Catholicism

Catholicism is the faith and institutional life of the Catholic Church, the largest Christian communion, whose moral and social doctrine has supplied modern conservatism with several of its organising ideas. Its bearing on conservative thought runs less through dogmatic theology than through Catholic social teaching, a body of papal and conciliar doctrine on economic and political order, and through the older tradition of natural law systematised by Thomas Aquinas.

The Catholic contribution to conservatism is distinctive in refusing two dominant modern alternatives. Against socialism, it defends private property, the family, and the autonomy of associations below the state. Against laissez-faire liberalism, it insists that economic life is subject to moral order and that the wealthy owe enforceable duties to the poor. This double refusal is the feature that has made Catholicism both attractive and awkward for the various wings of Anglo-American conservatism.

Key Takeaways

• Catholicism has shaped Anglo-American conservative thought chiefly through its social teaching, which grounds politics in natural law, the family, and the common good rather than in either market or state.
• Catholic social teaching, opened by Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891), rejects both socialism and laissez-faire capitalism, defending private property alongside the duties owed to labour.
• The principle of subsidiarity, defined by Pius XI in 1931, supplies conservatism with a doctrinal case for mediating institutions and limits on the central state.

History And Context

The modern tradition of Catholic social doctrine begins on 15 May 1891 with Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, subtitled “On the Condition of Labour.”¹ Responding to the social crisis of industrial capitalism and the rise of socialist parties, Leo defended the right of private property against socialism while affirming the rights of workers to a just wage, decent conditions, and free association. The encyclical set a method that later teaching kept: the Church articulates moral principles drawn from natural law and revelation, and leaves their prudential application to lay Catholics.

Forty years later Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (1931) restated this teaching and gave the principle of subsidiarity its classic formulation: that it is an injustice to assign to a larger and higher body what a smaller and lower one can accomplish.² John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus (1991), issued on the encyclical’s centenary, reaffirmed the critique of socialism after the fall of communism while warning against a capitalism unrestrained by law and morality.³

In the English-speaking world the lay writers G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc carried these ideas into political argument. Chesterton’s apologetic career opened with Orthodoxy (1908), and he was received into the Catholic Church in 1922; Belloc set out the case against the wage-economy in The Servile State (1912).⁴ Together they developed distributism, the proposal that property be spread as widely as possible rather than concentrated in either capital or the state.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives have drawn on Catholicism for a substantive account of the social order that liberal proceduralism does not supply. The teaching grounds politics in the dignity of the person, made in the image of God, and in the common good understood as the conditions of shared flourishing rather than the sum of private preferences. This furnishes the conservative critique of both utilitarian policy and ideologies that subordinate the person to a collective.

The family holds a settled place in this account. Catholic teaching treats the family as a society prior to the state, with its own rights in education and property that public authority must protect rather than absorb. Subsidiarity extends the same logic outward: parishes, guilds, schools, and voluntary associations are the proper seat of much social life, and the central state should support these mediating bodies rather than displace them. Conservatives have used this principle to argue for decentralised authority and against the administrative concentration of power.

The reception has been asymmetric. The Catholic and traditionalist wings of American conservatism, associated with journals such as First Things, have made this teaching central, while the fusionist and free-market wings have been uneasy with its strictures on wages, warfare, and unregulated markets. Defenders of the market reading, including Michael Novak, have argued that the teaching is compatible with a morally formed and institutionally limited capitalism, and that Centesimus Annus sustains this view.⁵

Differing Positions

Free-market critics hold that the teaching’s defence of labour rights and a just wage amounts to a soft endorsement of state intervention. Catholic conservatives reply that the duties of solidarity are owed first through the family, the parish, and morally formed exchange, and that the magisterium’s rejection of socialism, explicit since Rerum Novarum, has never been withdrawn.

Liberal theorists hold that the substantive Catholic conception of the common good is incompatible with the neutrality a pluralist democracy requires. The Catholic reply, developed by John Courtney Murray and later John Finnis, is that no political order is in fact neutral about the human good, so the real question is which conception of the good will inform public life.

References

1. Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1891), esp. §§4–6, 20, 36. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html
2. Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (1931), §79. https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19310515_quadragesimo-anno.html
3. Pope John Paul II, Centesimus Annus (1991), §§35, 42. https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus.html
4. Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (London: T. N. Foulis, 1912); G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: John Lane, 1908). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Servile_State
5. Michael Novak, The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Free Press, 1993). https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus.html