Natural Law in Catholic Social Teaching

Introduction
According to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, there are seven main themes of Catholic Social Teaching: 1) Life and Dignity of the Human Person, which highlights the intrinsic value and goodness of life and the fact that the human person was made in the image and likeness of God and therefore should not be abused or desecrated; 2) Call to Family, Community and Participation, which highlights the idea man is a social creature, the family is the building block of society, and men are meant to work for the common good, have children and show charity towards one another; 3) Rights and Responsibilities, which focuses on the duty and rights of the individual in society; 4) Option for the Poor and Vulnerable, which highlights the need for charity for the underserved; 5) Solidarity, which refers to the need for peace, justice, faith and charity to be interwoven into human actions around the world; 6) Care for God’s Creation, which emphasizes the value of taking care of the environment rather than mistreating and abusing the world that God has given to people; and 7) The Dignity of Work and the Rights of Workers, which was especially highlighted by Pope Leo in Rerum novarum and showed that employers should respect and care for laborers and apply Christian principles in the workplace.[footnoteRef:2] These themes of Catholic Social Teaching are rooted in the Church’s teaching on natural. This paper will show how natural law from the time of Aristotle till now has complemented the Church’s moral law and provided a framework for its own social teaching, and it will also show how the Enlightenment Era Social Contract perverted the notion of natural law by viewing it from a liberal and atheistic perspective. [2: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Seven Themes of Catholic Social Teaching,” http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/what-we-believe/catholic-social-teaching/seven-themes-of-catholic-social-teaching.cfm]
The Natural Law
Natural law ethics were articulated by Aristotle in classical Greek philosophy and have been a mainstay of Western philosophy ever since, being discussed by Roman philosophers, early Church Fathers and Scholastics in the Middle Ages. It was not until the Reformation and the Age of Enlightenment when modern society began to reject the Old World values where natural law conformed with moral law. Enlightenment philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau abandoned the notion of Original Sin and of fallen human nature and viewed natural law from a liberal perspective in which every human impulse was deemed good regardless of whether form followed function. For Rousseau liberty was what mattered most, and that meant rejection of the order of the medieval Church and of the doctrines of sin and redemption. But Catholic Social Teaching only makes sense within the parameters of sin and redemption, for outside those parameters are only empty worldly solutions based on false hopes, political promises, and short-sighted economic solutions. The Enlightenment philosophers argued that man in his natural state was sufficient unto himself.
Such was Rousseau’s point of view, which is why he argued mostly for liberty. He believed that people should be left to be as they would like to be. He argued that it was the dogmas and institutions that got in the way, that corrupted youth and caused them to misbehave. Oppression, in his eyes, came from people seeking power over others and those people tended to use religion or government to gain that power. He believed that everyone should be free.
By rejecting the Old World concept of Original Sin, the Enlightenment philosophers could make these assumptions about human beings—i.e., that if they were just given the right system of organization they would be able to govern themselves without problem. What they neglected to consider was that human nature is indeed programmed with a default mechanism that causes one to pursue all the known vices—greed, envy, wrath, pride, lust, etc. The Enlightenment was essentially a materialistic philosophy that had a distorted view of human nature and nature itself. It placed far too much emphasis on reason and logic. The Romantic era that would follow would show the extent to which the Enlightenment thinkers had gotten it wrong, as the Romantics would place their focus on feeling and passion and man’s irrational side. This led to a corrupt understanding of the Rights of Man.
The Rights of Man
In the 18th century, the rights of man were not a matter to be taken lightly or even something that one took for granted. As Lynn Hunt points out, one of the big questions over right was the issue of voting—the distinction between political and civil rights: “Political rights guaranteed equal participation; civil rights guaranteed equal treatment before the law in matters concerning marriage, property, and inheritance.”[footnoteRef:3] Nowadays, the assumption is that people should have both civil and political rights and that these are part of their basic human rights—but such was not the notion in France. Certainly it was not the notion in America, where the test run for the French Revolution was conducted via the Declaration of Independence and the War that followed. [3: Lynn Hunt, \"Introduction: The Revolutionary Origins of Human Rights.\" In The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief History with Documents, 2nd Edition, edited by Lynn Hunt, 1-31 (Boston: Bedford, 2016), 1.]
Rousseau had helped to champion the idea of these rights, but he never moved beyond a vague, romantic idea of emancipation and freedom. Liberty was like an 18th century intellectual drug that fueled many a heady debate in many a salon. It was not necessarily something that anyone expected or foresaw needing to be writ down in fine, well-examined terms. Rousseau’s doctrines had helped to inspire the surge in Revolutionary ardor, but had done little in terms of developing a scholastic-like approach to the problem of governance. Those with a more scholastic-like mind, men like Abbe Sieyes, for example, demonstrated a bit more restraint in their approach to the rights of man than did Robespierre, who pushed for total equality and saw it as one of the noblest virtues of the revolution.
Natural law as summarized by Diderot in the middle of the 18th century in France had done enough to provoke outcry among the Old World political and religious classes. Like most of the Enlightenment thinkers, the idea of Original Sin was rejected, and naturalism like what Rousseau envisioned was viewed as wholly appropriate and acceptable and something that the Old World institutions blocked and opposed on principle because the leaders of the Old World knew if naturalism ever got a toehold in society, society would reject the Old World institutions out of hand.[footnoteRef:4] That was the belief of the Romantics and Revolutionaries, of Rousseau and his offspring, at any rate. Sieyes, who had become a Catholic priest (though his actual belief in the tenets of Catholicism is another matter), had a more reserved opinion on the matter, which came forward in his own arguments on how the rights of man should be observed by the new French Republic being created on the corpse of the monarchy. [4: Lynn Hunt, \"Introduction: The Revolutionary Origins of Human Rights.\" In The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief History with Documents, 2nd Edition, edited by Lynn Hunt, 1-31 (Boston: Bedford, 2016), 5.]
If there was any commonality among the Revolutionaries, however, it was at least on the matter of liberty. When the revolutionaries took over in France, the first principle they put forward was an echo of Rousseau’s doctrine in The Social Contract. Rousseau had written that man is born free and everywhere he is in chains in The Social Contract. The National Assembly in France in 1789 wrote: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on common utility.”[footnoteRef:5] In reality, the idea did not play out quite as practically as the revolutionaries envisioned. Political enemies were slaughtered by the thousands. Freedom and equality could not abide, it turned out, criticism or objection. In spite of the inherent contradictions in the doctrines of the Revolutions, their Social Contract succeeded in becoming the grounds for Social Action in the Modern World. However, many of their doctrines were materialistic, anti-God, and liberal and thus were a danger to Catholic morals and faith. Thus, the Church, beginning mainly with Leo XIII and Rerum novarum, began to assess and discuss the social issues that Christians faced. [5: National Assembly. “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 26 August 1789.” Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/exhibits/show/liberty--equality--fraternity/item/3216]
Just by Nature
Nature was made and ordered by God for a specific end—all things have a purpose and a reason, as can be found in Ecclesiastes 3:1-10. What is most interesting about the manner in which these verses are framed, however, is the fact that there is no appeal here to divine wisdom. God is not mentioned until the tenth line, and then the reference is negative for God is associated with “burden” and the toll that God “has laid on the human race” (Ecclesiastes 3:10). Thus the section is bookended by an appeal to the wisdom of nature on one end and by an acknowledgement of the oppressed state of mankind by God on the other hand. It is not the kind of filial or spiritual devotion that one would find in Psalms. This represents a worldly (literally) wisdom. The idea present in the verses is that there is a wisdom or law inherent in nature that can be read and understand by the human intellect. Moreover, this natural law can be shown to be in conformity with the moral law of the Church, as the Scholastics, including Aquinas, would show. That is why Aquinas appeals so heavily to classical Greek philosophy: it has keen insight in the natural law, which can help to illuminate the moral law of the Catholic Church. Social Catholic Teaching follows from this sense of being “just by nature,” as Aristotle put it.[footnoteRef:6] Barton suggests that there are aspects of the philosophy of Heraclitus in the verses.[footnoteRef:7] Regardless, Ecclesiastes 3:1-10 certainly provides a Scriptural basis for the existence of natural law. [6: Stephen J. Pope, “Natural Law in Catholic Social Teachings,” 41. https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/centers/boisi/pdf/f09/Pope_Natural_Law_In.pdf] [7: George Aaron Barton, A critical and exegetical commentary on the book of Ecclesiastes. Vol. 17. (Scribner, 1908), 101.]
As Pope notes, “the first Christians saw creation as the reflection of the Creator’s wise governance.”[footnoteRef:8] The Book of Wisdom notes as well that there is an order to nature that can teach one wisdom (Wisdom 8:1). This concept of natural law was certainly not unknown to the early Church Fathers and apologists. Justin states that God gave this knowledge of the natural law to every people throughout the world, regardless of their race or their religion. This is what Plato and Aristotle talked about in their philosophies, referring to them as the Universals and the Transcendentals.[footnoteRef:9] [8: Stephen J. Pope, “Natural Law in Catholic Social Teachings,” 42. https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/centers/boisi/pdf/f09/Pope_Natural_Law_In.pdf] [9: Stephen J. Pope, “Natural Law in Catholic Social Teachings,” 42. https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/centers/boisi/pdf/f09/Pope_Natural_Law_In.pdf]
Pope contends that the Church used the natural law for two reasons: First, natural law provided Christians with a means of interpreting social, political and economic concerns from the standpoint of living the faith in the word; and “second, Christians in. the Roman Empire, not entirely unlike Christians today, faced the problem of communicating their convictions to citizens who did not necessarily share their religious convictions.”[footnoteRef:10] Natural law helped them to rest faith upon reason by showing that there was nothing in the faith that went against nature or that contradicted the natural law. The faith held supernatural truths but as far as natural law went the faith could be seen as a religious complement to the philosophers like Aristotle and Plato who expounded upon natural law from a rational perspective. Christian apologists could use that natural law as a grounds for expounding upon the faith, as they saw that source of great reason and insight feeding into the great body of faith the way a river flows into the sea. [10: Stephen J. Pope, “Natural Law in Catholic Social Teachings,” 42. https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/centers/boisi/pdf/f09/Pope_Natural_Law_In.pdf]
Gratian in the 12th century wrote that natural law as being the primary source of law in the Gospels.[footnoteRef:11] Isidore of Seville noted that “any provisions of human law that contradict natural law are ‘null and void.’”[footnoteRef:12] Out of this sense came the medieval sense of “subjective rights,” such as the right to marry under the law, the right to self-defense and the right to property.[footnoteRef:13] The modern notion of the natural rights of man followed from this medieval sense but skewed the concept by applying a liberal filter. [11: Stephen J. Pope, “Natural Law in Catholic Social Teachings,” 43. https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/centers/boisi/pdf/f09/Pope_Natural_Law_In.pdf] [12: Stephen J. Pope, “Natural Law in Catholic Social Teachings,” 43. https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/centers/boisi/pdf/f09/Pope_Natural_Law_In.pdf] [13: Stephen J. Pope, “Natural Law in Catholic Social Teachings,” 43. https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/centers/boisi/pdf/f09/Pope_Natural_Law_In.pdf]
But it was Aquinas who provides the most thorough exploration of natural law. Aquinas situated natural within a hierarchy of laws, first being eternal law that governs the universe, second being divine law as revealed in Scripture and the Church, third being natural law that identifies the moral standards for human conduct, fourth being human law, such as civilian law from governments. What Aquinas showed was that “because the simple promptings of nature do not suffice to meet the typically very complex needs of human beings, reason is required to penetrate and extend the normative implications of natural law. Natural law requires acts to which nature does not spontaneously incline but which reason identifies as good.”[footnoteRef:14] In other words, natural law is not a free for all ala the dimensions of the modern philosophers from Rousseau onward. It is rather a clear indication of the way that one should conduct oneself, but as the Church points out grace is required for the moral order to be maintained. The natural law in short requires some effort from human beings. It is not a construct that extends from liberal politics and socialist views. Right reason is required and if applied ensures that “natural law avoids the two opposite extremes of reductive materialism and otherworldly idealism.”[footnoteRef:15] Ultimately, Aquinas concludes that the natural law is simply the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law. [14: Stephen J. Pope, “Natural Law in Catholic Social Teachings,” 43. https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/centers/boisi/pdf/f09/Pope_Natural_Law_In.pdf] [15: Stephen J. Pope, “Natural Law in Catholic Social Teachings,” 43-4. https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/centers/boisi/pdf/f09/Pope_Natural_Law_In.pdf]
Catholic social teaching thus comes about as a result of the application of the eternal law, but the danger for some Catholics becomes interpreting that through a skewed natural law lens that is modernist. As Pope points out, however, “we exist by nature as parts of larger social wholes on which we depend for our existence and functioning, and these provide instrumental reasons for participating in political community.”[footnoteRef:16] Preservation of the community and the common good are part and parcel for what makes up a person’s duty and obligation and purpose in society. At the same time, the natural law focuses on natural purposes, so the purpose of the family, the purpose of the community, the purpose of justice—all of this has to be considered andd everything has to be interpreted from the standpoint of purpose. This is why the Enlightenment philosophers got off on such a wrong foot: they interpreted natural law from the standpoint of romantic idealism and wishful thinking—not from reality or purpose. Thus, in the modern era sex has been divorced from procreation (its natural and therefore moral purpose) and instead the purpose has been defined from a pleasure perspective (i.e., Enlightenment morality). [16: Stephen J. Pope, “Natural Law in Catholic Social Teachings,” 44. https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/centers/boisi/pdf/f09/Pope_Natural_Law_In.pdf]
The modern notion of social teaching has been corrupted by the incorporation of non-Christian principles. As Pope states, natural law theory evolved in secular ways that “came to regard the human predicament as essentially conflicted, apolitical, and even antisocial.”[footnoteRef:17] Kant tried to return the discussion of natural law to at least a perspective duty with deontological ethics being the basis of moral action, and Kantian philosophy is said to have influence John Paul II in his writings on social teaching, as there is in John Paul II’s work “a recurrent emphasis on the dignity of the person, on the right of each person to ‘respect,’ and on the absolute centrality of human rights within any just social order.”[footnoteRef:18] Catholic social teaching from Leo XIII to John Paul II has both disagreed and agreed with the natural law traditions of both the Old World and the modern era, which reflects a changing in Church teaching as well, particularly after the Second Vatican Council, which sought to reconcile the social teaching of the Church with the modern world. [17: Stephen J. Pope, “Natural Law in Catholic Social Teachings,” 46. https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/centers/boisi/pdf/f09/Pope_Natural_Law_In.pdf] [18: Stephen J. Pope, “Natural Law in Catholic Social Teachings,” 48. https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/centers/boisi/pdf/f09/Pope_Natural_Law_In.pdf]
Leo XIII focused on the welfare of the working class in Rerum novarum and for good reason: the industrialists had taken to exploiting the labor of the working class and working them long hours without providing them with a just wage or with concern for their responsibilities to their families. Thus, Leo XIII addressed this issue at a time when social circumstances were changing because of technological and industrial changes. Leo XIII thus developed a model of how society should work and insisted that Christian principles be applied if workers were going to unionize. Without those principles to guide them, they would quickly devolve into an organization antithetical to the aims of the Church and God and at odds with natural law as traditionally interpreted.
The post-Vatican II popes, however, focused more on the rights of man and the dignity of man from a more modern perspective in keeping with the spirit of Vatican II.[footnoteRef:19] Paul VI for instance watered down and relaxed at least in spirit if not in the letter the Church’s attitudes on procreation, and John Paul II discussed democracy as though it were an officially approved form of government by God Himself, without assessing any of the major pitfalls and problems that a democratic society can bring to light. Too much incorporation of liberal principles, i.e., religious liberty, had clouded the Church’s perspective on natural law and how it should be applied in Catholic social teaching. John XXIII’s Gaudium et spes essentially sought to embrace the modern world, and the Second Vatican Council’s attitudes towards modernism stood in stark contrast to those of the Church in the 19th century under Leo XIII and the early 20th century under St. Pius X, and this led to different foci in terms of social teaching. [19: Stephen J. Pope, “Natural Law in Catholic Social Teachings,” 54. https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/centers/boisi/pdf/f09/Pope_Natural_Law_In.pdf]
Conclusion
In conclusion, natural law guided the Church in its social teaching from the beginning. Aquinas articulated it most fully, but with the Enlightenment Era, natural law was reinterpreted from a liberal perspective and eventually that perspective crept into the Church through Vatican II. That led ultimately to changes in the way the Church’s social teaching was expressed. Leo XIII set the tone for Catholic Social Teaching in the 19th century and it was not a tone that sought to embrace modern times or to be accepted by those with an anti-Christian or anti-Catholic bias. By the time the Vatican II popes came around, however, the social teaching of the Church seemed eager to be more reconciliatory with the liberalized world, attempting to marry Catholic social teaching with liberal social teaching in a way.
Bibliography
Barton, George Aaron. A critical and exegetical commentary on the book of Ecclesiastes. Vol. 17. Scribner, 1908.
Hunt, Lynn. \"Introduction: The Revolutionary Origins of Human Rights.\" In The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief History with Documents, 2nd Edition, edited by Lynn Hunt, 1-31. Boston: Bedford, 2016 National Assembly. “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 26 August 1789.”
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. Accessed November 4, 2019. http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/exhibits/show/liberty--equality--fraternity/item/3216
Pope, Stephen J. “Natural Law in Catholic Social Teachings.” https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/centers/boisi/pdf/f09/Pope_Natural_Law_In.pdf
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Seven Themes of Catholic Social Teaching,” http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/what-we-believe/catholic-social-teaching/seven-themes-of-catholic-social-teaching.cfm