Politics have not always been liberal, and won’t remain so forever.

The Idea of a Catholic Society

by James Kalb

What would it mean for society and its institutions, including government,

 to become Catholic?

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Times are bad for Catholics now, but times change, other people have problems too, and we don’t know how things will look in fifty or a hundred years. Politics have not always been liberal, and won’t remain so forever. I’ve argued that the Catholic view is likely to be more enduring and resilient than the liberal one, simply because it’s more adequate to reality. If that’s right, and social leaders generally come to adopt more and more of the Catholic view and look to it as a way of understanding their jobs, society will stop being liberal and become Catholic. Why would that development be something for a Catholic to object to?

To say a society is Catholic is not to say it has no room for anything else. Catholicism is less a collection of rules than an understanding of what the world is like that helps us deal with it in ways that make sense. So if some people are not Catholic, others aren’t as good as they should be, and many concerns are much the same for Catholics and non-Catholics, it helps deal with that state of affairs as well.

A Catholic society could, for example, be liberal and democratic in many ways. Liberal goals and institutions are often good, but only up to a point and not as the highest standard. So the judiciary could be independent, accused persons could be tried by jury, high officials could be chosen by popular vote, and there could be extensive freedom of discussion and belief. The point is that pure choice would be limited by the public good, as it always is in one way or another, but the public good would be determined in a Catholic rather than techno-hedonistic sense. So actions and utterances at odds with Catholicism would likely be treated much as practices and utterances at odds with advanced liberalism are treated today. To pick an example, instead of worrying about hate speech the authorities might worry about gross impiety, and look for a sensible way to respond to it while respecting other concerns.

None of these speculations, of course, has immediate application.

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Read more: www.catholicworldreport.com