Book Review: Brian Benestad's Church, State, and Society

It is a challenging text, one that should be read by any serious student of Catholic Social Doctrine or anyone seriously desirous of learning Catholic Social Doctrine as it should be taught.

While J. Brian Benestad's Church, State, and Society, is styled an introduction, it is certainly not a primer.  It is a rigorous tour de force of Catholic Social Doctrine and Catholic Social Thought.  It is a challenging text, one that should be read by any serious student of Catholic Social Doctrine or anyone seriously desirous of learning Catholic Social Doctrine as it should be taught. And boy is it refreshing! 

CORPUS CHRISTI, TX (Catholic Online) - J. Brian Benestad's Church, State, and Society: An Introduction to Catholic Social Doctrine (Catholic University of America Press, 2011), is a welcome addition to the growing corpus of books offering a corrective to an often skewed understanding of Catholic Social Doctrine. 

Dr. Benestad is Professor of Theology and Director of the Catholic Studies Program at the University of Scranton, and is a long-standing peritus on Catholic Social Doctrine.  He also served as editor for a three-volume collection of essays by Fr. Ernest L. Fortin, A.A., under whom he studied, and whom he considers his mentor.  Benestad's Church, State, and Society is the third volume of the Catholic Moral Thought series published by the Catholic University of America Press under the editorial auspices of Fr. Romanus Cessario, O.P.  Benestad's mastery of the subject matter is without question.

In presenting an introduction to Catholic Social Doctrine and Catholic Social Thought, this book's great burden is to re-situate the concept of social justice where it ought to begin: with the individual.  "The concept of justice as order of in the soul of the individual," observes Benestad, "needs to be rediscovered today."  For a number of historical reasons which Benestad addresses, Catholic Social Doctrine has been filtered through the spectacles of democratic liberalism and statism (what Benestad calls generally the "regime"), and so its emphasis shifted from social justice as an individual virtue based upon natural moral law to social justice as a series of government programs and the promotion of subjective human rights without grounding in objective moral reality. 

Something that should have been a matter of "internal justice" which bleeds into "external justice," has become a matter of exclusively "external justice."  So social justice has become something for the external forum alone, and the internal forum aspects of social justice have largely fallen into desuetude.  And this loss results in a mischaracterization and misrepresentation of social justice as the Catholic Church understands it.

The book is divided into four parts.  The first part deals with the human person, the political community, and the common good.  The second deals with the relationship of civil society and the common good, and it focuses on three of the civil society's most important mediating institutions such as the Church, the University, and the Family.  The third part deals with private property and the universal destination of goods, and handles problems associated with the economy, with human work, with immigration, and with the safeguarding of the environment.  Finally, the last part deals with the international community, and it looks at Catholic Social Doctrine from a global perspective.  In this section, Benestad also includes a discussion on just war principles.  Finally, as an added bonus, Benestad provides in an appendix a discussion on Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical Caritas in veritate.

In my reading of Church, State, and Society, I found particularly valuable the treatment of human dignity.  Human dignity is a central feature of Catholic Social Doctrine, and a misunderstanding of it can have great effect on one's understanding of Catholic Social Doctrine and its application in a given context. 

(As with many words used in Catholic Social Doctrine--human dignity, social justice, rights, common good, subsidiarity, solidarity, love among them--there is the right way to understand them and a wrong way to understand them.  Frequently, secularistic notions creep into our understanding of these terms since they are used generally in other contexts.  Benestad's great contribution is to wash these terms from these accretions, and present us with a proper understanding of them.  With the terms thus purified, we get to see Catholic Social Doctrine in all its nonpartisan splendor.)

An example we might point to is the term "human dignity."  Benestad observes that human dignity must be understood to have both a static component and a dynamic component.  There is a form of human dignity which is ontological, i.e., which inheres in our being from the mere fact that we are human beings.  But there is also a form of human dignity which is developmental, which we can increase by developing virtue and acting in a manner that conforms to the objective moral order, or, on the other hand, which we can decrease by vicious acts.  While the Saints and the dissolute share an ontological human dignity, the Saints have developed their human dignity, whereas the dissolute have not.

Also well-handled by Benestad is the notion of the common good.  Again, like the concept of human dignity, the notion of the common good is a fundamental part of Catholic Social Doctrine.  Misunderstanding the notion of common good can affect one's understanding of what the Church's social doctrine is.  Importantly, Benestad properly insists that the common good is a substantive value, one that includes the good of souls (bona animi), and one that incorporates duties, and not only rights. 

If the common good is understood as a substantive good, and one which includes the good of souls, then it must be understood as comprehending a perfectionist view of liberty.  In other words, the common good understood as something substantive is a concept of the common good which justifies the promotion of virtue and the suppression of vice.  It is also a concept that is open to spiritual values.  The Catholic understanding of common good therefore rejects a non-perfectionist view of liberty such as espoused by secular liberals or libertarians.  It also rejects a purely materialistic concept of man.

Benestad's emphasis on the notion of social justice as fundamentally a virtue, informs his discussion of the centrality of virtue in Catholic Social Doctrine, particularly those cardinal virtues-fortitude, temperance, justice, and prudence-which St. Thomas Aquinas reminds us are preeminently "social virtues."  Emphasizing virtue instead of rights is a valuable corrective because as Benestad notes rights can be used badly, whereas virtues cannot.  A homosexual, an abortion advocate can (perversely) argue in terms of "rights," but they cannot argue in terms of virtue.

For Benestad, social justice begins with the individual, and only when the individual is properly ordered may one reasonably expect society to be properly ordered.  All too often, treatments of social justice seem narrowly focused on government programs.  It is as if social justice is seen as something that trickles down, rather than something that must trickle up.

Traditionally, however, the notion of social justice is a trickle up theory.  The soul in justice leads to society in justice, not vice versa.  The understanding of social justice as an individual virtue has been practically eclipsed.

Benestad traces this eclipse in the understanding of social justice as a result of a reductionism in the term.  The reductionist notion of social justice is largely the result of the influence of Msgr. John A. Ryan-a colossus in the development of Catholic social teaching within the United States.  As a result of Msgr. Ryan's emphasis on the equitable redistribution of wealth and the change in institutional structures, the individual component of "social justice" has been entirely neglected.  Benestad seeks to recover the individual notion of social justice, and through that recovery gain a richer understanding of Catholic social thought.

Another valuable corrective that is required, Benestad also provides.  His treatment of the "consistent ethic of life" or "seamless garment" theory is as adept as it is necessary.  Benestad shows that-regardless of what may be its advocates' good faith-the phrase is chock full of confusion.  The confusion comes from the fact that it aggregates absolute evils which must always be resisted and of which there can be no legitimate diversity of opinion (e.g., abortion, which involves the taking of an innocent human life) with specific prudential positions on other evils (e.g., capital punishment or affirmative action to counter racial inequalities) where there can be legitimate diversity of opinion.

Perhaps most delightful of all in Benestad's treatment is his penchant to weave in literary references in his handling of what could otherwise be a dry, academic treatment of the subject.  In his amplification of Catholic social doctrine, one finds examples taken from literature.  For example, uses Jane Austen's Persuasion and Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed to illustrate the importance of the practice of virtue in practical, real-life situations.  Additionally, we find the entirely worked pleasantly peppered with citations to Goethe's Faust, St. Thomas More's Utopia, J. R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and Georges Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest.

The book is a delightful read.  I spent eight hours one Saturday absorbed with the book, perhaps to the chagrin of my wife, who asked me what on earth I was reading that kept me so entranced.  And all I could say is, "This is a great book!"

My only criticism of the book relates to Benestad's treatment of the significance of the United Nations' 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UHDR).  While the significance of that document in speaking with those outside the Catholic tradition is without question important, the fact it has been rejected by Islam in the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI) in 1990 is something that, in my opinion, should have been treated. 

There is entirely too much hopeless optimism on the practical use of this document unless one recognizes that the CDHRI severely constrains the efficacy of the UHDR.  With respect to the Islamic world, the lingua franca on rights we had in 1948, the unanimity as to their content, has been lost to us.  How it is to be regained is an important issue.

While Benestad's Church, State, and Society, is styled an introduction, it is certainly not a primer.  It is a rigorous tour de force of Catholic Social Doctrine and Catholic Social Thought.  It is a challenging text, one that should be read by any serious student of Catholic Social Doctrine or anyone seriously desirous of learning Catholic Social Doctrine as it should be taught. And boy is it refreshing! 

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Andrew M. Greenwell is an attorney licensed to practice law in Texas, practicing in Corpus Christi, Texas.  He is married with three children.  He maintains a blog entirely devoted to the natural law called Lex Christianorum.  You can contact Andrew at agreenwell@harris-greenwell.com.

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