100 - American Catholic Social Ethics: Twentieth-Century Approaches

American Catholic Social Ethics: Twentieth-Century Approaches
By Charles E. Curran
Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1982. 353 pp. $21.95.

From a purely Protestant perspective, this is a very interesting book. In its own right, it is an introduction to a subject which, in general, Protestants know little about. Further, the development of Catholic social ethics in our century provides an illuminating contrast to Protestant social ethics of the same period. One gets the feeling of hearing new

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words sung to the melodies of old hymns. The issues are different, yet oddly they seem familiar.

In the process of expounding the views of others, Fr. Curran offers hints of his own, sane and balanced, rather "neo-orthodox" (centered in the "five-fold mysteries of creation: sin, incarnation, redemption, resurrection, and destiny") theological grounding for social ethics. From this perspective, Curran not only fairly and appreciatively criticizes all he surveys, but also gives promise that, should he choose to do so, he might become a significant theological commentator on the contemporary American socio-political scene.

The book explores the thought of five figures and/or movements: John A. Ryan; German-American Catholics and William J. Engelen; the Catholic Worker and Paul Hanly Furfey; John Courtney Murray; finally the Catholic peace movement and James W. Douglass. Curran is well aware that there is a large conservative wing of Catholicism which denies that the church should be involved in social issues at all. However, since in Curran's view this wing has failed to provide a sustained intellectual defense of its position, he omits it from consideration. Nevertheless, I do not quite understand why the neo-conservative Michael Novak was ignored.

Certainly it is inevitable that one's theology will inform one's social views. Yet as modern Protestantism attests, there can be no simple correlation between orthodoxy and political conservatism, on the one hand, or theological liberalism and political liberalism, on the other. For example, in the '30s, both Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Barth, in spite of their many differences, were both situated on the political left in the name of theologies which attempted to reappropriate the orthodox tradition. During the same period in Nazi Germany, many Protestant liberals found it difficult to say no to Hitler.

Curran shows us that the same subtleties and presumably unexpected turns of mind exist in Catholic social ethics. John A. Ryan was staunchly conservative; nevertheless he was an early and dedicated supporter of the New Deal. By contrast, John Courtney Murray was in many ways a theological liberal, yet he was basically a political conservative. The German Christian Movement, which took a reactionary stance against modernity, nonetheless advocated an extremely racial, albeit impractical social ethic, that is, a virtual return to the Middle Ages. Paul Hanly Furfey's Catholic Worker radicalism was grounded in a conservative scholastic supernaturalism, a biblicistic, literalistic understanding of revelation which lead him to a fundamental rejection of American society, and a call for a sectarian life of voluntary poverty. James W. Douglass, whose Christology is essentially a liberal adoptionism, veers into a strongly ascetic affirmation of the cross, a drastic apocalypticism, and a Gandhian doctrine of suffering resistance as the essence of Christianity.

Curran demonstrates that within the American Catholic Church there has been a great diversity in social ethics. It is as great as that

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exhibited within Protestantism. Just as with Protestants, Catholics are all over the social spectrum. (Granted, they speak with a "Roman" accent.) This is in spite of the fact that until the '60s, it wasn't feasible for a Catholic theologian to publicly disagree with papal pronouncements. It wasn't too long ago when many observers concluded that Catholic theology was inevitably committed to the reactionary decrees of such as Leo XIII. For many non-Catholics, it was an open question whether a Catholic could truly believe in freedom of religion and liberal democracy. The rich diversity of Catholic thinking in social ethics that Curran describes, by its very existence, gives the lie to the myth of such a Catholic monolith.

Ronald Goetz
Elmhurst College
Elmhurst, Illinois