.
For instance, it is hard to imagine any liberal intellectual, even one who is Catholic, today seeing society’s attitude toward the Mass as in any way a factor in social justice. Yet Hippler does demonstrate this in a chapter entitled “True Worship and Society,” in which, interpreting the First Commandment, he develops the theme that the right worship of God is essential to a just and healthy social order. He notes especially how, in Old Testament times, the people of Israel repeatedly fell into idolatry and, when this happened, experienced a breakdown in their social order and, eventually, conquest by their enemies.
This is only to be expected if, in the end, all relationships are ultimately grounded in our relationship to God, since, if that is the case, the point where the meeting between God and creatures takes place most completely, in worship, has to be crucial for all those relationships. And that means that, as far as Catholic teaching is concerned, the Mass, as the time and place where man and God meet, is absolutely necessary for the social order. Hippler puts it this way:
“This ‘eclipse of the sense of God’ is most evident when we fall into the error of thinking that the right worship of God is unnecessary for our society. Just as the Hebrew people suffered when they followed idols, so also we suffer with the evils of our present age when the Sacrifice of the Mass is neglected or despised.
“As Catholics, we certainly do not believe that people should be ‘forced’ to worship, that the laws should compel people to religious beliefs which conflict with their own. . . . For the sake of the common good, we must tolerate those who do not share our faith. At the same time, we must recognize that the Mass is the one true sacrifice that God has given us to reconcile us with Himself. And the more that unbelievers, through the grace of conversion, come to share in the richness of the Mass, the more abundantly these graces will benefit society.”
Hippler, following St. Augustine, defines the common good as “a good that can be shared in by many, and does not diminish when it is divided.” Thus the ultimate common good is God Himself, ideally shared in by all through the Church and the sacraments. If this common good is lost, there is little hope for keeping and promoting any of the lesser common goods.
The fact is, most modern people, whether on the left or the right, and, for that matter, whether Catholic or non-Catholic, see social justice issues as principally issues of economics — hence the tendency to focus on poverty almost to the exclusion of everything else. Now the distribution and right use of wealth are indeed of crucial importance to the establishment of a just social order, and Hippler rightly devotes attention to these. Yet, many issues that are not directly economic, though they may have economic repercussions, also affect the common good.
Abortion and contraception are cases here. The respect for human life, and with it, for the dignity and inviolability of the human person are both parts of the common good, and abortion and contraception both attack these goods. Similarly, truth belongs to the common good, hence ideologies like relativism, especially moral relativism, are incompatible with the common good. Books and entertainment that undermine the most basic standards of morality and decency, by corrupting the human person, also violate the common good and can be legitimately suppressed by the state.
The problem is, most people think of issues like this, not as matters related to the common good, but as matters related to the good of the autonomous individual. Hence, things like abortion, contraception, homosexuality, pornography, and so on are seen as individual rights issues, and people defend these practices by telling us that individuals have the right to do anything they want as long as they do not hurt other individuals (a condition in reality rarely, if ever, met).
But if we factor in the common good, then these “rights” of the autonomous individual carry far less weight, as Hippler tells us in his opening chapter, “Individual Rights versus Moral Perfection.” For Hippler, once again, it is God, not the autonomous individual, who is the ultimate good, the ultimate ordering principle:
“God is our Creator and final happiness. He made us, provides for us, and directs us back to Himself. Everything in the universe is for His sake. If you look at an army, all the parts of the army work together under the direction of the general. The general in turn directs the army to its final goal, victory. Likewise, all the parts of the universe are ordered finally to God, who is the highest good.”
If all Hippler’s catechism succeeds in doing is driving home the concept of the common good, it will have achieved much. This is a concept hardly anyone understands today, and that includes most Catholics. Practically speaking, almost everyone substitutes for the common good the utilitarian idea of the greatest good of the greatest number, an idea that actually attacks the common good.
If we are pursuing the greatest good of the greatest number, for instance, we may legitimately kill an innocent person in order to save others. That means we can create human embryos and destroy them in order to fight cancer, heart disease, spinal cord injuries, and senile dementia.
But the real common good, grounded in the law of God, tells us that the sanctity of human life is a good that trumps all of these, that we would not have the right to kill an innocent person even to save the world from destruction. That idea has become almost incomprehensible to most modern minds, yet it is one whose rightful place in ordering society has to be restored if any human society is to survive.
Clear And Readable
It is a cliché, but Citizens of the Heavenly City is truly a breath of fresh air, blowing away the fog and the “smoke of Satan” (to use Pope Paul VI’s expression) which are the source of so much confusion in the modern world. Catechesis has, since the 1960s, been a disaster area in the Church. Clear, solid Catholic doctrine, grounded in tradition and right reason, has been thrown out in favor of subjective, “feel-good” teaching, reducible to the idea that if it feels good, do it.
The Church’s social teachings are no exception. Everyone has a vague idea that the Church is against things like war, capital punishment, poverty, and abortion, but hardly anyone has any idea why. If Citizens of the Heavenly City is widely used, it will do a remarkable job of overcoming that abysmal ignorance.
As a textbook, it could not be more clear and readable. It is organized into 19 chapters, plus an introduction and a conclusion, with review questions at the end of each chapter. The reader will also find, at the end of each chapter, a brief biographical sketch of a great saint who did much to clarify the Church’s teachings on the social order. These include St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Cardinal Newman, St. John Chrysostom, St. Katharine Drexel, and many others, with illustrations.
The beautiful cover, with a detail from Fra Angelico’s Last Judgment at the center, also makes for a very attractive volume. The book is aimed at Catholic high school students, but could also be used quite effectively at the college level. It is perfect for use by home-schoolers.
Considering the terrible ignorance that prevails in this area, it could also be profitably read by Catholic laymen, as well as priests and religious, who want to understand the Church’s social teaching better.
I cannot more strongly recommend this remarkable book, even though I feel obliged to mention, in the interests of full disclosure, that I was involved myself in editing it and preparing it for publication. I do not, alas, have the honor of being its author.
