On the Dignity of Society: Catholic Social Teaching and Natural Law
by F. Russell Hittinger.
Catholic University of America Press, 2024.
Edited by Scott J. Roniger.
Review by K. T. Brizek:
In recent decades, the faithful have often found themselves really or potentially divided: are you a ‘conservative’ Catholic or a ‘liberal’ Catholic? Do you care primarily about the Church’s teaching on marriage or are you more enlivened by the preferential option for the poor? These novel political categories are superimposed onto Catholic belief and practice such that we often feel more like we are registering to vote in a presidential primary than bearing in our bodies the resurrection of Christ crucified. A third group has an uneasy sense that ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ don’t have much to do with Catholicism, but cannot quite put their finger on how.
Russell Hittinger’s magisterial volume, On the Dignity of Society, offers the interpretive key which makes sense of this muddle. What came to be known as ‘Catholic social teaching’ is often traced to the publication of Rerum Novarum in 1891, when Leo XIII spoke out against the excesses of industrial capitalism and the new plight of the poor in the age after the enclosure of the commons and the rise of wage labor. But the story, Hittinger explains, actually dates back to 1789, when the revolution of the Third Estate overthrew the French monarchy and with it the societal institutions linked to the Church.
The body of teaching we know as Catholic social thought thus began with the rise of modern nation-states. The tradition beginning with Leo and continuing through Pope Francis engages with the modern and what ‘modern’ means specifically from the standpoint of human societies. Namely, the politically modern is distinguished by representative forms of government, but perhaps even more importantly by a privatization of religion (in many places) and the subordinating of all other forms of human sociality to the power of the state. When Jacques Maritain and Dietrich von Hildebrand originated the concept of the total state in the 1930s, they stood in a centuries-long Church tradition of wariness toward the growing power of the nation-state and its trajectory towards totalitarianism.1
Catholic social thought is a body of writings, which pontiffs and their theologians have developed to address not only a new political context of disestablishment and banishment from the halls of political power, but also new concerns over the state’s tendency to arrogate control of all forms of human sociality to itself. In Hittinger’s view, the state ostensibly gives freedom to its members by delimiting the public from the private, while in fact it more tightly controls the Church, human relationships, and community than medieval courts ever could. Against this tendency, the Church asserted again and again that society is natural to human beings and the three necessary societies—family, polity, and church—have natural or supernatural forms, purposes, and prerogatives which the state may in no way alter or subvert.
A tour de force, standing at the pinnacle of a long and fruitful career, On the Dignity of Society includes Hittinger’s original interpretations of natural law, his inimitable insights into the makings of papal encyclicals and matchless cross-section of his expertise in philosophy, theology, Church history, and law. With pieces from across the three stages of his academic career, Hittinger’s latest publication finally makes available to the wider public the important line of thought he has been developing and teaching to Lumen Christi students for over a decade, in his semiannual summer seminar on ‘Catholic Social Though: A Critical Investigation.’ His co-teacher for the seminar, Prof. Scott Roniger, is the editor of the volume.
1Chappel, James. “THE CATHOLIC ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM THEORY IN INTERWAR EUROPE.” Modern Intellectual History 8, no. 3 (November 2011): 561–90.