Abstract
The through line of Catholic anti-liberalism runs wobbly but true from the Syllabus of Errors to contemporary Benedict-option enthusiasts and integralists. “Wobbly” because the present-day anti-liberal adherents cannot quite muster the rejectionist spirit of the Syllabus. And “true” because throughout this nearly two-century run the anti-liberals have made their case in polarized language pitting unconstrained liberal autonomy against truth, the common good, tradition, religion, and more.
Irish Jesuit Patrick Riordan has written an excellent book that reframes the polarized nature of this conversation and offers a convincing philosophical account of the compatibility between Catholicism and liberalism. R. engages the key contemporary philosophical resources, ranging from Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, to David Oderberg’s work on the human good, to a spirited defense of John Rawls in Political Liberalism from Rawls’s anti-liberal critics. R. also engages key figures in the theological tradition ranging from Aquinas on the analogical basis of the common good, to Augustine on the gradations of the secular and the sacred, to key Vatican II documents invoking human dignity and the common good.
One theological figure makes a surprisingly strong and persuasive appearance: Benedict XVI. R. rejects the sectarian Benedict option in favor of what he calls the liberal Pope Benedict option. One theological figure playing a puzzling because minor role in the argument is Jesuit David Hollenbach, whose book The Common Good and Christian Ethics anticipates and supports many of R.’s key points.
R.’s focus is on rescuing the concept of the common good from its polarized and inscrutable character in anti-liberal arguments—as well as from its polarized and paternalistic rendering in many liberal arguments. To do this, he turns in several fruitful directions. He argues that liberalism is best understood as the political theory premised on the centrality of human freedom, and that the political common good is best understood, in the language of Gaudium et spes, as “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment” (Gaudium et spes, no. 26).
Thus, for R. the conciliar definition of the common good is best understood not so much in terms of the truth toward which freedom is oriented as in terms of the “conditions” necessary for the exercise of freedom. To make this notion of the common good less inscrutable and more practical, he also offers two criteria for testing whether the demands of the common good are being met in the face of a particular set of conditions. First, the “common” element: there should be no systematic exclusion of any individual or group from the good in question. And, second, the “good” element: there should be no systematic exclusion of any genuine dimension of the human good.
There are positive theological evaluations of creation and analogy that undergird the argument and that push back against the polarities favored by anti-liberalism. As R. says, “Finding the good in the midst of brokenness, fragility, and failure is a very different approach to one that identifies a polarity, an either-or, a binary of good and bad” (12). Thus R. reflects on the range of goods present amid the persons, practices, and institutions of liberalism. For instance, he argues that one of the great values of modern liberal politics is its “institutionalization of a distinctive way of managing social conflict” (127). In turn, as R. sees it, the liberal institutionalization of this value amid great pluralism is a common good; the persons responsible for creating and sustaining such institutions are a common good; and the virtues and practices (especially, the virtues and practices of speech instead of coercion) that manifest in action such management of conflict are a common good. The evisceration today of such liberal institutions and the proliferation of illiberal vices of speech gives R.’s account in this regard a poignant bite.
R. discerns the common goods in the tragic, value-laden present. But this is not an unmoored exercise of discernment. He appeals to analogical arguments to point to God as the ultimate common good and to signal the source of the ontological claims of truth and justice that inform the assessments of any common goods. But he thinks that the anti-liberal tendency to absolutize such claims of truth and justice has, in effect, obscured and suppressed the many goods present in liberalism’s thought and practice. One of many refreshing aspects of this book is R.’s recovery of thinkers cast out into the anti-liberal cold. I mentioned Rawls in this regard. But perhaps the stellar figure in R.’s Catholic-rehabilitation-of-liberals project is John Stuart Mill in On Liberty.
This is a generative book ripe for our time. Throughout the world, the Catholic Church is reflexively turning to its anti-liberal past or trying to articulate more clearly its commitment to liberalism. Theologians can draw much from this book to help with such matters.