Ruminations on "Catholic Legal Thought" Prompted by Thoughts on Marx and CST

At a conference over the weekend, I had what one observer referred to as a "full and frank" discussion of the intellectual roots of Catholic social thought with esteemed Catholic legal scholar Tom Shaffer. As I understood Tom's claim, he argued that CST is basically Marxist in origin because it accepts virtually all of Marx's core principals excepting only such things as the claim that religion is the opiate of the masses and so on.

I will concede that elements of CST were infused with a Marxist sensibility during the heyday of liberation theology, of course, but I rather forcefully rejected Tom's apparent view that the key documents - especially the foundation stone laid by Rerum Novarum should be understood as even quasi-Marxist documents.

In doing some subsequent research on the subject, I found a very interesting essay on the historical roots of CST by Father Robert Sirico. Fr. Sirico concludes that:

Taken as a whole, and read in the context of its historical setting, Rerum Novarum provides one of the most finely honed defenses of the free market and private property order in the annals of Catholic, indeed Christian, social thought up until the appearance of Centesimus Annus, which expands Leo's notion of property beyond land ownership, to include "the possession of know-how, technology and skill." (#32)

I suspect our friend and leader Mark Sargent would add Sirico to his list of CST outliers, which as well all know includes myself and Michael Novak (at least I'm in very good company!). Yet, I thought Sirico's essay makes a very strong case that the key documents of CST in fact can be squared with a classical liberal understanding of the roles of the state and the economy. More precisely, Sirico claims:

Articulating a classically liberal view of the social crisis is obviously not what Leo had in mind when he wrote his encyclical. Yet, I would contend that classical liberal thought is at least as much in the tradition of Rerum Novarum as is the collectivist interpretation it has historically received.

Indeed, the standard interpretation given Rerum Novarum in many circles has obfuscated much of what is authentically liberal in Catholic social thought. Unfortunately, the interpretations of certain theorists have so dominated discussions on what is the proper Christian response to social, political, and economic calamities or injustices, that any classical liberal interpretation of contemporary injustices is greeted as naive, insensitive, or even heretical.

Perhaps it is precisely because CST is capable of both such an interpretation and that given it by Tom Shaffer that we end up, as Mark Sargent put it at the conference, back where we started from. In other words, it perhaps is not surprising that putting ideas through what Mark calls the "Catholic wringer" leads us back to the same place we would arrive using wholly secular precepts.

This line of analysis may call into question the enterprise to which the Mirror of Justice blog is devoted; namely, is it worth trying to figure out what a distinctively Catholic legal thought looks lie? Is CST and Catholicism generally such a big tent that there inevitably will be multiple legitimate Catholic perspectives on legal questions? If so, what do we add to the debate by invoking CST other than perhaps very useful end of insisting that faith-based discourse has a legitimate role in the public square?

Mark's remarks at the conference last Saturday raised very similar questions. (I hope Mark will print those remarks up for the blog and/or publication, as they were quite provocative.) Our post-speeches panel discussion further explored some of them. Because I'm genuinely curious about these issues, I now pose these questions to the rest of our fellow Mirror of Justice bloggers.