The Catholic Thing Catering to the Obsessions of the Bourgeois Elite

I have the privilege and pleasure of teaching Catholic social justice. Please don’t write me to complain.

I regret that some have reduced the wide-ranging, holistic vision of the Church’s social justice tradition to little more than a concern for “systems,” “structures,” and “governmental action.” But it’s not my fault, and it’s certainly not the Church’s doing. This reductio ad absurdum is a sad corruption of the majestic moral vision developed over the centuries by some of the greatest minds in the Church.

And note: the Church’s reflection on the principles and requirements of “natural justice” didn’t just begin with Pope Leo XIII and Rerum Novarum ^[1]. Concern for the common good, especially for the needs of the poor, has always been a hallmark of the Church. To claim otherwise is to be ignorant of – and contradict – centuries of Christian political thought.

That said, two other unfortunate misunderstandings often beset talk about Catholic “social justice.” First, in addition to associating “social justice” solely with “systems” and “structures,” too often, social justice “warriors” seem to forget there can be no “social” justice if we do not form a critical mass of citizens in the virtue of justice and concern for the common good. The “system” is made up of people. And if the people lack virtue, then there is no way to make the “system” just.

So, for example, the message should go out to all universities that style themselves centers of “social justice” that, if your institution is animated by modernist principles of self-determination and expressive individualism, you are simply not training students to be committed to social justice and the common good. If you imagine otherwise, you’re lying to yourself.

Unfortunately, many “top tier” Catholic universities, with their robber baron tuitions, mahogany-paneled president’s offices, plush alumni centers, and multi-million-dollar football stadiums and coaches indulge in this lie: that, they can train kids to be self-indulgent, self-interested expressive individualists and still, off to the side somewhere, keep alive their half-hearted devotion to “social justice” and “concern for the poor.”

The second, equally sad, misunderstanding is to fail to see that any possibility for “social justice” depends on strong, stable families within which the virtues can be developed. This mistake is especially inexcusable given the prominent place the family occupies in every major Church document on social justice.

In the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes ^[2]), the very first “problem of special concern” treated is “Fostering the Nobility of Marriage and the Family.” In the official Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, after laying out some general principles (“dignity of the human person,” “common good,” “subsidiarity”), the very first section, before “Work,” “Economic Life,” and “The Political Community” is “The Family, the Vital Cell of Society.”

As these documents point out, and as Pope John Paul II repeated unceasingly, it’s in the family that we learn the faith and develop the virtues. It’s in the family that we learn to care for others rather than merely about ourselves. Without strong families, we can no more have strong communities characterized by mutual concern for the common good than you can have a healthy body with unhealthy cells filled with toxic chemicals.

And it’s for this reason that I find people like Cardinal McElroy and the bishops devoted to the German “Synodal Way” so confounding. Who is so foolish as to think that you can undermine the Church’s central, fundamental teachings on marriage and the family and still support “Catholic social justice”?

Do they think they can surrender to the Zeitgeist (spirit of the age) of expressive individualism and yet preserve society’s concern for the poor and the common good? Do these people play that game Jenga and pull out the bottom pieces not expecting the entire column to collapse?

If nothing else, you’d think clergy who had been gut-punched with a decades-long sex-abuse scandal would want to focus on any other topic than less-restrictive attitudes toward sex. This seems a little like Jeffrey Epstein fighting his conviction by trying to lower the legal age of consent for sex with young girls. Is that really the direction you want to go?

So, perhaps a fitting term for these ecclesiastical functionaries would be one popular among nineteenth-century socialists: they are just so utterly bourgeois. Who spends a lot of time worrying about their sexual psychology? Or about women in the priesthood? Or navel-gazing about “governing structures” in the Church?

Not the poor. They’re busy just keeping body and soul together, trying to eke out another day’s living to support their families. No, these are the obsessions of a class of bourgeois intellectuals who elbow aside everyone else in order to maximize their self-interest and to ensure the self-created identities of people who share their lifestyle. They see themselves as governing by divine right, and they are not especially tolerant of those who defy them.

Now, granted, the German episcopacy has a long tradition of going along and getting along with whatever or whoever happens to be the dominant force in German politics and society, with a few noble exceptions. But how about the American Church? What will be our response? Schools for the families of the working poor? Or schools for wealthy, upper-middle-class bourgeois parents who want all bathrooms open to transgender kids?

Unstinting efforts to support marriages and families with children, especially children with disabilities that the culture would prefer to abort? Or an embarrassed avoidance of all those “unpopular” topics in favor of things more of interest to the bourgeois elite who have all the money and power?

We all know which side most Catholic universities have come down on. Few are willing to risk offending those with money, power, or prestige in favor of the working poor. But what about the rest of the Church, especially those who are supposed to be successors of the apostles? What will it be? Christ or the zeitgeist?

*Image: The Lock ^[3] (Le Verrou) by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, c. 1777-78 [The Louvre, Paris]. This is Fragonard’s depiction of the libertine spirit of his age.