At a moment in the cultural history of the West when utilitarianism is the default moral position in public life, Evangelical Catholicism insists that “Will it work?” is not the only question. “Is it right?” is the prior question, and the answer to that question, Pontius Pilate and the Guardian notwithstanding, can be known by the arts of reason, properly deployed.
Evangelical Catholicism, in the line of development that runs from Leo XIII through Benedict XVI, thus takes a rather different stance toward public life than the Catholicism of Christendom (whose conception of Church and State – or, more broadly, Church and Society – long outlasted the 16th-century fracturing of Christendom).
Evangelical Catholicism declines the embrace of state power as incompatible with the proclamation of the Gospel: the Gospel is its own warrant, and the power of that warrant is blunted when coercive state power is put behind it, however mildly.
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George Weigel–Benedict XVI and the Future of the West
At a moment in the cultural history of the West when utilitarianism is the default moral position in public life, Evangelical Catholicism insists that “Will it work?” is not the only question. “Is it right?” is the prior question, and the answer to that question, Pontius Pilate and the Guardian notwithstanding, can be known by the arts of reason, properly deployed.
Evangelical Catholicism, in the line of development that runs from Leo XIII through Benedict XVI, thus takes a rather different stance toward public life than the Catholicism of Christendom (whose conception of Church and State – or, more broadly, Church and Society – long outlasted the 16th-century fracturing of Christendom).
Evangelical Catholicism declines the embrace of state power as incompatible with the proclamation of the Gospel: the Gospel is its own warrant, and the power of that warrant is blunted when coercive state power is put behind it, however mildly.
Read it all.