As Michael observes, this new interview with Pope Francis is remarkable. Pope Francis's interview contains a "separate spheres" description of the relationship between church teaching and the obligations of political officials that, as he acknowledges, differs in "accent" from the way this relationship has previously been described.
For those concerned with the development of Catholic legal theory, it is becoming increasingly clear that renewed attention must be given to the relationship between Catholic social teaching and positive law. As I read Pope Francis's interview, it is important to distinguish between the limited political competence of the institutional church, on the one hand, and the religious obligations of Christians in the political sphere, on the other. The lay Christian's obligations as a citizen of the earthly city are underdetermined in specificity by the Church's social teaching. But as Gaudium et Spes instructs, the laity must not forget that "it is generally the function of their well-formed Christian conscience to see that the divine law is inscribed in the life of the earthly city."
From the perspective of Catholic legal theory more particularly, perhaps there is an analogy here with the way in which the positive law is underdetermined in specificity by the natural law. The positive law must always be shaped by reference to the natural law, but it underdetermines the content of positive law. As John Finnis has explained, "[n]atural law theory's central strategy for explaining the law's authority points to the under-determinacy (far short of sheer indeterminacy) of most if not all of practical reasons's requirements in the field of open-ended (not merely technological) self-determination by individuals and societies." Collected Essays of John Finnis, Vol. IV, Essay V, p. 114.
In what follows, I situate Pope Francis's comments in relation to observations of the Second Vatican Council in Gaudium et Spes and Pope Benedict XVI in Caritas in Veritate.
