Anthony Esolen, Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching: A Defense of the Church’s True Teachings on Marriage, Family, and the State. Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 2014.
The dedication of this book is illuminating. Esolen pays honor in this work to his four grandparents, who “came from Italy without any money, but with a will to work hard and to raise strong and virtuous children. . . . All that I owe to my parents I also owe to them; and may God let perpetual light shine upon them” (v). He praises his ancestors for their “natural moral virtues,” and the presentation of these virtues do indeed have a place in this book. But more importantly, he shows that this book is a work of piety, the virtue by which, according to St. Thomas, “as Cicero says (De invent. rhet., ii), ‘we offer homage and duty to all our kindred and to the well-wishers of our country’; not, however, equally to all, but chiefly to our parents, and to others according to our means and their personal claims.” Broadly, Esolen wants to show how justice, which we usually think of when we think of social teaching, is not complete without piety and religion, which we now tend to forget.
As Pope Leo XIII wrote in a letter to the French people in 1892, “religion, and religion only, can create the social bond” (117). The citations in Esolen’s book come almost exclusively from the works of Pope Leo XIII. This enshrinement of Leonine writings and the above portrait of Esolen’s grandparents give a striking tone to the work. Though the book is partly a lament for lost virtues, Esolen is also witnessing to ways of life that are a living memory for him, indeed probably for many.
In the introduction, Esolen writes: “First Principles and human realities—we must return to them. They are what this book is about” (8). The book proceeds in an intuitive order: man, liberty, marriage, family, social life, the Church, work, and the state. But for Esolen and Pope Leo, beginning with man involves first avoiding the “Naturalist” error of thinking of a truncated civil man, “‘that the sacred and the civil thing should be torn apart to the core’…But man is the subject of both. To tear them apart is to tear him apart” (16). This conception of man, not only open to the sacred but naturally ordered to it, will lead to a similar conception of the state. “Pope Leo reminds us that without the virtue of religion, the State becomes little more than a compact of selfishness and sensuality, not worthy of human allegiance” (168). And so he concludes his book with a chapter called “A Catholic Order,” which culminates with praise of the Eucharist. How does he get there?
His account of man, besides noting his religious nature, also emphasizes his common or corporate nature: “We depend upon each other for our . . . moral growth toward perfection. We need one another, for love” (22). While this will lead, through conjugal love, to marriage and family, he also takes time in this first chapter to point out Pope Leo’s interpretation of this need as also ordered toward religion and the Eucharist. In Mirae Caritatis §11, Leo admires “the spectacle of Christian brotherhood and social equality which is afforded when men of all conditions, gentle and simple, rich and poor, learned and unlearned, gather round the holy altar, all sharing alike in this heavenly banquet” (Esolen 33).
Esolen treats man, marriage, and family under the shadow of an encroaching bureaucratic state and corroding moral virtue. He brings in examples from art for comparison: Jean-Francois Millet’s painting The Angelus and its peasant piety, against the reductionism of welfare (27–29); the illustrations and sexual innocence in Norman Rockwell’s Four Seasons, against the presumption of an inevitable economy of sexual license (73–74); and the opening of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter and its portrait of brave Christian spouses, against banal modern scenes of family life and death (77–80). He reminds us—against “the vast machinery of government that no one can any longer describe or control”—to remember Pope Leo’s statement in Rerum Novarum that “a family, no less than a State, is . . . a true society, governed by a power within its sphere, that is to say, by the father” (81).
Sebastien Bourdon — The Beggars
While this traditional way of thinking has suffered unimaginable mutations since the nineteenth century, Esolen’s outline hews closely enough to “human realities” that this presentation might just hold up under the scrutiny of a twenty-first-century eye. The idea that a family is a society still has some legs. And as Esolen proceeds, building up from the family-society to local social interactions and on to parish-society, the solidity of the Church’s teaching is apparent. But arguably this is a running start for what modernity may well see as an inexplicable dash into obscurity: “The Church is herself the consummate society” (118).
Specifically as Americans, we might tend to question the notion of Church as society, when our society has flourished under a plurality of religions. “Pope Leo had to deal with this question directly, raised by loyal churchmen in the vigorous young republic called the United States of America” (126). Esolen prefers Leo’s approach of expounding the Catholic notion of authority, of the Church’s elevation and purification of the cultures it inhabits, and especially of the witness of the saints to bring about true politics:
The saints do not tread upon the common man’s corns. They summon him, they inspire him, they teach him, they lead the way. And mainly they lead the way by their cheerful and expansive and noble obedience. For “God in His Infinite providence has decreed that men for the most part should be saved by men; hence He has appointed that those whom He calls to a loftier degree of holiness should be led thereto by men” (Testem Benevolentiae 447). (Esolen 130)
Esolen chooses not to discuss many significant things one might expect to find in a book on Catholic Social Teaching written in 2014, his argument being that Pope Leo himself is simply a representative of a perennial tradition. We might consider, though, how Pope St. John Paul II, in his encyclical Fides et Ratio, situates the philosophical renewal sparked by Leo’s Aeterni Patris. He praises its timely meditation on Thomism for the turn of the nineteenth century, but then provides a timelier reflection on the promise and danger of the philosophy of the twentieth. Esolen’s approach admirably fulfills much of what Fides et Ratio asks when it comes to putting theological limits on philosophy, but Esolen avoids all contemporary rational accounts of the social. I understand the distaste for late post-modern incoherence, but it is appropriate to consider Pope St. John Paul II’s exhortation that any unruly power of reason should not simply be constrained: “It is faith which stirs reason . . . to run risks so that it may attain whatever is beautiful, good and true. Faith thus becomes the convinced and convincing advocate of reason” (Fides et Ratio 56). The Church’s social teaching can and should affirm some things in modern social reasoning as well, few as they may be.
The book does not propose many solutions, but offers boisterous testimony to traditional forms of life, from medieval Europe’s guilds and Third Orders to America’s array of immigrant communities and free associations. Esolen writes like a man whose powerful love for Catholicism has marked him with that paradoxical combination of greatness and humility. If the proper response to our body politic is love, a love which sacrifices and gives meaning, then we need more than a mere contract because “no one loves a contract” (102).
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