I am going to speak about Catholic principles, but it's certainly the case that the Catholic Church thinks of these principles as principles of natural reason,

and that therefore they're not only principles that all Christians can use for thinking about public life,

but I think all people of goodwill can use these principles to think

about a public life. There are two dimensions, as I see it, to the Catholic social doctrine

or Catholic social teaching. One, I would call the limited government side. And here, after the

French Revolution, the tremendous growth of the

modern nation state, the Catholic Church was very anxious about the absorptive power of the modern

nation state. And so the church identifies the proper autonomy of the family, the rights of parents

to educate their children, the liberty of the

church as essential things, rights to be protected in the modern context. And I think you could say

that the Catholic Church sees the family below and the church or religious communities above

pinioning or limiting the power of the state.

That they're living institutions and loyalties that motivate people to keep the state at arm's length.

So limit the state's attempt to gain control of everything.

And to this you can add also a Catholic solicitude or concern about nurturing,

mediating institutions.

This was a time period where the church encouraged the formation of Catholic labor unions

and sodalities and other forms of Catholic organizations to provide a rich and textured

public life. So in short, it seems, or at least

as in my interpretation of this element of the tradition, the church is concerned that there

be a robust, flourishing, and differentiated social life that can resist absorption into politics, absorption into the purposes of the modern nation state.

But there's also a second dimension here because there's a second challenge that Christians faced in the modern era.

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