A Single Paragraph on CST

A friend asked me the other day why Catholic social teaching (CST) isn’t taken more seriously. I replied with, “Because most of its loudmouth proponents are heterodox.” I was only half-joking, of course. However, it is hard to shake the sense that there is a contingent—even a very large contingent—of pro-CST types whose Christian horizon doesn’t expand much beyond their pet socialist sympathies or re-distributionist tendencies. That’s too bad, because it wasn’t always so. Crack open a copy of Fr. Edward Cahill’s The Framework of a Christian State or any book penned by Fr. Denis Fahey and you will quickly see that their rigorous promotion of CST is inextricably bound-up with strict doctrinal orthodoxy. They do not write “provocative” theological opinions or try to re-image Christ as some sort of social revolutionary, a man whose divinity is confirmed by His “political message” rather than the revelation He brings. While there are many Catholics today who acknowledge CST as an authentic expression of the Church’s magisterium without breaking from the Church’s other teachings, they are not as visible as they ought to be, or so I have found. That really is a shame, yet not the most shameful thing going on in the Church today. So it goes.

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