On the Dignity of Society: Catholic Social Teaching and Natural Law

Dick Helmholz came to the University of Chicago in 1981 after teaching for ten years at Washington University in St. Louis. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he also received an AB in French literature from Princeton University and a PhD in medieval history from the University of California at Berkeley.

In the course of his career, he has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize. In the academic year 2000 to 2001, he served as the Arthur Goodhart Professor of Law in Cambridge University where he was also elected to a fellowship at Gonville and Caius College. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, a Member of the American Law Institute, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

Professor Helmholz’s teaching interests have been centered in the law of property and in various aspects of natural resources law. His research interests have been concentrated in legal history. In the latter, his principal contribution has been to show the relevance of the Roman and canon laws to the development of the common law.

Russell Hittinger was the incumbent of the William K. Warren Chair of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa, where he was also a Research Professor in the School of Law. Since May 2019 he is the Emeritus Professor of Religion.

In 2019, he became the Senior Fellow at the Lumen Christi Institute at the University of Chicago, where he is a Visiting Scholar in the John U. Neff Committee on Social Thought, and Visiting Professor in the Law School at the University of Chicago.

From 2020 through 2022 he was a Visiting Professor at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology (Graduate Theological Union, University of California, Berkeley), where he had served as Dean of the College of Fellows since 2014.

In January 2020 he gave the Aquinas Lecture at Blackfriars, Oxford. He will receive the Aquinas Medal from the American Catholic Philosophical Association in November 2023.

Since 2001, he is a member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, to which he was elected a full member (ordinarius) in 2004, and appointed to the consilium or governing board from 2006-2018. On Sept. 8, 2009, Pope Benedict XVI appointed Professor Hittinger as an ordinarius in the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, in which he finished his ten-year term in 2019.

In 2005, he was named an Alonzo MacDonald Senior Fellow for Christian Jurisprudence in the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University School of Law. He remains an Affiliated Scholar.

He has taught at Fordham University and at the Catholic University of America, and has taught as a Visiting Professor at Princeton University, New York University, Providence College, and Charles University in Prague. During the academic term 2014-15, he was a Visiting Ordinary Professor in the School of Business and Economics at the Catholic University of America.

On 25 May 2013, he was awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters (Honoris Causa) by The Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA. He gave the 81st annual commencement address. He was elected Dean of the College of Fellows at Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology (Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley) in 2014.

In 2003, to mark the centenary of the death of Pope Leo XIII, Professor Hittinger gave a lecture to the Ministry of Culture of the Italian Government. In 2004 he gave a talk titled “Secularity and the Anthropological Problem,” as the Inaugural Claude Ryan Lecture in Catholic Social Thought, at McGill University in Montreal. In December 2006, he addressed the President, Prime Minister, and Speakers of the Polish Parliament in the Royal Castle in Warsaw. His keynote address culminated a week-long celebration of human rights and the Polish constitution.

In 2000, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, where he is on the Board of Advisors. For the academic year 2007-08, he was the Robert J. Randall Distinguished Visiting Professor in Christian Culture at Providence College.

His books and articles have appeared through the University of Notre Dame Press, Oxford University Press, Columbia University Press, Fordham University Press, the Review of Metaphysics, the Journal of Law and Religion, the Review of Politics, and several law journals (both American and European). He has work forthcoming with Catholic University of America press.

Scott J. Roniger is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he currently holds the Fr. Robert H. Taylor, SJ Chair in Philosophy and directs the Lonergan Center for Catholic Faith and Culture. He earned a Baccalaureate in Sacred Theology (STB), summa cum laude, and a Masters of Sacred Theology, magna cum laude, from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. He then earned a Master of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Chicago and a Licentiate in Philosophy (Ph.L.), summa cum laude, from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. He earned his doctorate in philosophy, with distinction, from The Catholic University of America under the direction of Robert Sokolowski. He has published scholarly articles on metaphysics, Catholic social teaching, phenomenology, ethics and political philosophy, and philosophy and literature. He is currently editing a collection of essays by Russell Hittinger on natural law and Catholic social teaching. His research recapitulates themes in Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Husserlian phenomenology. He regularly teaches classes on these topics and figures, as well as classes at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and theology.

Mary Hirschfeld is the John T. Ryan Jr. Associate Professor of Theology and Business Ethics, Academic Director of the Business Ethics and Society Program. She works on the boundaries between theology and economics using an approach rooted in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. She has written on economic inequality, the technocratic paradigm, the financial crisis and the common good.

Selected Publications Aquinas and the Market: Toward a Humane Economy (Harvard University Press, 2018), “Rethinking Economic Inequality: A Theological Perspective,” Journal of Religious Ethics, 42(2) (June 2019): 259-282, “Reflection on the Financial Crisis: Aquinas on the Proper Role of Finance,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 35(1) (Spring-Summer 2015): 63-82, “What is the Technocratic Paradigm and Must Business Be Structured By It?,” chapter in Business Ethics and Catholic Social Thought, Daniel K. Finn (ed.) (Georgetown University Press, May 2021): 93-113, “What Theology Should and Should Not Learn from the Social Sciences About the Common Good,” in Empirical Foundations of the Common Good: What Theology Can Learn from the Social Sciences, Daniel K. Finn (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017): 208-240.