Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry (PEG), a neo-Catholic economic liberal, is taking umbrage with Patrick Deneen’s claim at Ethika Politika that those whom the latter refers to as “neoconservative Catholics” (see my brief thoughts on that here) “have tended, then, to read the Church’s teaching on sexual ethics to be inviolable, but Catholic social teaching regarding economics to be a set of broad and even vague guidelines.” PEG goes on to pitch a fit, claiming that the distinction Deneen attributes to neoconservative Catholics is the very distinction the Catholic Church herself maintains. To back up his claim, PEG lifts a passage from the Catechism that happens to be quoting a very small section of Pope John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus which, according to PEG, is “thoroughly platitudinous” as compared to the Catechism’s section on abortion. Even so, that hardly means the Church’s social magisterium, or what we commonly call Catholic Social Teaching (CST), is nothing but a set of platitudes and hortatory declarations with no binding force. Even if CST were comprised of nothing but vague and highly abstract guidelines, it wouldn’t mean that they are due less accord than the more apodictic statements the Church has made on topics such as abortion, fornication, and marriage. However, the Church’s social magisterium is not nearly as vague or abstract as PEG intimates, and the whole of it cannot be captured by appealing to a partial passage from a single encyclical.