In this conflict-ridden time, we need the Church’s best kept secret

I’m ever grateful to the blogger and author Mark Shea for helping draw me into full communion with the Catholic Church 15 years ago last month, so I’ve been eagerly awaiting his new book, The Church’s Best-Kept Secret: A Primer on Catholic Social Teaching.

Soon after St. John Paul II died in April 2005, the first edition of Mark’s little book By What Authority? An Evangelical Discovers Catholic Tradition convinced me that the Protestant doctrine that the Bible on its own is the only infallible spiritual authority really didn’t hang together. (Ignatius Press has since published a revised edition.)

Over the years, Mark and I became online friends. He would occasionally link to my now-defunct blog, The Sheepcat.

My wife, who reposed in the Lord eight months ago, used to write fairly regularly for the pro-life newspaper The Interim. In a 2013 column, “A challenge for abundant life,” Theresa pointed out that, no matter what sexual desires we may experience, God wills for each of us to live abundantly. So if a young person discovers they’re attracted to members of the same sex, what positive vision of dignity and community can the Church offer them with integrity?

Mark readily recognized how deeply Catholic Theresa’s thinking was, in that the right to abundant life is how he summarizes the principle of the dignity of the human person.

That same humane sensibility of Mark’s is evident in The Church’s Best-Kept Secret. Fittingly, it’s put out by the publishing arm of the Focolare movement, New City Press, whose mission is to foster “a culture of unity, encounter, and dialogue.”

Catholic Social Teaching has four pillars: the dignity of the human person, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity. In these conflict-ridden times, we need this teaching as much as ever.

Catholic Social Teaching is thoroughly explained in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, one of those Church documents that only keeners are likely to read on their own, so I’m glad Mark has written such an accessible introduction to this important topic. The first time, I zipped through the book in two hours. I’ll also be returning to it, though, because there’s real depth here too.

For instance, I was already familiar with the basic principle of subsidiarity, which means trying to solve problems at the lowest and most local level that has the necessary capacity. I’d seen this, however, as simply commonsensical. New to me was that subsidiarity has a theological rationale: we’re being offered “the opportunity to act personally as a sacrament of God’s goodness and provision to the world.”

I had half-expected The Church’s Best-Kept Secret to be full of policy questions such as how health care should be provided. Instead, it asks what Scripture and Tradition tell us God is like. And then, in light of God’s generosity, what we can infer about how to act toward our neighbours.

Each of the four pillars of Catholic Social Teaching is explained in two short, balanced chapters: the first, to relate the pillar to God’s benevolent will; the second, to apply it to practical issues.

The book is written especially for readers in the United States, so Mark answers talking points that politically engaged Catholics there will find familiar. Though these applications may or may not be as directly relevant to those of us living here in B.C., their purpose is in any case to illustrate how to think with the Church in concrete situations.

The core of The Church’s Best-Kept Secret, like Catholic Social Teaching itself, is not limited to any particular time or place. Questions for discussion wrap up each chapter, so the book lends itself to use in study groups, a purpose I expect it will still be serving decades from now.

Toward that end, the book would benefit from a more thorough and user-friendly index. The current one is of no help if you’re trying to locate where recurring themes such as work or salvation or participation in the life of God were discussed.

Mark continually emphasizes the unity and internal harmony of Catholic teaching. In the face of attempts by one political program or another to appropriate the moral authority of the Church, he insists that Catholic principles cannot be pitted against one another. Private morality and social justice are not mutually opposed but instead contribute jointly to human flourishing. Love for God is inseparable from love for neighbour (Mt 22:37-40).

Within these pages, Mark’s writing is disciplined and temperate. The text is deeply grounded in Scripture (with well over a hundred citations) and extensive quotations from the Church Fathers and popes of the past century and a half. For example:

“[Solidarity] is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say, to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all” (St. John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis).

The basic thrust of the book ought to be acceptable to any faithful Catholic – and intelligible to any person of good will. Meanwhile, any reader who is paying attention ought to come away feeling at least a bit convicted by the radical Gospel demands it relays.

I found the afterword, which reminds us to “be doers of the word, and not hearers only” (Jas 1:22), stirring if perhaps a bit general in its suggestions for social action.

Of course, no book can tell you what particular set of tasks God has uniquely equipped you to do. It’s up to you to pray that the Holy Spirit will show you how you specifically can help God’s will be done on earth – and by this be fitted for life in the New Jerusalem.