11.18.24 Catholic Social Teaching: Putting Love of Neighbor into Action

So welcome everybody to the talk tonight on Catholic social teaching, putting God's love of neighbor into action. This is something that's very relevant.

the Catholics at every stage of life but in a particular way for young people are always striving for some form of social justice to remedy the injustices that are out there. It's important for us to do so framed within a truly Catholic logic and so that's what I hope to do tonight to give you an introduction to the chief categories of Catholic social teaching and then some of the areas in which it's applied

And then depending upon how much time we have, I can take you on a little journey to how this was put into action by the Holy Seastakelmatic War in which I was part for seven years of the United Nations. And then there'll be some time for questions. So that's pretty much where we're going. I'm not sure if you recognize profiles. Anybody recognize who this

Profiles up, Pope Leo XIII, Pope from 1878 to 1903. And he's the one who basically formulated Catholic social teaching as a discipline that's continued ever since.

The difference about Catholic social teaching is Catholic moral theology all the way up until the 1800s was more or less geared toward how am I as an individual going to love God and love neighbor? How do I examine my conscience about my actions? But then what happened in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution is that there started to be collective acts versus groups of people.

And so the church wanted to basically say that the system needed to change. It wasn't just about one business owner exploiting a whole class of his employees, but about a system in which everybody was justifying that. And once you started on the worker question, then it started to look at, well, what does government owe to its people? What do we owe to our environment?

Is it legal? Is it moral? Is it ethical for workers to strike in every company? In every field of life or only in some, what are the responsibilities? What are the duties?

You know, eventually you start to get to some of the questions, what is the responsibility of governments to the family, families to society, etc. So Catholic social teaching is how we live in the social order and it's an ethical evaluation of things that go way beyond an individual's morality, but looks at some of these larger questions.

So those weren't really raised explicitly and systematically until the late 19th century under the pontificate of Pope Louis XIII. Slightly before, there was Bishop Wilhelm von Gauteller in Germany.

who was starting to think through these things, especially with workers' question. And Pope Leo was able to benefit from that. But then he started to go into the mind of scripture and tradition to see that what he was doing was an application of the principles that came before, rather than something truly novel. It was a novel expression of the church's wisdom, but not something that was being invented.

only 18 or 19 centuries into the Christian journey. So Pope Leo XIII is a real giant of Catholic social teaching, which is one of the reasons why the program for young adults that I run in the city called the Leonine Forum, trying to take Catholic social teaching and help young adults to know it, to live it personally, and then to be able to propose it in various workplaces is named after Pope Leo XIII.

All right. So how would we define Catholic social teaching? Catholic social teaching is the set of principles that guide how people are to relate to each other in society and how to build society up. It's not just theoretical, it's practical. How do we actually help our society? It's based as an expression of the love of God and gratitude, for example, for his gifted creation that we do our responsibilities there.

is likewise based on love of neighbor in the full social content of the gospel. So we'll talk at the very end tonight about what Pope Francis says that the gospel has a social content.

that love of neighbor can't just be one's individual love of his or her neighbors, but sometimes the problems of our neighbor exceed the capacity of one person to be able to fix. So what's the morality that governs all of that? Catholic social teaching is an integral part of the church's mission of eventualization. Because the proclamation of the faith, the corigma,

has a social content, as Pope Francis reminds us.

There's got to be this expression of love of neighbor that comes for the love of the family, that comes for the love of immigrants that is shown in this expression of love not just for individuals but for larger groups of people. And what's super important for us to be able to get is Catholic social teaching is not an ideological or pragmatic system meant to define economic, political, and social relationships.

but it's a branch of moral theology aimed to guide people's behavior. So I say that because sometimes those in the church are going to try to say Catholic social teaching means that you've got to have a tax rate of blank percent. Sorry, that's not Catholic social teaching. And here in the United States over a course of time,

Some who worked for the bishops in Washington started to get way too specific in terms of concrete policies versus sticking to the principles and allowing those with the responsibility of applying the principle in practice to apply them. Sometimes you have to say that ball is out of bounds. It's a foul ball. It's wrong. Can't be done. But between the foul polls,

That's not always for the church to be able to say this is an expression of Catholic social teaching, but that is not. So let's just take something. It is essential for every Christian to love the poor. Absolutely impossible for a Catholic not to love the poor. But it's not Catholic social teaching that the way to help the poor is through government or through private charity.

We've all got a duty. But once we start picking and choosing some of those types of things, then it becomes political rather than theological. I'll have a chance to give you some questions about that if there are some. The term social teaching goes back to 1931 in Pope Pius XI's document on the 40th anniversary of Leo XIII's first document on Catholic social teaching, which we're going to go through some of these names now.

just so that you're aware of them and the progression. Not important, really, to remember the titles just to remember that these are titles of Catholic social doctor. So, Pope Leo XIII in 1891 gave a document literally called, Of the New Things, Rear Novari, which focused on the conditions of salary workers,

it categorically for bad as immoral socialism, as not being consistent with who we are as individuals made in God's image and likeness with a social nature. It expounds on the importance of work,

the right to private property, again, again, certain versions of socialism, collaboration instead of class struggle, which was coming in the early days of Marxism, the right to form professional associations and labor unions, the rights of the weak, the dignity of poor, the obligations of the rich. So these are types of things that we've been hearing about for the last 130 plus years. So it might not be a huge surprise

But in 1891, that the church was concretely wading into these waters, it was a super big deal, and it was controversial. And it was a point of a lot of controversy, because various Catholics who were on the opposite side practically of this were saying, whoa, Pope's never talked like this before. You're sounding like a politician. No, no, no, he was sounding like a pastor, applying the light of the gospel to the particular question that we have here.

Next document was the one I mentioned, Quadrijez Milano, literally on the 40th year of Rura Nubaram in 1931. This started to get a little bit more concrete, focused on a family wage. So it wasn't just a minimum wage for someone in contrast to everybody else, but is this person going to be able to support a family?

The principle of subsidiarity, we're going to define that soon. It rejected unlimited competition between economic forces. You know, the free market idea that competitions ultimately going to raise all the boats in the harbor. Okay, but how many boats are going to be capsized at the same time and how many people ground?

The rise of totalitarian regimes, it condemned, right, especially the two that were known by this point, Leninism, as well as the beginning of national socialism. In 1961, so again, the 70th anniversary of Reverend Navaram, you'll get a general theme of these documents coming out in anniversaries, you had

St. John the 23rd, give us Matir and Magistra, mother and teacher, which spoke in a very positive way about community and socialization at a time in which because of the Cold War, people were forming into camps and making hard enemies. Two years later, he gave a

document peace on earth to address to all people of goodwill. This was the first time a church document went not just to Catholics, but to everybody. And it was on the problem of peace in an error marked by nuclear proliferation. What happened to provoke this document anybody know?

Cuban Missile Crisis was the main provocation, but it was during the meetings likewise at the Second Vatican Council as they were looking at the church's role in the whole world. And they said the church has to be prophetic to try to prevent a nuclear disintegration of the entire planet. And so Pope Sicha and the 23rd got involved with Pocham and Terrace. And then the Second Vatican Council launched into Catholic social teaching in its pastoral constitution for the church in one world called Gaudium et Spes, Joy and Hope,

which gave a systematic presentation on culture, which drives so many of these issues of economic and social life. I mean, for the church to get in the nitty gritty here was novel. Marriage and family, just what the rights and the responsibilities are. The political community in general, not just individual governments, but also the international order.

peace in the community of peoples, all in light of who we are made in the image and likeness of God, made even more concretely to find our identity and our moral example in God who took on our humanity and said, follow me.

So everything in the Guardian and Spess was built on the theological principle that Christ fully reveals to the human person to himself and makes a screen call and clear, and that if we really wish to find fulfillment, fuck what we've got to do so not by self-affirmation, but by self-gift, that we'll only find ourselves if we give an unselfish gift of ourselves to others. That was a theological way of saying love your neighbor. So that's Guardian and Spess. We're just getting warmed up.

In 1967, so right after the Second Vatican Council, St. Paul VI gave us popular and progressio, which outlined not just sort of individual questions of justice, but we owe somebody else, but what the peoples of the world owe each other, integral development of man and a development solidarity with all humans.

So this was the first document of the church on what we would now accept readily as development. These were the church's first thoughts on development. And the principles there have really passed the test of time. For the 80th anniversary of Reverend of Ireland in 1971, St. Paul VI gave octoges in the Athenians.

as the 80th anniversary comes. And in each of these anniversary documents, it's going back to where I'm going to be applying it to the sort of modern question. So he was reflecting on a post-industrial society that we were no longer sort of building these massive factories and polluting rivers and all the rest of it. But we were starting here to shift much more at the beginning to an information society, because at the beginning of computers,

So reflecting on post-industrial society and the inadequacy of ideology to respond to post-industrial society. It likewise focused on the growing problem of urbanization, on the condition of women, unemployment, now that people weren't working on farms and sustaining themselves, discrimination, where racism was getting involved, emigration,

People were moving because there was no longer work where they were. Population growth and the attacks against growth in population. Social communications and the manipulation thereof. Youth.

or becoming more prominent than international sort of questions because of the protests of 1968 beyond. And then the ecological problem is you had Rachel Karstens and everybody else talking about the way we're harming our planet. So that was for the 80th anniversary. 10 years later, St. John Paul II didn't give us a document on the 90th anniversary. We'll talk about what he did in a second. He gave us a beautiful document on work.

This is really his thought in its purest form about what it means to be a worker, taking his philosophical personalism and applying it to how we're going to spend a third of our life. He concentrated in spirituality and the ethics of work, both the objective and subjective dimension, how we make something, but at the same time form ourselves as we make something.

In 1987, six years later, he gave us the most boring document in the history of the Magisterium. Solicitudo Ray Sotialis, believe it or not, this was the first document I ever read. And I thought that they were all terrible. I mean, it was just like, you'd get vertigo as he would do his Polish circles constantly re-examining the same question from a deeper and deeper level. But this was focused on development in the third world.

What he called the third word would now call the developing world and the meaning of a development truly worthy of the human person. He distinguished between development and progress is more than goods and services, but personal so development can look at.

economic development can look at social development, can look at environmental development, you name it. But what he wanted was true progress, which he said would always involve the transcendental reality of a human person at the same time that we're looking at everybody else, because we're more than just mouths to feed. In 1991, sorry, that's a typo.

He gave us Chantissimus on the 100th anniversary of the 100th year of railroad Navarro. And this is one of the biggest documents in the history of the Church's social teaching. It presented the fundamental principles of social and political organization, solidarity, a civilization of love,

a couple years after the fall of communism. And so it asked the big question, after the fall of communism, what's left? Does that mean capitalism is the way? He said you've got to understand capitalism the right way. What we're talking about is a system that respects human freedom more than

to vibrant moral culture and to free political reality, then we can say, okay, capitalism is consistent with the human person. But if we're understanding it, as they did in the Gilded Age, yes.

sometimes still today, you've got, let's take away almost all regulations and just let the market fix itself, etc. And he says, we can't say that capitalism would be consistent with the human good. So he got very much into these details.

It was heavily influenced by some American thinkers against European thinkers looking at the real benefits that come from when people are able to be free agents and how economically that can help out lots of people at the same time by raising the water in the harbor. But at the same time, we just have to make sure that certain people aren't capsizing along the way if this is going to be moral. So he got into all of that.

Four years later, he gave another document and Catholic social teaching was what is called the Gospel of Life, Evangelion Vitae on the dignity of every human life at the beginning, the middle, and the end of life. And so there, channeling infallible language, he condemned both abortion and euthanasia in uncertain terms, but he also, for example, raised questions about the death penalty. And he said, we're at a stage in which practically the reason why we have to

have recourse to the death penalty to render aggressors incapable of continuing to commit further harm that those odds are so remote that we need to have access to the death penalty anymore, that it should be practically nonexistent. He likewise looked at the principles of just war and reevaluated, et cetera. But it was what we owe others based on their human dignity and how we're supposed to respect and defend it. Last few docs.

In 2006, Pope Benedict gave us a document called God is Love Davis Caritas Est, where we ponder the organization of charity in the church and society. This is in two parts. The first part is all about love and how we are to understand it and live it at a personal level. And the second half of it is how that plays out with organized charity. The big point that he makes is

We just can't have charity a la carte, all left for individuals to be able to help out their neighbor because lots of those who are suffering won't be adequately geared for. So we looked at the organization of the church's charity from the beginning, that all of a sudden we have deacons who are organizing diacomia or what we would now call food pantries and Catholic social services and everything else because the early church recognized that it couldn't just be individuals doing everything.

And then he got into the beautiful history that all of a sudden the Roman emperor under, well, Julian apostate says, hey, these Christians are converting everybody by their love. Let us as the government start to aid what the church is doing so that people don't for charity have to go to the church.

You know, eventually they started pouring a lot of money in to try to draw people away, but then corruption would come on into the government types of stuff in a way that wasn't really in the jury. And so there's been this situation for 1700 years, which lots of times the governments are trying to take over

the charities that the church gives in order to lessen the attractiveness of the church. And it can change actually the whole way things are delivered because they're no longer being delivered with the heart that inspires charity, but it's often now being delivered by bureaucrats who are doing it for a job.

and sometimes they're going to care more about whether the paperwork is done correctly, rather than whether this person's truly hungry and needs something. So, Caritas and Veritate was next in 2009. This was a follow-through on popular and progressive from 1967, and then Solicitudo raised sochialis in 1987, all about development.

Pope Benedict discussed global development in the common good, markets, big government, human ecology. So there's not only the ecology regarding the planet, but of our roommates in that common home and what responsibilities we have to promote a healthy human ecology, not a toxic human ecology. Population and population control, hunger, migration, civil society.

So they were all tackled by Pope Benedict. And then finally in 2015, Marato Si, which is a document of Pope Francis specifically on care for our common home. And so the big term there was integral ecology. So not just the planet alone, but the planet in all of its other relationships, including to the human realities that are involved. Creation, technology,

ecological conversion and ecological spirituality. So how do we live in community with our creator and our fellow creatures? How do we need to change in terms of being rampant consumers, for example? What would be an ecological spirituality? What would that look like in terms of waste?

discarding things, including other human beings who name it. So this is a sort of brief little walk through. Catholic social teaching should take the churches, principles from scripture and tradition, and apply it to modern issues that exceed just individual morality. So let's start to look at the principles of Catholic social teaching. If you're looking for one place to find it all,

In 2004, the church published a beautiful catechism, basically, for Catholic social teaching, which is called the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. I had a little something to do with this, actually, between 1999 and 2004. I had helped on an initial draft of this.

The draft was substantially changed after, but a lot of what we had done was incorporated into this. And this is dry, but super clear if somebody's really looking for what Catholic social teaching is and how the component parts fit together. And so it identifies

basically four main principles of Catholic social teaching. And one is so obvious and it's missed that I have to include it anytime I teach it because it would be there and it was in the draft that we had done. So the first principle of human dignity, we're going to define these in a second. Solidarity, the common good, subsidiarity,

We're going to define these. Social justice and corresponding rights and responsibilities have added there because there's always a justice component involved. But then charity has to be a principal of Catholic social teaching. Otherwise, we're not talking about Catholic social teaching. Everything derives from charity. So let's look at the four main ones that are generally talked about. First is human dignity. What do we mean?

The catechism of the Catholic Church says that the dignity of the human person is rooted in his creation, in the image and likeness of God and is fulfilled in his vocation to find the attitude. So if we're really going to ground human dignity, we do it by our origin and by our destiny, our being made by God, and then our ultimate call to live in communion with God and others. That ground human dignity. Now you're going to tell me that sounds really theological, Father.

And it is, because we're not really going to be able to have a rock-solid definition of human dignity just on philosophical terms, people have tried. When the United Nations in 1948 was putting out the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they were trying to define human dignity, but they couldn't get everybody on the same page. They could enumerate various rights that everybody agrees to by consensus, but they couldn't really get to a definition. There were a lot of Christians there who were close to a definition,

But then there were, on the one hand, Muslims who didn't want to accept it, on the other hand, communists who didn't want to accept it. So they just bracketed the whole thing of human dignity. They mentioned that there is a thing of human dignity without any definition. And one of the things that has happened ever since is we've been spending time misappropriating the term and using it to define any thing we want

in calling it a human right flowing from human dignity, even if it contradicts another right that's since the beginning been consistent with human dignity. So let me define it. Starting in 2009, Hillary Clinton, when she was Secretary of State for the United States, with all the U.S. is powerful diplomatic apparatus said that there's a new right to love whomever you choose.

That was an attempt to try to push the redefinition of marriage to encompass same-sex couples in global diplomatic circles. But what that attacked was first the right religious freedom, because pretty much every religion on the planet understood marriage to be of one man and one woman, or at least men and women, if you look at certain Muslim contexts, open to children and everything else.

And it likewise attacks some of the rights of the family that were enshrined in local law. And so what's consistent with human rights? What's consistent with human dignity when they have an absolute categorical clash? That's been the big argument at the United Nations, for example, ever since. Pope Francis has had to speak about it as the rights of the 60s.

versus the rights of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the third article, they are the first right that's mentioned. Anybody want to take a guess at it? What would be the first right? The right to life, first right, enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

And then you've got the right to choose that comes on up, including the choice to end another innocent human being's life. And so what's it going to be? What's the true human right? What's consistent with human dignity? Those are the arguments that are taking place partially because there was never a definition of human dignity. And it goes back a little bit to Dostoevsky's point that if there's no God, all things are possible.

And so there's a ground beyond us that is stable, otherwise it's just some ideas and ideas can change. Early this year, the Vatican published a decree called Dignitas Infinid Dignity.

which was an attempt actually to define human dignity much more clearly than has existed up until this point. And it made a fourfold distinction, which I think is super useful based on my experience in international context.

It defined ontological dignity or essential dignity, moral dignity, social dignity, and existential dignity. We can quibble a little bit about the actual term used to describe it, but its articulation is pretty smart. So ontological or essential dignity, this is the inalienable dignity that has been talked about in another context.

It belongs to the person as such simply because he or she exists and is well created and loved by God. It's indelible and remains valid beyond any circumstance in which the person may find himself or herself. So this is not conferred by the state and the state can't take it away. This is what fundamentally understood as human dignity across the centuries. Moral dignity

refers to how people exercise their freedom. When people are endowed with conscience, they can always act against it. Where they do so, however, they behave in a way that we would call not dignified, or with respect to their nature as creatures, who are loved by God and called to love others. Moral dignity, in fact, can be lost. So we can start to behave in a way that's almost subhuman.

in a way in accordance not with our higher faculties, but our lower instincts. This is what it means. We can lose our moral dignity. We can't lose our ontological dignity, but we can start to act in a way contrary to that true dignity. Social dignity is defined as the quality of a person's living conditions, so we could say a person living on the street is living in

undignified circumstances where somebody is living in a cockroach and rat infested house is not living in a dignified circumstances, what we mean. And then existential dignity was for the fourth. And so this is what we hear about in terms of various questions of whether somebody's living in dignity or not. So a dignified life or not dignified with regard to our health

regard to addictions, hardships, but on the positive side, peace, joy, and hope. When we hear thoughts about death with dignity, or saying that somebody who is now incontinent and wetting himself or defecating all over the place is not letting in accordance with the personal dignity, everybody can

agree with that, but at the same time it would be against the person's existential dignity that just say, let's treat the person like we would have pet and put the person out of his or her misery. So these distinctions are at least the concepts allow us to clarify what we mean and when we don't, when we start talking about the dignity of human beings. So that was a 2024 advance. Common good is the next term.

It's the sum total of social conditions that allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and easily. So at the surface, this might sound a little bit like the definition of utilitarianism. You know, the greatest good for the greatest number, or things like this, it's not at all. Because it's geared to full human flourishing. And that is way more than materialistic or quantitative.

It's likewise and principally concerned with the transcendent dimension of human person. So the sum total of all those social conditions. It's never really going to be perfect, but there are conditions that permit full flourishing. And so what are going to be some of the aspects of the common good? A thriving economy. Because if we're all sort of looking for our next meal, it's going to be very difficult.

A system that is led by a rule of law so that justice can really be present and the law is applied purely to everybody. The capacity to change our environment through peaceful means, like the ballot box, through a healthy democracy, that's going to be part of the common good.

care for our environment so that we're able to drink clean water and breathe clean air. A good human ecology, so that the whole educational system is helping people to grow on up with virtue rather than how to use each other and objectify others. These types of things are all part of that sum total of social conditions that allow us truly to flourish.

Couple distinctions in the Compendium. The common good doesn't consist in the simple sum of the particular goods of these subjects of a social entity. That would be closer to utilitarianism. Belonging everyone into each person, it is and remains common because it's indivisible and because only together is it possible to attain it increases and safeguard its effectiveness with regard also to the future. So we can't talk about a common good that's good for me but terrible for you.

Just as the moral actions of an individual are accomplished and doing what's good, so too the actions of a society attain their full stature when they bring about the common good. Common good, in fact, can be understood as a social and community to the dimension of the moral good. That last sentence is important. The common good can be understood as the social and community dimension of the moral good.

When we're morally good, when we've got virtue personally, it begins to change all our interaction. And the common good begins to lift everybody up. You know, I remember there's Polish aphorism, that the amount of cops you need is inversely proportional to the amount of cops in here. If everybody truly follows a conscience that's well informed, such that if the house door were wide open,

And you weren't home, but nobody would go on in to steal from you. That's toward everybody's benefit. But if we begin to live in a place in which everybody's got to lock their doors, even if they're going to step out for two minutes, lest somebody come on in and rob them, that's to everybody's detriment. So the common good is this real fruition of the social and community good. So that area is the third big term.

defined as the firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good. So at the beginning of that definition, the firm and persevering determination, that is based on the term for justice. To give each one his do is the way that would finish if we were defining justice. But solidarity is a just way of relating to everyone else.

But it defines it through this common good, to commit oneself to the common good, that we care about others in general. It's the opposite of self-centeredness or selfishness as we go through life. It's the opposite of individualism in which my good is supreme. My good matters.

But solidarity has got to purify that desire for one's own individual good. If it is going to be the detriment of everybody else. So solidarity highlights in a particular way the intrinsic social nature of the human person. The equality of all, indignity and rights in the common path of individuals and people to a never more committed unity. So it's really to try to bring about social cohesion. It's an authentic moral virtue.

It's not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress of the misfortunes of so many people both near and far. That should have a close quotation from it that's from the Compendium. So it's an authentic moral virtue that we really care about others. We care about their being in an environment in which they can truly flourish.

It rises to the rank of a fundamental social virtue since it places itself in the sphere of justice, hence the definition above. It's a virtue directed par excellence to the common good and its founding commitment to the good of one's neighbor with the readiness in the gospel sense to lose oneself in the sake of the other instead of exploiting the other and to serve him instead of oppressing him for one's advantage.

That's a clear application of it. And the fourth and the last principle is subsidiary, which is the one people know the least. It's the principle that a community of higher order shouldn't interfere in the internal life of the community of lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.

The fact that the church lifts subsidiarity as one of the four main principles is total genius. It basically says that in accordance with our dignity and the flourishing of the common good, and in genuine solid area with everybody else, we've got to allow them to become dignified agents of their own destiny. They've got to take responsibility. And if they can fulfill that responsibility,

they have it. If they can't fulfill that responsibility, then those of higher orders can help them with those responsibilities and those needs. But it should always be the order closest. So, should each of us be totally responsible for our own security? No, we can't fulfill that.

So where do we start? We start with what the local police department is able to do or the local sheriff is able to do. Are there certain situations that the local police department or the local sheriff or the county sheriff not going to be able to handle? Yes. So maybe that's now the state police. Are there certain that can't be handled just by the state police? Yes. Well, maybe now that's the feds.

Are there other needs that can't be handled by the FBI? Yes. So maybe that's the American military doing the borders. But it would be super weird if you started to have the Marines coming to protect the Merton Institute, right? And then you could likewise look at education. The whole debate

about whether there should be an education apartment. Federally is because the federal government has usurped a lot of power of local school boards not to mention state departments with education because we've lost a sense of subsidiarity. Likewise, we've lost a sense of subsidiarity with healthcare. We've lost a sense of subsidiarity with the care for the poor as we've become more and more federalized

What happens? The care locally for this one person starts to get lost in this massive bureaucracy where the person who's making decisions that affects this person's good is often hundreds of miles away.

rather than somebody in the neighborhood who recognizes that this particular person could use twice that amount because these are the pressures. And that person is taking what's being given and immediately going and wasting it on drugs. So we've got to have a different solution than this, but that's never going to be settled if the decision's being made hundreds of miles away. So subsidiary is a very important principle.

And the second paragraph, it says, Socialization presents dangers. Excessive interventions by the state can threaten personal freedom and initiative. The principle of subsidiarity is opposed to all forms of collectivism. Embrilliantly, the competitive says, solidarity without subsidiarity can easily degenerate into the welfare state. You're hearing the church condemn the welfare state.

not the motivation behind the welfare state and caring for those who are in need, but the effect of a welfare state in which people become permanently dependent, which can harm their interior culture. While subsidiary without solidarity runs the risk of encouraging forms of self-centered localism. We're good. I don't care what's going on for you. Everything's fine for us.

In order to respect both of these fundamental principles, the state's intervention in the economic environment must neither be invasive nor absent, but commensurate with society's real needs. So you see this subsidiarity without solidarity a lot in education, where people say, my public school district is great. Thank you very much. I don't really care if the kids in your public school district can't read. Localism.

Okay, key themes in Catholic social teaching. It's from the Compendium. Gabriel, you have a question? Okay, you explain what you mean about clock visualization in your best form of clockwise. Collectivization basically means that all the goods are hard and common. Okay, key themes. We'll go through this twice. First, in general, in the Compendium and then what the priorities are.

in the practice of the church's social teachings in places like the UN. So the first is the promotion of peace. We are disciples of the peacemaker. He says, blessed are the peacemakers. They will be called true children of God. So the Prince of Peace sends us out not to be peace-wishers, but peace-makers, peace-builders, trying to bring people and peoples back in the harmony.

The opposite is the spirituality of Cain and Abel. And so a lot of the times we don't really live this well, because many think that to promote peace basically means almost to be a pacifist, almost to be an Aquarius age, peacenick, rather than really strong in trying to bring people back in harmonies and stop the fighting, stop the attacks. We all have roles to play here.

We're not all going to be diplomats trying to settle 77-year-old problem in the Holy Land. But we all can make a role in trying to bring people in a family who haven't talked to each other for five years back together, friends even at Columbia. So the promotion of peace, which is consistent with human dignity,

It's consistent with the common good and full flourishing. It's consistent with solidarity and this real care for the common good and real care for others all lead to this. Second, dignity and sanctity of every human life, every life. No matter what stage, you know, there's the concentration to try to assuage one's conscience by saying, I care for the dignity of

the lives of those at this phase of existence without sort of focusing on people at every stage of existence. And it's always able to be used by one side against everybody else. We as Catholics, dignity and sanctity of every human life, including those people who have made themselves our adversaries. Family, community, and participation. So that we're always trying to promote the authentic good of the family.

then flowing from the family community, and then flowing from both not just being recipients, but participants, people who are contributing to these goods. The preferential option for the poor and vulnerable. Again, we care for 100 out of 100, but a lot of the times Elon Musk and Warren Buffet and Bill Gates can take care of themselves. There are others who can't really take care of themselves.

And so, we've got a prioritization of those who need more help. A free economy, democratic quality, and a vibrant public moral culture. These are the three pillars of Chantism Asanas by John Paul II in 1991 for a full vibrant, full free and virtuous society. These are the three basic conditions.

The dignity of work and the rights of workers, you'll see this in the compendium very much, that work is an essential part of who we are as human beings before the fall, not just after the fall. And so we need to promote a healthy culture of diligence in our work, but also that there are true rights of workers, not to be exploited, but to make them true participants in their work.

Catholic social teaching always defends private property while at the same time talking about the higher universal destination of human goods. So we've got a relative right to private property, not absolute. It doesn't give us a right to hoard everything. If people are starving, they have a right even to what we have. That a universal destination of goods comes before

private property, but provided that people are able to have access to enough. There clearly is a right to private property, including to the fruits of our own labors, and then care for God's creation. Throughout most of the centuries, everybody cared for creation. It's a relatively young problem where we exploit creation.

but that's why the church has become more and more prophetic. It's become more and more prophetic because the main voices out there have become somewhat pantheistic and the main voices out there have likewise tried to exploit Keir for our planet to attack the summit of creation which is the human person. We're seeing it frankly among many young people who just don't want to have kids because kids are going to be bad for the planet.

Just saw another article today, well, I think it was an interview with Bill Gates, trying to move to synthetic means because we just got to get rid of all the cows because of the methane they're producing with China's environment and things like this.

There's a lot of ideology behind it. And you'll be able to see if you really trace the birth of some of the modern environmentalist movements. It's where Marxism went down. So they were no longer going to win the economic argument towards some outcomes. And I needed to come up with another tax. And one of the tax that were particularly helpful with young people was Care For Our Home. And as part of the Care For Our Home, we're now inserting things like

don't have any babies anymore, because that's going to be the way to try to revivify the failed population control arguments of the 60s and the 70s, the population bomb stuff, when most of the developed societies now aren't even replacing each other, replacing themselves, right? So we've got to be careful about that, and the church has gone in there not only because it's a real good

to care for the gift of creation, but also because a lot of the actors there are false prophets that can do a lot of harm, exploiting the desire to care for a criminal. Okay, and I'm just going to go through a handful of themes before we get to live in this hell. Image of God starts everything. Again, our human dignity is grounded in our origin and destiny.

We're made in God's image. We have a reason and will that are made to exist in a loving and traversal communion. Christ shows this to us and calls us to follow him along his path. So we begin with human dignity, our dignity to act well and others dignity. The only worthy response to home has to be loved. For us to understand the human being, we have to understand that we're a creature. There were one in soul and body that were made male and female.

that were free moral agents with a conscience, that were fallen from our original moral dignity, and therefore we suffer and die, but were made for transcendence. We have to grasp with the isens of the 20th century. Nazism, communism, materialism, hedonism, individualism, relativism, atheism, all start with erroneous reductive understandings of who the human person is.

all reductive anthropologies we've got to have an adequate anthropology if we're ever going to live off Catholic social teaching. We're created to know, created with a desire to know and we're able to know by faith and reason which a complementary not competitive. Since God fourth point there is the source of truth, there can't really be a discrepancy between faith and reason.

Each has its own scope for action. Philosophy and theology, science and faith are meant to be an harmonious relationship. If we see what seems to be a contradiction, it's because either faith or reason are overstepping its proper bounds, as we talked about last week in the Q&A session. We're acting persons. Our action follows our being.

and hence we've got a second nature that we father and mother by our own choices. That's where our character comes from. So virtues are habitual and firm dispositions to do the good. Long persons don't only to perform good acts, but to tend toward the good with their whole being give the best of themselves in concrete action. We could talk about the virtues that we receive from God and help us to relate to God as well as those

In the book of wisdom, chapter 7, as well as Aristotle, Plato, you name it, the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance, all of which we need. All of the commandments hang on the twofold love of God and neighbor, but they likewise, if you look at the commandments, point to certain things that can never be justified. What's the interrelationship between truth, freedom, and charity?

It's charity and truth is the principle around which the Church of Social Doctrine turns. So we can't have charity without truth. That's just sentimentalism. We try to have truth without charity. That leads to cold treatment of others. And our treatment's always got to be a unity between head and heart.

We're created to be good stewards. There has to be an integral ecology. This involves five parts. Environmental, ecology, economic, ecology, social, cultural, and human dimension. So sometimes when we talk about development, we'll talk about economic development. There's something far greater.

We can just talk about environmental development or social development or cultural. We've got to make sure that there's truly human development at the same time, not just our bodies, but also the transcendent parts of who we are. To be a steward means that we take care of the gift of creation in nature, that there is a connection between creation and the creator.

The gift should fill us with wonder first, and then we should strive to cultivate the gift. Pope Francis gave us LaRato Si, which he talked about care for coming home. And I've already mentioned that the two main parts of the conclusion there is all of us need a conversion when it comes to this integral ecology. And then our spirituality must incorporate an integral ecology.

We're co-creators. We see that in God's trifold plan for work in the beginning before and after the fall. Increase and multiply. Fill the earth and cultivate it. Have dominion over all the creatures. Three folds come into work after the fall. They'd be pangs of childbirth. They'd be sweat on the brow from the cultivation. And caring for the creatures and the other creatures would be toil some.

but this pain, sweat, and toil would be a means by which we could offer our labors all of love. They make the work more arduous, but that's the means by which it's redemptive as we work ourselves through that for the sake of those we're trying to cure for through our labor. There is a gospel of work, John Paul II said, imitating the creator in working and resting.

Jesus had fleshed his gospel as a construction worker. The Greek word for that is tecton for most of his life. We sometimes translate as carpenter. Carpenters are only one small part of being a tecton. To be a tecton was to be a builder. You couldn't always use wood. You could use stone. You could use metals.

Jesus was constantly referring to human work in his teaching. To shepherds, farmers, doctors, sewers, householders, servants, stewards, fishermen, merchants, laborers, cooks, bakers, sewers, lawyers, scholars, harvesters, fishermen, all of them. He had a great appreciation for human work, and he entered in. You know, it was at the Erasmus lecture a couple weeks ago, and it was in Orthodox.

He had some very good insights, but like he kind of wanted to pretend as if Jesus would have been a farmer because he's totally against civilization almost. And you know, in the question that I asked him, just like, Jesus came as a carpenter. He came as a builder. He came as a tecton. He didn't come as a farmer. What significance do you make of that? We come to build

And that's not contrary to our nature. That's consistent with our nature. We're receptive. We're not trying to build towers of Babel. But Jesus who wanted to build the church first started by building cheers for people and tables. The parable of talent shows that we're supposed to use our gifts in order to bring dividends. There's a spirituality work in which we sanctify the work by trying to offer to God.

We sanctify ourselves through our work, by work well done. We try to do an apostle with others through our work, or just love them by the solid fruit of our labors. And there is a right to work. Workers have rights, and that's why unemployment is so devastating. It's about the worst thing that can happen to a man is to be unemployed, because man's first love language is work.

He tries to work for his family, work for his loved ones, and when he's prevented from working, he's lost in the universe. That's why Pope Francis is so concerned about unemployment among young people. We're spiritual beings, which means we have a transcendence. There's an importance of freedom of conscience and religious freedom that has to be properly exercised. A lot of people in our society don't exercise the religious freedom.

and gradually it's taken away. Freedom is tied to truth, goodness, love, and responsibility. The truth sets us free. It's bound to goodness. We're freely attracted to the good that we wish to choose. It's ultimate purpose is love, but love's never going to be exercised with our responsibility. So our freedom is likewise tied to justice toward God and toward others.

If we think we're free when we end somebody else's life where we exploit them, that's not freedom, that's slavery. In the international context, there are many who try to reduce freedom of religion to freedom of worship. That means they won't get in your way if you go to the mosque on Friday, the synagogue on Saturday, or the church on Sunday. But that's not consistent with our rights. It's not even consistent with the Constitution.

We're supposed to be able to bring our religion to every aspect of our life. Just like people are able to bring their atheism to every aspect of life. And the public square is not supposed to be naked, but clothed. There are different types of violations of religious freedom. Harassment, intimidation, discrimination, persecution, death, genocide.

Religious freedom doesn't mean religious indifferentism or relativism. Catholics we are always seeking to propose rather than impose even though historically at times we did try to impose. The goal for Christians is never just religious tolerance but love for persons even if we don't agree with their idea.

Many in international circles just want tolerance, tolerance, tolerance. Sorry. It's not a bad thing necessarily, but we Christians want more. We want to love our neighbor. Not just tolerate them as if their existence is somehow an evil that we're just enduring.

I'm going to skip through so that we can get to some questions. There are lots of questions on anthropology, bioethics, and public policy that are involved in Catholic social teaching, gender identity, the inseparable connection between love, life, and contraception, respect for life and human dignity, abortion, euthanasia, the evil of artificial procreation, cloning, and the manipulation destruction, freezing of human embryos.

plead premium plantation diagnoses when they're used to just end the lives of those with Down syndrome, for example, or other in utero issues. And surrogacy, surrogacy is one of the biggest exploitation of women that exists today and with commercialized women's rules. It's just incredible, commodified them. And most of the world just says that this is an application of freedom.

migrants, refugees, and internally displaced persons. This is hugely important for the Church today because the rights of so many are being trampled by new forms of xenophobia. We remember the biblical background of migration. Abraham left her. Jacob and his sons moved to Egypt. Moses and the Israelites.

wandered through the desert. It was the exile of Jews to Babylon, the flight of the Holy Family. Jesus' words, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, or you gave me no welcome, whatever you did to the least of my brothers you did to me. We as Christians have got to take this issue super seriously. The principles and keys of Catholic social teaching were all relevant.

common good, universal destination of good, solidarity, subsidiarity and participation. The importance of the family, care for children, dignity of work, rights of workers, the rights to remain and the rights to migrate are all implicated in these questions with regard to migration. Balancing the human rights of those on the move and the rights of individual sovereign countries to secure their borders and establish immigration policy. We've got to balance the two.

Pope Francis is constantly using four verbs. First thing we're going to do is welcome. Second, we've got to protect from exploitation. Third, we've got to promote their authentic human rights. And then we're going to integrate them, not just assimilate them, but integrate them. We don't want them to be their own clicks, living in their own enclaves. We want to integrate them together with all their gifts and talents, not trying to erase them, but make them part of a melting pot.

care for the poor. Jesus tells us that the poor will we will always have with us because wealth needs to be shared. There's always going to be an opportunity to love those who are in need. Jesus himself became poor. He came to proclaim the gospel to the poor. He called all of us to poverty of spirit because our real treasure is the kingdom. He hears the cry to the poor.

and gives the poor special attention. This is the ground of the church's preferential option for the poor. St. John asked, hauntingly, how does God's love abide in anyone who is the world's goods and sees a brother, sister, and beaten yet refuses help? The church fights against poverty, both by helping individual poor people and families, as well as by promoting integral human development and helping them become dignified agents of their own destiny. We lift the poor out of poverty,

But that can't happen if we leave everything to individual charity and to market forces. We'll come back to this quotation a little later, but the corregma, the proclamation of our faith, has a clear social content centered on charity. Christ redeems not only the individual person, but also social relations, who must address the question of economic exclusion. And then finally, in this sort of presentation of principles,

we've got to look at our responsibilities within our own society. God of inspiration and the Second Vatican Council said, Christians as citizens of two cities are to strive to discharge their earthly duties conscientiously in response to the gospel. Their mistake and think that they may therefore shirk their earthly responsibilities or imagine they can plunge themselves into earthly affairs in such a way as to imply that these are altogether divorced from their religious life.

split between the faith and their daily life, deserves to be counted among the most serious errors of our age. Secular duties and activities belong properly, although not exclusively to lay people. It is generally the function of their well-formed Christian conscience to see that the divine laws inscribed in the life of the earthly city. So what's it basically saying? It's saying, raw dryer is totally wrong.

Misapplying who St. Benedict was is if we build ourselves these sort of little enclaves away from society because we can no longer influence it. No, church is saying we have real responsibilities to go out there and solve through the earth light of the world in 11. We've got to take that responsibility seriously that we can't split faith from life.

There are lots of other forces who want to have Christians march into a closet. We need to resist that strongly, is what it's in. St. John Paul II focused on the democratic quality of free economy and a vibrant moral culture as the three underpinnings of a free and virtuous society. We have the responsibility to try to promote all three. Okay. So let's just look a little bit at Catholic social teaching and action. This is an image from Pope Francis at September 25th.

2015 address at the UN. How does the church live this out? Many ways. The real way we do it is on the ground, every Catholic, but then we've got religious orders putting in the practice in all the various dimensions of a new name. But at one of the highest levels, the church is very much involved in international diplomatic work. And this can show in a pristine way, I think, some of how these principles work.

So the whole we see is international juridical personality. We've got the oldest diplomatic corps in the world. I'll just leave it at that.

The biblical ground for the church's interaction. We're called to be salt of the earth, which means preserve our society from going into corruption, giving flavor to everything, and starting a fire. Still today, you put salt and dung in, you light it as chocols. 37% of the people have to breathe that.

in their little huts, which is why many of them die before they're 40, which is one of the reasons why energy policy is so important, but that's what it needs to be the soul of the earth. Light of the world, we enlighten and we warm, leaven that makes the whole dough of society rise, that one Christian can lift up multitudes. One person can make a huge difference who doesn't cave in.

There's clearly a distinction between Caesar and God, while disconnected, well, sorry, while connected, they're distinct. We are to give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar. Always to God what belongs to God, but God wants us to lift up the civil order. The Holy See has individual diplomatic relations with 184 countries. The only country that has more is the United States of America. Diplomatic relations with European Union and other organs.

etc. The Holy See is very much connected in order to try to bring the light of social teaching into every society. The Holy See is not concerned principally with what states are, with what most states are, excuse me, they're concerned with borders, economic benefits, and military security, etc.

The Holy See is concerned with articulating the ethical principles that underpin the social and political order on the basis of universally applicable principles that are as real as the physical elements of an actual environment, as I always say, because they're grounded in who the human person is.

World War II was a thought about United Nations. The USSR, the USA, and the UK were all talking about it. The League of Nations had failed coming out of the end of World War I. Pope Pius XII had a huge concern about the UN, which he stated in Christmas addresses in 1943 and 1944, and it proved to be tremendously prophetic.

He said, if you're going to have the United Nations with a P5, five countries, patently unequal, the original Soviet Union, which isn't necessarily Russia, Ukraine constantly makes that point. Why isn't Ukraine on that? Security Council, rather than Russia. Taiwan, rather than the CCCP, the UK, France, and the US.

In 1945, these five countries had 80% of the military of the world. Now we've got just about 30% of the military of the world. And so why are these the only countries? Why don't we have anybody from Africa? Why don't we have anybody from Latin America? Big questions that are there. So probably unequal. And so that's not going to be helpful long term. Like, for example, when Russia on the Security Council invades its neighbor with no provocation.

Second was that if the General Assembly of the United Nations had no real authority to enforce its decisions, it would devolve into the world's most prestigious debating society. And that's essentially what it's become. Lots of resolutions with no impact, but Pope Francis in this photo called Declarationless Nominalism. Whole bunch of words, whole bunch of decorations, but no results.

He says that's not consistent with justice. But as conceived, the UN was very much aligned with Catholic social teaching. First, principle was peace to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war. Okay, check. Second, was about human dignity and the rights that flow from it to reaffirm faith is from the charter.

through reaffirm faith and fundamental human rights, and the dignity and the worth of human person, the equal rights of men and women and of nations, large and small. Third, from the fourth century, the church always talked about paktasun sivanda that treaties need to be kept. And this is the condition that the Secretary General of the United Nations never mentioned anymore.

to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sorts of international law can be maintained. So we've got to keep our agreements, we've got to keep our words. So that, for example, the Trump administration can't follow the Biden administration, just say we totally change what we've agreed to when an international treaty. This isn't just a policy.

But we've also just, even if there's been no succession, keep the commitments that are there. The reason why the Secretary General doesn't mention anymore, because it's a massive scandal that so many just don't care what they've agreed to. And lastly, is lifting a poor out of poverty, whereas the Charter says promoting social progress in better standards of life and larger freedom. Perennial and present priorities of all we see diplomacy,

This is stuff that we were trying to implement all the time. First piece is the biggest priority. And the Holy See really tries to work as peacemakers wherever anybody will allow us. Fundamental human rights. The basic human rights. Not every right claim, but fundamental human rights we push. Most of those are allocated in the UDHR in 1948. Development and seeking to lift the poor out of poverty, especially the extreme poor.

You know what's super interesting during my time there is the Sustainable Development Agenda was passed immediately after Pope Francis stopped talking here. Same day, same hour. First of the SDGs is all about lifting people out of extreme poverty, but the EU started to forget SDG1.

and kept basically focusing only on the environment rather than on poor people. Freedom, especially religious freedom and freedom of conscience. These are types of freedoms that are not being defended adequately at an international level. Intercultural dialogue.

so fraternity and social friendship. We've got to help the religions of the world set the example for the political realities of the world to be able to interlate. Support for democratic institutions. This doesn't get enough attention, but the Holy See has always been involved here because it's much more consistent with the rights of people

and their freedoms, but at the same time, most of the attacks against human dignity come from authoritarian regimes. Care for migrants and refugees, all we see was really one of the leads on the in 2016 on the global compact for, say, quarterly and regular migration. Care for our common home. And so we finished with Pope Francis. This is in his

He said, reading the scriptures also makes it clear that the gospel isn't merely about our personal relationship with God.

Nor should our loving response to God be seen simply as an accumulation of small personal gestures to individuals in need, a kind of charity, a la cas, for a series of acts aimed solely at easing our conscience. The gospel is about the kingdom of God. It's about loving God who reigns in the world. To the extent that he reigns within us, the life of society will be a setting for universal fraternity, justice, peace, and dignity.

Both Christian preaching and Christian life, then, are meant to have an impact on society. True Christian hope, it continues, which seeks the eschatological kingdom, the definitive coming of the kingdom of God, always generates history. So do we care about the kingdom of God, as I was saying yesterday? We don't withdraw from society. We try to bring the values of the kingdom into society. Again, the corigma has a clear social content.

It translates love of neighbor. Our redemption is a social dimension, because God and Christ are deemed not just individuals, but also the social relations existing between people. These are the convictions that undergird the Holy Season diplomatic work, bringing the light of Catholic social teaching the problems facing the world. It's part of the church's seeking to be the soul through the earth, the light of the world, and the love that raises everybody up.

So if I've gone a little too fast and you'd like to have any slides of the talk, you can just go to Catholic Preaching and get it there. And now I've got time for some of your questions and your input and your feedback. So thanks everybody for coming.